It was the first week of October and executives from five leading publishing houses had gathered at a plush office block in St James’s Square, central London, for the most eagerly anticipated deal of the year.

One by one, they went inside to see Tony Blair and the American lawyer Bob Barnett, who was conducting the auction for the former prime minister’s memoirs.

In September, about eight publishers had been sent a two-page outline of what Blair intended to write. It was much shorter than the usual synopsis and contained merely a series of cursory bullet points.

Five firms - Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, Bloomsbury and Simon & Schuster - went to see Blair, eager to find out more details. Would he dish the dirt on his feud with Gordon Brown? What would he say about the Iraq war?

Blair casts himself as EU president candidate

Speaking on French TV, Tony Blair sang the praises of the EU and sketched his agenda for its future, all in fluent French

Multimedia

• The Blair years: video, pictures and analysis

• Interactive Blair Timeline

• BlairTube

Multimedia

• Blair fashion gallery

• Cherie Blair picture gallery

• Brookes on Blair

Related Links

• I beat Brown with a breadstick

Most came away rather unimpressed. “Blair looked very tired,” said one of the publishers. “He also seemed just full of himself. There seemed no real awareness of others. It was as if he was mainly interested in ensuring his place in history.”

Another said: “Blair told no anecdotes” to draw them in and was “defensive” about what he would write. He added that Blair kept emphasising that he would be penning the book himself and not employing a ghost writer.

This was a problem for many of the bidders. Blair has kept no personal diaries over the years and is known to be a tech-nophobe. He does not type, let alone use a computer. These are all factors that will make the physical act of writing his memoirs, which he has not started, more difficult.

Then there was the “Cherie factor”. His wife struck a deal with the Little, Brown Book Group just over a month ago for her memoirs, which are expected to appear in 2008. The proximity of her auction to her husband’s alerted publishers to the fact that her efforts might take the sting out of his.

Others thought he had rather missed the boat by not bringing out his memoirs until, at the earliest, two years after leaving Downing Street. Privately, some wonder whether he will hit his 2009 deadline.

There was also the price. Blair and Barnett, who had secured big advances in America for the memoirs of Bill Clinton, the former president, and Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, had set their sights on £7m. It soon became apparent that the bidders would not go that high.

Indeed, they didn’t come close. Random House won with a bid of £4.6m, beating the second-placed publisher which offered £4.5m.

To put it in context, the advance is about the same as the Rolling Stone Keith Richards will receive for his memoirs, which are due out in 2010.

Richards’s book, with salacious tales of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, is as close to a guaranteed bestseller that the the publishing industry can get. But can Blair’s offering even hope to be a success and earn back its advance?

Having secured such a big-name deal, Random House was last week naturally telling the world how honoured it was to be publishing the book.

Gail Rebuck, its chief executive, who is married to Blair’s former pollster Lord Gould, said: “We are absolutely delighted to be publishing Tony Blair’s memoirs. He was an extraordinary prime minister, and this will be an extraordinary book.”

The book will have been an extraordinary success if it bucks the trend of the political memoirs business. It is widely acknowledged in the publishing industry that the advances for these books have become too big - at least too big for what they bring back in sales and income from newspaper serialisation rights.

The Hachette group - which in Britain owns Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion, John Murray, Hodder Headline and Little, Brown - read Blair’s two-page synopsis and decided not to bid.

“We did not think it was worth it,” said a Hachette insider. “We didn’t see how we could make our money back.”

NAGGING away at them will have been the dismal performance of the books written by Blair’s former colleagues. The offerings from Robin Cook, Mo Mowlam and Clare Short all disappointed. But the name that sends shivers through the publishing industry is that of the former home secretary David Blunkett.

Bloomsbury, with money to spend from the fortune it has made from the Harry Potter books, paid more than £400,000 for his memoir, The Blunkett Tapes: My Life in the Bear Pit. Anybody hoping for revelations about his high-profile affair with Kimberly Quinn was disappointed. The book sold fewer than 4,000 copies.

This was not the first time publishers had had their fingers burnt. Incredibly, 18 former members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinets published memoirs. Some were very long, such as Nigel Lawson’s massive 1,100 pages, or extremely tedious such as the autobiographies of the two Normans, Lamont and Fowler. All sold in the low thousands.

Yet still the publishing houses queue up for the books.

“Publishers will sometimes buy them as loss-leaders or for the prestige of publishing the memoirs of a leading politician,” said Alan Samson, publisher of Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Blair’s book will do exceptionally well to earn back its advance. One publisher who bid on the book reckoned that it would lose about £2m even if it sold 150,000 UK hardback copies the group projected.

Giving Random House succour will be the past demand for prime ministerial memoirs. “There is still an interest in those who held real power or who offer a genuine insight,” said Samson.

Blair’s two predecessors, Baroness Thatcher and Sir John Major, both had successful memoirs. Her Downing Street Years sold a massive 500,000 copies (though she did not fare so well with a sequel), while 200,000 bought Major’s autobiography.

The only recent memoirs of a former prime minister to flop were those of Sir Edward Heath, which perhaps had something to do with their publication in 1998, nearly 25 years after he left Downing Street.

Generally it is political diaries, as distinct from memoirs, that have fared better. “A diary tends to give a sense of the immediate rather than the often self-justification of a memoir,” said Samson.

It was Richard Crossman, the Labour minister of the 1960s, who defined the genre with his three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister. Nobody had written so frankly about contemporary political affairs and the government of the day was scandalised, trying in vain to prevent their publication.

The baton was then passed to Alan Clark, a minister under Thatcher, who shocked and delighted with accounts of his infidelity and his lusting about his former boss’s ankles.

Tony Benn has struck a very different tone in the seven volumes he has brought out so far and has a loyal following. Even the heavily censored diaries of Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell sold well, shifting 70,000 copies in less than two months.

It is not memoirs that are the problem, but rather the political ones. In recent years so-called “misery memoirs” have sold in huge numbers.

Dave Pelzer is their undisputed king. The American’s six books detailing his abused childhood and unhappy teens have sold an incredible 3.5m copies in Britain alone.

Ideally a misery memoir is linked to a well-known and much-loved entertainer. This is why Pamela Stephenson’s 2001 book about her husband Billy Connolly, who was abused as a child and suffered extreme poverty in Scotland, sold so well.

“It’s personalities who usually make books sell,” said Hunter Davies, who has written an acclaimed biography of the Beatles and is now working on John Pres-cott’s memoirs. “It’s gossip too and the celebrity life that most people want.”

Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Daily Mirror, found the right mix in his diary The Insider. His tabloid instincts merged the political intrigue it contained with showbiz tittle tattle and provided a engaging read that sold 400,000 copies.

CAN Blair hope to be so successful? He has promised to be “frank, but not disloyal”, which does not bode well.

Random House may be hoping, though, that the delay before the book is published will work in its favour.

“I reckon it’s a good thing that Blair is waiting a couple of years before his book comes out as he is certainly not Mr Popular in Britain right now,” said the leading literary agent Jonathan Lloyd of Curtis Brown.

“By 2009 he and his term of office might well be reassessed by the public.”

Lloyd, however, adds a coda that will depress Britain’s publishers, especially Random House. “In my experience,” he said, “the public generally think that politicians are at best hypocrites or simply a bunch of lying bastards.”

Times Recommends

• Oh no, Mr Darling: you have failed
• BBC survives dogfight over Kennel Club expose
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone