Tony Blair’s autobiography A Journey would have made its author a very rich man. Or should that be an even richer man. The advance was £4.6 million. There’ll be a lucrative serialisation in a Sunday newspaper. It will be translated into many languages, and sell around the world. Already 14 territories have secured translation rights. There is little doubt that with an early release as a paperback Blair’s book will hit the non-fiction best-seller lists and stay there for many weeks. It will probably rival Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father as a best-seller by a politician which cuts through to the mass market.

All of which makes his decision to donate every penny to the Royal British Legion both remarkable and laudable. For most leading politicians – Prescott, Mandelson, Thatcher, Clinton, Wilson, etc – a memoir is partly the chance to set the record straight, but mostly the chance to make a wad of cash for the retirement fund. Blair has shown that he is a cut above your average politician. He wants his book to tell a story, not make a mint.

There are plenty of people who will say it’s just ‘blood money’, motivated by guilt for sending British troops to war in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. The professional, irreconcilable Blair-haters are always swift to ascribe motives to Blair’s every move. It must be quite a responsibility to possess the ability to read Blair’s mind so accurately all the time. They will never accept, unlike the British Legion, that this is simply a fantastically generous  donation to a good cause. The grubby motives they will ascribe, and ill-grace with which they will react to the donation, say more about them than Blair.

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