| With the news this week
that top civil servants expect to cast a censorious eye over ex-FM Henry McLeish’s
forthcoming autobiography, his publishers expect to make substantial revisions. A
spokesspine told The JT: "Ordinarily with a political biography we’d be looking
at 200-odd pages. After the civil servants have expunged any less than complimentary
references to serving members of the Scottish Executive, we’re probably looking at
one page tops."
The redesigned tome will now open with the title, "Scotland First: Truth and
Consequences" and conclude immediately with, "The End".
The move will obviously come as a
disappointment to the ex-FM who, his publishers assert, has made concessions to tone down
the earlier combative tenor of the work. |
"It took us ages to
convince Henry that his original title for the book would’ve been unnecessarily
provocative, although, ‘A list of everyone whose ever fucked me over’, did
admittedly have a ring to it." Likewise, Mr McLeish’s original draft called
for photographs of ex-colleagues to be included. "When Henry insisted that a photo of
McConnell be captioned ‘Spawn of Satan’ we had to call a halt. And don’t
even ask how he wanted us to caption a pic of Wendy Alexander, just let’s say it
involved an unflattering and possibly actionable reference to ‘Fish lips’ "
It is thought however that the jacket photo of the author will feature that shot of
Henry just after his resignation, the one where the look on his face says: "What the
fuck just happened?" |
