Tony Blair, man of the hour. Photo credit: Monika Flueckiger

The publication – and major success – of Tony Blair’s memoirs has re-ignited heated debate about his record as leader.

Tony Blair may have scuttled out of Downing Street years ago, but the ex-Prime Minister remains a much listened-to voice, if the media feeding frenzy surrounding the publication of his memoirs A Journey today is anything to go by.

“I’ve got something to say and I’ve got something to explain,” declared Blair, in The Guardian‘s world exclusive eve-of-publication interview. What he wanted to say, evidently, was a good deal about his strained relationship with former Prime Minister and Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, and to re-assert his undying commitment to Labour: “I want to see it win because I think that a modern progressive Labour party is better for the country than a Tory party.”

That A Journey should command lots of column inches is perhaps no surprise given the fairly startling revelations included such as “Emotional intelligence, zero. Gordon is a strange guy.”

Not all critics appreciated Blair’s warts-and-all approach. “Blackmail? Problem drinking? Are these the memoirs of Britain’s longest-serving Labour Prime Minister or the latest salvo from Katie Price in her ongoing battle with Peter André?,” quipped Toby Young in The Daily Telegraph. “I was expecting some high-minded lessons in the art of statesmanship, not a series of jaw-dropping revelations about Gordon Brown.” To Young and others, Blair’s score-settling is “unbecoming … really, we have the right to expect a little more from our ex-Prime Ministers.”

Polly Toynbee, giving her verdict on the book in The Guardian, declared, “A Journey is a re-writing of history, events seen through the rear-view mirror from a man who hitched his wagon to the Bush neocons and learned some of their tunes.” Tom Clark, also in The Guardian, complained, “Through A Journey’s meditations on centre-left coalition building – some of it instructive – Blair has forgotten what being centre-left means. He is a political strategist in the same way that successful captains of industry are business strategists.”

However, Blair’s full and frank account of his years at the helm has drawn praise from other commentators. To The Times, the memoir is “a reminder of why Mr Blair won three emphatic general election victories. It is the work of a man who, we needed to be reminded, was the finest progressive politician of his generation … Mr Blair remains a communicator and a politician of the first rank.”

“What we get is the man we know: self–deprecating but steely, willing to admit tactical mistakes but unbending that his strategic vision was right,” said Adam Boulton at his Sky.com blog. Most predictably, Blair’s old ally Alastair Campbell whole-heartedly backed the book on his blog AlastairCampbell.org: “Far more people will hear the noise than read the book, but those who do will get a very good idea of what it is like to be a top flight politician in the modern age.”

The controversy over the book and its writer may also prove short-lived. Gideon Rachman, in a Financial Times column complaining that the hatred for Blair is “over the top”, praised the former PM: “My guess is that, in a few years’ time, the Blair years will be remembered for a lot more than Iraq. They will be seen as a period of prosperity and optimism in Britain – certainly compared with what was to come. In 20 years’ time many Britons may look back on the Blair era with considerable nostalgia.”

On whether people will actually buy the book, Campbell may not be right  - though the extensive coverage of the memoirs in the media may dissuade book buyers and be bad news for booksellers in the long run, right now, it’s the fastest selling autobiography of all time, according to The Independent. This circumstance may owe as much to high street retail strategy as to the overwhelming buzz:  Waterstones has slashed A Journey to half-price on day one per Periscope Post lunch-break investigations.