The AP's Hillel Italie reports on the culmination of the bidding on Tony Blair's memoirs, as the former British prime minister elects to publish with Hutchinson in England and Knopf in the United States. (Both imprints are divisions of Random House.) Blair was repped in the negotiations by Washington attorney Robert Barnett, who famously handles all the major political book deals, or at least seems to, and describes the bidding over Blair as "one of the most lively and most competitive processes I've participated in in over 20 years." No word on exactly how much Knopf is shelling out for the memoir, but one imagines it's in the ballpark of what they paid to publish Bill Clinton or Andre Agassi.

Interestingly enough, outgoing Knopf editor Ash Green had told Leon Neyfakh at the NY Observer that some at the company had thought Blair and Barnett were toying with them: "Because [Rupert] Murdoch for ten years supported Blair through his newspapers, and he has the Sunday Times first serialization, and he has HarperCollins, that seemed to be a natural fit... I think there was some wonder here whether the agent was using us as a stalking horse to get Murdoch's price up."

They say Blair will be writing the book himself, so I guess that rules out any Robert Harris-esque scenarios...