Craig Ferhman explains how ghostwriting went from scandal-in-waiting to acceptable political reality:
In October 2007 — the same month that Random House emerged from a four-day auction with a $9 million deal for Tony Blair‘s memoirs — Robert Harris published his sixth novel, The Ghost. It centers on a cynical, self-aware ghostwriter who must finish the memoirs of a former British prime minister. The PM, thanks to war crimes, waterboarding, and other timely plot points, is laying low in America, but Harris spends more time skewering publishers than politicians. He did his homework, interviewing real ghostwriters and pulling epigraphs from a handbook by “Britain’s foremost ghostwriter,” and his novel makes for some biting (if predictable) satire. No wonder Harris told National Public Radio, on the last day of his rather busy October, that he “just really was interested in this phenomenon of the ghostwriter.”
The main thing that interested NPR, and the novel’s reviewers, though, was playing connect-the-characters with the Blair administration. The Ghost certainly allows for this reading, and Harris handled the attention with the skill of someone who’d been expecting it, smirking and demurring his way through round after round of sales-boosting interviews.