Richard Charkin is the managing director (I think) of the publishers MacMillan. He also has a blog (a real one with opinions and comments rather than a series of corporate press releases).

He has written an interesting piece about the government's plans to prevent criminals from profiting from the writing of their memoirs.

I suppose Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom was written in prison and he earned money from it. Some people would regard George Bush's invasion of Iraq as criminal. Should he be banned from selling his memoirs? I sense an interesting debate in the offing.

Quite.

I suppose this is just headline grabbing by the government, but I suppose we will have to go through the motions of opposing it.