|
When in 2045 Dr Horatio
Lestoq, All Souls Prize fellow and freelance journalist, discover
the corpse of a nonagenarian admiral in very suspicious circumstances
- and is wrongfully arrested for murder - he is suddenly flung
into a series of dangerous adventures. He embarks on a trail
of discoveries that lead to a scandal at the heart of the
United States of Europe - the corrupt, bureaucratic, xenophobic
Euro-superstate that has all but snuffed out British identity.
Can the overweight, snobbish, lecherous,
asthmatic, cowardly Lestoq stay one step away from his sinister
pursuers? Is his lover Cleo Tallboys, the sexiest secret policewoman
in Europol, all that she seems? Is it coincidental that Prince
William Windsor, King of New Zealand and pretender to ex-King
Charles III's former throne, should be visiting Britain just
as Lestoq stumbles across the scadal.
As body piles upon body, will the dreadful
truth emerge of how British independence and sovereignty was
extinguished by the now all-powerful USE?
I came to Euro-scepticism relatively early,
opposing further European integration in the pages of the
Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere from 1991 onwards. By 1994,
when The Aachen Memorandum was published, I felt that a combination
of thriller, satire, whodunit, futuristic fiction and comic
novel might be able to make political points that were already
becoming stale when presented conventionally. For as Lord
Salisbury wrote in the Saturday Review
in 1858: 'Whatever a man has to communicate to the world
he has
no hope of its being read unless he dresses it up as a novel.'
As well as making a series of predictions
about what Britain might turn into if she chose the federalist
path, I made my reputation as the Nostradamus of the Right
by foretelling various other social, economic and political developments, a bewilderingly large number of which
have already come to pass.
|
