Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

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 St.John Whilloe is the black sheep member of a wealthy legal family,  whose firm of solicitors looks after the affairs of many of the top  families in the country. He is consulted by a young woman who claims  to be frightened by her husband. Things are not as they seem and  St.John finds himself drawn into a complex web of intrigue and  murder. He is soon in a race against time to solve a mystery with roots  in a tortured family history, with sinister paranormal undertones.

It is reported that Cameron is to engage in a degree of finger wagging about the trillion dollar corruption industry woven into public life around the world, as part of his contribution to the G7 summit. It kind of looks good on the home media but will have little practical effect, even though all the other heads of government will be obliged to agree.

Unfortunately Britain has unwittingly stoked this pestilence by its practice of paying huge tranches of overseas aid to developing governments whose auditing practices are rudimentary and whose customs make these cash flows fair game for local politicians and commercial interests. If Cameron were to announce that the UK would in future stop altogether payments to governments and instead give the cash direct to the charities or other authorities distributing the aid and encourage other aid giving countries to follow suit, he would deliver a blow to the thieves and fraudsters which would inaugurate real improvements.

Dr. Rachael Benedict is an American historian and a best-selling author. She has a British connection through her estranged father Saul, an English thriller writer. Saul, whose parents were of Anglo-German origin, has spent much of his life plotting to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years. As the time approaches for him to make his move to expose duplicity, murder and lies at the heart of the British State, he seeks Rachael’s help. This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden.
Set equally in the United States and Britain, the narrative grips from the first page, transporting the reader to the heart of government both in Washington and London and on into the darkest corners of the secret states on each side of the Atlantic. Rachael battles forward to unearth the truth both from intrigues of the Nazi era, but also within her own family, surviving three attempts on her life, before finally achieving her goal. Not only does she expose the truth from history and from her own roots, she has to delve deep into her own emotions to find the truth about herself.

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Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. The novel catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.

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The arguments continue about the pay of members of parliament, with cabinet ministers and backbenchers (of all the main parties) lining up to say they are going to pay the increase to charity, in self righteous declarations designed to appeal to voters. In fact, as IPSA points out, the award is revenue neutral as reductions in pension contributions and the removal from the expenses list of various items previously claimable, means that the bill to taxpayers will not increase.

Unfortunately all this hair shirt stuff is thought necessary not just because public sector workers have much lower pay increases, but because politicians are so reviled by the people that any money paid to them is begrudged. This prejudice is made worse by the recent death, caused by alcohol illness, of a much admired and respected parliamentarian, giving rise to all sorts of discussions about the stress on MPs with a good deal of wasted time in a Palace of Westminster awash with bars open all hours.

I wrote in 2009 that the way parliament functioned was completely unsuited to the modern world and was failing to meet the needs of the people it was organised to represent. I see no reason now to retract those thoughts; rather to reinforce them. My proposal then was that every constituency should have a Parliamentary Office, which would be the place of work of members of parliament, open always to the public, through which their local member would be able to look after their needs and champion their causes. Parliament would meet three or four times a year to learn about, approve of or reject the plans of the government, which would concentrate much more on governing by organisation and function and much less by endless streams of legislation. What seemed a good idea in 2009 seems, in the light of events, and even better one today.