Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The biggest mistake Ed Milliband ever made was to resign as leader when he did. Since his departure his party has been drifting rudderless, caught up in a leadership election for which it was not prepared and in which it appears unable to see the wood for the trees. Now the whole election process has been called into question with allegations of weirdoes from both left and right becoming supporters just to make mischief and skew the result. How on earth the party has electoral arrangements of such a peculiar style is difficult for all outsiders and many insiders to fathom. Nevertheless this is a slippery slope. Order must be restored at once or the whole party will go over the cliff. If that happens, like Humpty Dumpty, it might not be easy to put it together again.

Alex Salmond has come clean. The quest for Scottish independence is not over. There are three issues which may trigger another vote (remember it took two votes for devolution). One is if England votes to leave the EU and Scotland votes to stay. The next is the forced austerity which hits the poorest which Scotland voted decisively against. The the failure to deliver on the lavish devo-max promises a panicked English political establishment made to swing the last vote to NO. The only way to interrupt this chain of events is for the Scottish people to boot out the SNP at the  Holyrood election next year. This does not seem likely.

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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