Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy and right hand man, flew to Scotland on a mysterious peace mission in 1941, which has never been convincingly explained, to meet unidentified politicians who wanted to end the war. The truth has been covered up for generations because to reveal it would somehow undermine the honour and constitutional fabric of the United Kingdom. Who was plotting against Churchill? What were the peace terms on offer? What happened to Hess? Was he killed in the War? Was the prisoner in Spandau a double?
There are many questions to which in the modern day one man, Saul Benedict has all the answers, because his parents were players in the drama involving Churchill, Hitler, leading politicians and an important Royal. Saul is an author and declares his intention to write a book to reveal all, but he is shot dead, apparently accidentally by a poacher. But was it an accident? Rick Coleman an investigative journalist determines to find out and in doing so to uncover the mystery.
Taking place in the modern day but with flashback chapters which gradually unfold the hidden secrets, the novel is a fast moving and compelling read based on the family knowledge of the author whose parents had connections to both Hess and Hitler and to British Intelligence.

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.

KINDLE OR PAPERBACK     UK    US

I find I am having trouble recognising my country. Today is the seventy-sixth anniversary of the outbreak of WWII. On that day Great Britain put its very existence on the line in order to challenge the inherent evil which had gripped Nazi Germany. Later we were attacked by Japan. In the end we came through victorious, though at enormous cost.  But we paid willingly because we knew we were right. Now, a lifetime later, we are wrong. The picture of the Turkish soldier gently cradling the body of a dead three year old child is heart rending. It is shocking. And it is shaming because we have said no to him and his family. If we had said yes there might have been a system that took care of them better than the murderous traffickers into whose despicable clutches our foreign policy has driven them.

We have a moral responsibility for the mayhem now unfolding and well we know it. For Downing Street to talk in terms of cash aid to countries in meltdown is all very good, but no use to a three year old tossed into an angry sea. Whatever  oily excuses the smooth talking Cameron puts forward and however angry the underclass bearing the weight of his cuts becomes, he has no excuse for his shameful policy which even shocks the Germans. It is his duty to take a lead, back sensible quotas of fair sharing across the EU, and open our gates to the desperate.

It may very well be that the ultra right Thatcherite tendency which howls from the backbenches of his party frightens him more than the world opprobrium beginning to surround his person. The Tories may wallow in the notion that they are the nasty party. We must not let them turn our homeland into a nasty country.