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 theSaturday 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.