| | Review by The Spectator

Then, though the Osborne character’s disclosure of Mandelson’s confidences should be provoked by pique and injured vanity, the set-up in a Raven novel would have been devised in order to discredit Osborne and the Tory party. Strings are pulled by sinister off-stage figures in the Security Services with the unsuspecting Rothschild as their puppet. They are working in mysterious collusion with the Russian oligarch, whom they are also blackmailing. Establishment figures rescue the hapless O, and then a busty, big-thighed woman takes over to keep him out of further trouble. In the Raven novel, as in life, the Mandelson character emerges unscathed, skating serenely over the thinnest of ice.

The Russian oligarch himself plays only a minor role in the Raven novel where he is a mere cardboard figure. Raven was seldom convincing with characters who had not been to an English public school and Cambridge. Indeed the coup de foudre, when M first catches sight of O, inevitably strikes at a dinner in Lancaster College, King’s in all but name.

It would be very different if Trollope had written the novel. The sexual element would go. So would the secret services. No need for them at all. The O figure is now an outsider, like Phineas Finn, a young politician on the make, a man of good intentions but weak virtue, dazzled by wealth and corrupted by ambition. M is the spider weaving his web to entrap the innocent. His indiscretions in the taverna are calculated. The money O asked for — in the novel, if not in real life — is handed over in return for a bond to which O has put his name. So he is now in the clutches of the oligarch working with M to dish the Tory party’s chances of winning the next election. As for R’s letter to the Times, that is undoubtedly drafted by M, and R is compelled to put his name to it because of some dark secret in his life which M has discovered and threatens to reveal. Yet the oligarch’s role remains murky. Perhaps it’s not a Trollope novel after all.