Handing your life to a stranger

Adam Lang, until recently Prime Minister, is keen to write his memoirs as soon as possible. He employs for this task a hulking apparatchik who was part of his inner team at 10 Downing Street. He takes his wife Ruth, his secretarial staff and this ghost-writer to a luxurious house made available by a millionaire at Martha’s Vineyard in New England. He has an argument with the ghost-writer; the writer gets drunk, falls off a ferry and is washed up on the shore. After he has identified the body Adam Lang quickly recruits a replacement ghost-writer through his lawyer. This replacement, whose name we never hear, is the hero and narrator of the book.

As he arrives to take up his job at Martha’s Vineyard a report begins to circulate that several years ago Lang had authorised the kidnapping by the CIA of four British citizens suspected of terrorism in Pakistan. They had later been tortured and detained at Guantanamo Bay. Egged on by a former foreign secretary whom Lang had sacked, the International Court of Justice (acting with wholly improbable haste) begins to investigate the story. Lang and his advisers decide to speed up the publication of the memoirs so that they will sell even better in the light of this publicity and enable him to set out his side of the story. The accusations and emotions multiply within the team at Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere. The thriller gathers speed.

The look-alikes in this story are plain enough. Adam Lang is described as ‘having a genius to refresh and elevate the clichés of politics by the sheer force of his performance’. As neat a summary of Blair as you could find. Lang follows slavishly the policy of the American President to the extent that Americans ‘were embarrassed about how much support he gave and how little he got in return’.