The latest Bond villain is Nigel Farage. Not literally, of course. But he was clearly a major inspiration for the chief antagonist in the most recent James Bond book, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. This master of international skulduggery is known as Athelstan; a former City trader with a Kentish accent, he espouses a boisterous, saloon-bar English nationalism of the kind usually ascribed to the former Ukip leader.
The men drawn to Athelstan’s scheme are preposterous caricatures of the kind of people whom Higson dislikes – i.e. people who have any kind of reservations about any aspect of progressive politics
The author, Charlie Higson, has had a certain amount of commercial success with his Young Bond novels. I have not read any of them so cannot comment on their quality, but his contribution to the mythology of the adult Bond is outstandingly terrible. It makes Dan Brown look like a master of nuance, understatement and subtle characterisation.
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