In 2020 the United Kingdom elects its own Donald Trump.
Bob Grant, former football hooligan, now the charismatic leader of the Britain’s Great party, has swept to power on a populist tide. With his itchy finger hovering over the nuclear trigger, Bob presides over a brave new Britain where armed drones fill the skies, ex-bankers and foreigners are vilified, and the Millwall football chant ‘No one likes us, we don’t care’ has become an unofficial national anthem.
Meanwhile, Bob’s under-achieving, Guardian-reading brother Zack gets a tap on the shoulder from a shady Whitehall mandarin. A daring plot is afoot to defy the will of the people and unseat the increasingly unstable PM. Can Zack stop his brother before he launches a nuclear strike on Belgium? And just what is ACERBIC, Britain’s most closely-guarded military secret?
A darkly comic political thriller, Time of Lies is also a terrifyingly believable portrait of an alternative Britain. It couldn’t happen here… could it?
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Extract
***
In 2020 the UK elects its own Donald Trump as Prime Minister – Bob Grant, uneducated Bermondsey geezer and self-made millionaire. The election slogan of Bob’s BG party is ‘Britain’s Great! End of!’
Zack, a Guardian-reading out-of-work actor, can’t believe that his brother Bob has his finger on Britain’s nuclear trigger. Meanwhile Patrick Smath, the Eton-educated permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, is wetting himself and having to tell Bob Britain’s most closely-guarded secret for the last 25 years.
Kathy, Zack’s wife, is a rising Royal Navy officer currently assigned to be Patrick’s right hand person. Here Kathy and Patrick are briefed about something BG have up their sleeve – futuristic drones.
‘I thought you’d want to know right away: finally we’ve got one of the BG drones. Of course we haven’t formally traced it to BG, but it’s obvious – a jet-black triangle, one metre sides, about two and a half kilos in weight.’
Both Patrick’s and Kathy’s faces lit up. ‘That’s great news. Where did it come from?’ Patrick asked.
‘The Metropolitan Police have just brought it in. Several members of the public saw it come down on open ground in Southwark Park. Its batteries must have failed. Fortunately no-one was hit.’
‘You’ve dispatched it to Farnborough?’
‘A car is on its way now.’
‘Good. I’m afraid you’ll need to spoil the lab boys’ weekend – I want the analysts crawling over it all night and all weekend if need be.’
‘I doubt you’ll be spoiling their weekend. You might be helping a few marriages instead. If the thing is half as interesting as BG want us to believe, they’d be over it all weekend anyway. Now they can say it’s an order. I’ll speak to the team right away.’
Thank you, Douglas Board and Rachel’s Random Resources.
About the author
Douglas Board is the author of the campus satire MBA (Lightning Books, 2015), which asked why so much of the business world is Managed By Arseholes. Time of Lies, his second novel, is a timely exploration of the collapse of democracy.
Born in Hong Kong, he has degrees from Cambridge and Harvard and worked for the UK Treasury and then as a headhunter. He has also had a distinguished career in public life, serving as treasurer of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and chairing the British Refugee Council.
As well as writing fiction, he is the author of two applied research books on leadership, which was the subject of his doctorate. He is currently a senior visiting fellow at the Cass Business School in London. He and his wife Tricia Sibbons live in London and Johannesburg.
Social Media Links
Twitter: @BoardWryter
https://douglasboard.com/home/
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