A British PM, a football match, blackmail, bisexuality — it is a political martini
Even by the standards of masala-filled airport novels, Meghnad Desai’s political thriller Dead on Time offers an embarrassment of riches: paedophilia, incest, bisexuality, blackmail and, not least of all, a Scottish Premier League football match between the Celtics and the Rangers. The characters are equally colourful: there is the obligatory unscrupulous publishing magnate, his rich wife dying of cancer, a dissolute peer, a retired journalist endlessly writing obituaries, a French lesbian actor playing Ubu Roi, an ambitious diary secretary at 10 Downing Street, a weird terrorist-type named Red and a vengeful barman armed with some very dangerous olives. Oh, and there’s the nation’s agony-aunt who writes articles with titles like “Children are God’s tears on earth”. Together, these ingredients — and especially the fat green olives — make a peculiar but racy and readable cocktail.

Apart from his publications as an economist, Desai has written on subjects as varied as Dilip Kumar, Ezra Pound, and Islamism. Dead on Time, a new effort, gets full points for enthusiasm. As a Labour peer, Desai has drawn on his experience of the House of Lords. Crime writer Ruth Rendell, also a Labour peer, provides a generous back-quote for the novel (“close enough to reality to raise a shiver”). The novel is set in England in the late 1990s. The main protagonist, Harry White, is the prime minister of Britain. Like all occupants of high office, he spends most of his time doing things that he detests — such as wearing contact lenses, or watching a football match in Glasgow before the elections for the devolved Scottish Parliament. The events unfold in the space of one day under headers like “06:59 am. London”, “7:20 am. London”, “7:28 am. London”, “7:30 am. London” and so on until the narrative reaches Belfast at noon — but no one’s dead yet.

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