As a novel for our time, I cannot recommend "A Small Town in Germany" by John le Carre strongly enough, although beware the edition with an introduction by Hari Kunzru as this in my view gives a poor entre to the narrative which follows.
The "small town" of the book's title is Bonn some forty years ago when Britain is conspiring to enter the European Community and Germany is regarded as our key ally. Threatening to jeopardise this special relationship is the supposed defection of a British embassy employee to the Eastern Block, together with the emergence of a new German leader intent on national re-unification.
The book's central theme is British post-war international realpolitik at a time when the nation appears to be in terminal decline. Against this backdrop, there can be few better literary accounts of office politics, encapsulated in the UK's Bonn embassy, where a combination bureaucratic determinism and internal relationship management wrestle with external imperatives.
As I neared the novel's conclusion, it occurred to me that our present government may be run along very similar lines, and that David Cameron could have found his literary equivalent in le Carre's Bonn embassy head honcho, Bradfield.
The arch political manager, Bradfield makes UK's modus operandi clear to the British spy Turner, who has been despatched by the Foreign Office to find the potential defector:
"I'm a great believer in hypocrisy. It's the nearest we ever get to virtue. It's a statement of what we ought to be like.....I did not contract to serve a powerful nation, least of all a virtuous one. All power corrupts. The loss of power corrupts even more. We thank an American for that advice. It's quite true. We are a corrupt nation and we need all the help we can get."
The alternative interpretation of our current prime minister's pronouncements on a range of issues, including private sector investment in infrastructure, is that he has inherited "delusions of Gordon" , or that he dwells in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
