2020 visionless (Image in the Water - Douglas Hurd)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Image in the Water - Douglas Hurd
Date:	26/02/02 (155 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice.

Disadvantages: About as exciting as a rather old hat.

Douglas Hurd (or the Right Honorable Lord Hurd of Westwell as he is now) was the Home Secretary from 1985-89 and Foreign Secretary from 1989-95, but he will forever be remembered as the one with the ice-cream cone head on Spitting Image.

The Conservative Prime Minister, Simon Russell has kicked the bucket, he is an ex-PM, he has ceased to be. Right away the reader is asked to suspend his disbelief - I mean, whoever heard of a successful politician called Simon? And a Tory Prime Minister? That's just absurd. Even if this is set nearly thirty years in the future.

There appear to be two candidates to succeed Russell - the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Joan Freetown (imagine a cross between Anne Widdecombe and Gordon Brown - no, on second thoughts, don't!) and Roger Courtauld, the Home Secretary. In the meantime, Foreign Secretary Peter Makewell(!), a modest 'tweedy' Scot in his late 60's, has had the Premiership thrust upon him on a caretaker basis. Now I wonder who that character could be based on? Dream on, Douglas!

The Thunder newspaper has no doubt who is the best woman for the job, so they set out to destroy the Home Secretary by publishing a photograph showing him as a young man, holding hands with a German lad on a beach thirty-years earlier. Courtauld, now a family man, decides to withdraw from the contest, when the publicity causes his son to run away from school.

The idea that such a photograph might be scandalous these days, let alone more than a quarter of a century in the future, is either depressing, or silly, I can't decide which. But I'm afraid Lord Hurd seems somewhat out of touch with the present, never mind the future, judging by the way that the editor of the Thunderer mocks-up his front page splash on a piece of cardboard!

It's impossible to predict what the future will be like, and it's unwise to try - for example he envisages Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber writing a musical
about Chequers, the Prime Minister's country house! But perhaps that's a joke...? At times the setting felt more like the 1970's than the 2020's:

"The telephone rang. There was no extension in the bedroom..."

Doesn't that seem a tad quaint even for today? A politician without a mobile phone? I think the future is a foreign country of which Lord Hurd is blissfully ignorant. (Of course, if Edwina Currie had written that line, it would have meant something else entirely...)

He also foresees a 'New England' movement led by a B'Stard of a character called David Alcester - the villain of the piece, and the only politician under sixty in the book. Lord Hurd obviously considers the trend towards youth in politics as a disease (one character says as much) - a temporary anomaly which will pass, and that the future will belong to the old. A bit sad isn't it? Anyway this bounder Alcester gains popularity by whipping up anti-Scottish feelings in England, and climbs the Tories' greasy pole as a result...

I was expecting a political thriller informed by the author's inside knowedge of the corridors of power, but apart from learning that the Foreign Secretary has to make do with a shower rather than a bath, the only thing I learned from reading this nice, inoffensive, book was that Lord Hurd is out of touch with the modern world. Perhaps that's why he did so well in the Tory party.


¶ Hardback: £16.99 ¶ ISBN: 0316857726 ¶ pp 243 ¶
¶ Paperback: £5.99 ¶ ISBN: 0751532150 ¶ pp 320 ¶ 5 September 2002 ¶
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