He is bull-necked and barrel-chested, bald and foul-mouthed, the owner of a bejewelled Rolex and the hundreds of millions - perhaps billions - that go with it. His English is Russian-accented and salted with expletives. He is holidaying in Antigua, on a peninsula that he owns in its entirety. He is the kingpin in a brotherhood of Russian super-criminals, a financial whiz who until now has acted as a human Laundromat, expertly washing clean his fellow crooks' soiled fortunes. But now he has made covert contact with the British authorities: he wants to be an informant, a mega-grass who will reveal the secrets of the dark underworld he has inhabited for so long.If that sounds like the plot of a thriller, that's because it's the set-up of the new and utterly riveting John le Carré novel, Our Kind of Traitor. The Russian gangster is Dima, whose fate we follow as a rogue unit in British intelligence seeks to reel the would-be defector in to safety on England's shores.
He is bull-necked and barrel-chested, bald and foul-mouthed, the owner of a bejewelled Rolex and the hundreds of millions - perhaps billions - that go with it. His English is Russian-accented and salted with expletives. He is holidaying in Antigua, on a peninsula that he owns in its entirety. He is the kingpin in a brotherhood of Russian super-criminals, a financial whiz who until now has acted as a human Laundromat, expertly washing clean his fellow crooks' soiled fortunes. But now he has made covert contact with the British authorities: he wants to be an informant, a mega-grass who will reveal the secrets of the dark underworld he has inhabited for so long.
If that sounds like the plot of a thriller, that's because it's the set-up of the new and utterly riveting John le Carré novel, Our Kind of Traitor. The Russian gangster is Dima, whose fate we follow as a rogue unit in British intelligence seeks to reel the would-be defector in to safety on England's shores.
`Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go. The Blair/Brown feud and their factions dominated everything. `In the last shameful years there was wild over spending. When Alistair Darling was warning the financial crisis was the worst for 60 years, Brown almost sacked him for it. And the Blairs...' Cornwell shakes his head despairingly. `Him and his wife. The shared greed that emanates from the pair. It's embarrassing. I've become more radical in old age than I've ever been. The Blair catastrophe went far beyond the Iraq war and the destruction of the old Labour Party. It was about his creation of an inner circle.'
`In the last shameful years there was wild over spending. When Alistair Darling was warning the financial crisis was the worst for 60 years, Brown almost sacked him for it. And the Blairs...' Cornwell shakes his head despairingly. `Him and his wife. The shared greed that emanates from the pair. It's embarrassing. I've become more radical in old age than I've ever been. The Blair catastrophe went far beyond the Iraq war and the destruction of the old Labour Party. It was about his creation of an inner circle.'
