First among equals.

I had just finished reading a fairly engrossing book today. It's an Archer book entitled "First Among Equals". Unlike most of his other books, this one was a particularly good read as there were four main characters in the book that were equally important. In fact, he published an american version that had a different person winning in the end. How he managed to remove the Scottish MP from the American edition puzzles me though. The reason he had different endings was because British and American readers were cheering for a different character to win. One thing was obvious, neither wanted the scheming pompous aristocrat to win.

Although this is a work of fiction, it has introduced me to several elements of British politics. The entire book is peppered with real historical figures as well as events between 1964 to 1984. The British edition has a major Scottish role in the story (with a couple of chapters involving the Irish question). It mentioned something about 1707 and looking it up on wikipedia revealed that 1707 was the year the Treaty of Union was ratified, unifying Scotland and England into Great Britain. It also introduced many foreign things about British parliament that I have witnessed in my few years here. Things like counting the ayes or noes and prime minister's questions. The stereotype Tory and Labour politician is also painted in wonderful clarity in the story.

It's probably one of his better books that I've read and I've been reading a lot of Archer in recent weeks as they were selling many of his books at Oxfam for only 99p. According to wikipedia, one of the characters was probably based around the author himself: Kerslake, narrowly avoided bankruptcy and was a Tory MP on the rise. Anyway, I really should go to bed now.