Since his compact with the security service and break-up with Miranda de Coursey, Jack Pugh had become an increasingly bitter man. He had seen the financier’s daughter once since Oxford. She had taken him on holiday with her to the French Riviera where he had wallowed in the luxury that surrounded her, only to be humiliated in front of her friends and dismissed at the end with the crushing rebuff: ‘when it comes right down to it, Master Trotsky, you are nothing, not even a good fuck. I don’t really want to see you again.’ MI5 appeared to have dropped him, too. More than ever, he was convinced that the system was rotten to the core and had thrown himself behind Arthur Scargill, elected president of the National Union of Mineworkers by a landslide in 1981. To make matters worse, Margaret Thatcher, buoyed up by her victory over the Argentines, had been returned to power in June, winning a majority of one hundred and forty-four seats in the House of Commons with only 42% of the popular vote, against a hopelessly divided opposition.
