The President is Missing

FORMER president Bill Clinton and thriller writer James Patterson have teamed up to write a novel, which for pure marketing genius would be like Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Katy Perry releasing a duet.

It’s no accident that in their acknowledgments, the first person the authors thank is Washington super-agent Robert Barnett. Poor Hillary comes in third, with thanks for her “constant encouragement” – just what every girl wants to hear.

This isn’t the first work of fiction by a US president: Jimmy Carter published an earnest novel about the Revolutionary War called in 2003, and Donald Trump is a master of autoerotic fantasy. But

is, nonetheless, an extraordinary event. As the publishers gush, it’s the first novel “informed by insider details that only a president can know”.

The CIA can relax. The book reveals as many secrets about the US government as reveals about the French government. And yet it provides plenty of insight on Clinton’s ego.

The novel opens with President Duncan preparing for a House Select Committee. His staff have strongly advised him against testifying. “My opponents really hate my guts,” Duncan thinks, “but here I am: just one honest man with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of humour.”

Facing a panel of political opportunists intent on impeaching him, Duncan knows he sounds “like a lawyer” caught in “a semantic legal debate”, but darn it, he’s trying to save the United States.

Although Congress insists he explains exactly what he’s been up to, he can’t reveal the details of his secret negotiations with a terrorist set on destroying the country.

As a fabulous revision of Clinton’s own life and impeachment scandal, this is dazzling. The transfiguration of William Jefferson Clinton into Jonathan Lincoln Duncan should be studied in psych departments. Both men lost their fathers early and rose from hard-scrabble circumstances to become governors. Both men met their brilliant wives at law