Tale of a politician who lies and lies and lies...
Aldwick author Beryl Kingston loved every second of writing her latest book – the tale of a politician who lies and lies and lies.
The tale of a politician who most definitely gets his comeuppance in the end.
The book is The Great I Am and is available from Amazon. Beryl has self-published it.
She is doing a book signing at Heygates bookshop in Bognor on Saturday, February 5 from 11am-1pm
“I put it out myself because my agent was terrified of it and said ‘I don’t think I can find a publisher for that!’”
The point is that it is political. Very political.
“It’s the story of a politician who tells lies as easily as he breathes and whose entire life is based on a lie, and his relationships with women are appalling. He abuses them and discards them like tissues.
“I made him a self-made man. His mother turns up, in the first chapter, to his home where he is having a garden party just to show off. She is very left-wing and very working class and has started to organise demonstrations to stop a developer. Her son is a Tory.
“He calls himself Sir Willoughby Ponsonby-smyth but his mother says his real name is Fred Perkins and that he was born in Whitechapel and that his father was a burglar who died in prison and good riddance to bad rubbish!”
Beryl said she had plenty of politicians in mind when she started writing the book.
“And do you know how these politicians can get away with lying in parliament? When Hansard first started, they collected together all the sorts of terms that they were not allowed to use, and in the middle of all those there is the word liar because they decided that a gentleman doesn’t tell lies!
“I have made my politician very rich. He had worked in hedge funds and he has a lot of money. He goes off to the West Indies once a year to check through all his accounts to make sure that they are in a safe place and that also gives him a holiday because he likes holidays. He has hopes of being Prime Minister one day and he is very Tory in their showoff kind of way with all the favourite phrases about the greatness of Great Britain and all that kind of thing
“And he is awful to women. Sexually he uses them without taking any interest whatsoever in whether they are having pleasure too. It is all me, me, me, and then he just dumps them. He dumps one West Indian girl who is actually pregnant.
“But he gets his comeuppance. Doesn’t he just!
His wife leaves him and goes home to her parents who live quite modestly in Guildford. I chose Guildford because I know it very well.
“The wife has got two brothers that she is very fond of. She gets the divorce and she goes back to college and she finds another man in her life but the politician will not accept that they are divorced because he hasn’t agreed to it. But she has the decree in her hands and says to her brothers that she is going to go and show it to him and put it to him, and her brothers say that if she is going to do that then they are going to go along too and so does her lover…”
As Beryl says, it’s a very different kind of book for her, but then again all her books are different: “I have a very low boredom threshold. I want to keep writing different books. There’s no point writing the same book over and over again. You don’t want to go boiling cabbage twice!”