Kompromat - Softcover

A former MEP, Stanley Johnson has written widely in both fiction and non-fiction. Previous thrillers are The Doomsday Project, The Virus, The Warming and The Commissioner, which was made into a film starring John Hurt. He lives in London, and is the father of Foreign Secretary and former London mayor Boris Johnson.

"A different sort of ambiguity propels English author Stanley Johnson’s outrageous political-espionage satire KOMPROMAT , a rollicking work of fiction that sets conniving caricatures of real-life figures amid a diorama of recent world events. Front and center is Ronald C. Craig, the “proud and manly” American TV-show host and entrepreneur running for president of the United States, who tweets and tub-thumps such campaign catchphrases as “Build the Wall!” and “Drain the Swamp!” Then there is the jet-flying Russian president Igor Popov (“five eight in height [with] thinning hair, carefully brushed back to cover a bald spot”), whose high-profile mission to save the world’s tigers serves as a mask for his high-tech meddling in elections from Germany to England to America. Not to be overlooked are various Chinese government operatives bent on persuading England, through fair means and foul, to remain in the European Union. Our witness to the main players’ shenanigans is British cabinet minister Edward Barnard, who, in the course of his globe-trotting duties, survives an attempted assassination by means of a poisonous Australian spider, and the leaking of a video purporting to show him cavorting with two Russian prostitutes. 'Classic Kompromat stuff,' a British Secret Service man scolds Barnard regarding the latter. 'Ministers who go to Russia surely know the drill: don’t talk to strange blonde women in hotel lobbies. Don’t go upstairs with them. Above all, don’t go to bed with them.' Mr. Johnson, a former member of the European Parliament and the father of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, clearly knows all the drills. The author of 25 earlier works of fiction and nonfiction, he has a lifetime’s expertise that adds comic credibility to a caper combining the antic action of Mad magazine’s old “Spy vs. Spy” cartoons with the gonzo humor of Carl Hiaasen." -- The Wall Street Journal