The Predecessor

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“Old soldiers never die,

Never die, never die,

Old soldiers never die,

They simply fade away”

This is the story of a political haunting. Holton is a marginal Westcountry constituency, splicing together feral countryside, a pompous market town and depressing suburbs. This is the tale of two of its Members of Parliament.
Robert Wilkes is a backbench MP of the modern age, lost in the gap between ambition and capability and increasingly bitter about his insignificance. His empty, self-obsessed days are shortly to change, filled with encounters with a strange, tobacco scented shadow. Maurice Copeland-Ellis, soldier, squire and knight of the shire has been dead for half a century. He watches over his old constituency with a gimlet eye and an inscrutable agenda. The proposed M17 a is a major road project designed to cut congestion, boost the regional economy and burnish political credentials. In its way stands a patch of scrubland, a small wood and outraged local sentiment.
The Predecessor is a tale about politics, past and place and the tangled ways they are woven together. Alone of the ancient buildings of Britain, the Palace of Westminster does not have any ghost stories attached to it. This book suggests why.