The Final Cut
Francis Urquhart’s eventful career as Prime Minister comes to a spectacular end in the final volume in the Francis Urquhart trilogy – now reissued in a new cover.He schemed his way to power in ‘House of Cards’ and had a memorable battle of wills with the new king in ‘To Play the King’. Now Francis Urquhart is about to take his place in the record books as the longest-serving Prime Minister this century. Yet it seems the public is tiring of him at last, and the movement to force him from power is growing. But Urquhart is not yet ready to be driven from office. If the public demand new blood, that is precisely what he will give them…Francis Urquhart goes out in a blaze of glory in this final volume in the irresistible story of the most memorable politician of the decade.
Читать The Final Cut онлайн беплатно
MICHAEL DOBBS
THE FINAL CUT
This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the authorâs imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
Copyright © Michael Dobbs 1995, 2014
Michael Dobbs asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006477099
Ebook Edition © MAY 2015 © ISBN: 9780007405978
Version: 2017-10-10
Praise for The Final Cut:
âItâs that man againâ¦in Francis Urquhart he has created a true political icon. Dobbs lays fair claim to being the Quentin Tarantino of pulp fictionâ
Sunday Times
âA triumphant returnâ¦The action is unflagging, the characterization razor sharp, the satirical barbs at politics and politicians unfailingly accurateâ¦What a brilliant creation FU isâ
Sunday Telegraph
For David, Peter and Linda. The Family Dobbs.
âThat we shall die, we know; âtis but the time
And drawing days out, that men stand upon.â
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Contents
The Final Cut was written in 1994. All these years later the British are still arguing about Europe, the Cypriots have discovered a vast ocean of hydrocarbon wealth beneath the Mediterranean, and the Greeks and Turks are still arguing about the future of that sadly divided island. What I also hope the reader will find timeless is the enduring wickedness of FU.
Troödos Mountains, Cyprus â 1956
It was late on an afternoon in May, the sweetest of seasons in the Troödos, beyond the time when the mountains are muffled beneath a blanket of snow but before the days when they serve as an anvil for the Levantine sun. The spring air was filled with the heavy tang of resin and the sound of the breeze being shredded on the branches of great pines, like the noise of the sea being broken upon a pebbled shore. But this was many miles from the Mediterranean, almost as far as is possible to get from the sea on the small island of Cyprus.
These were good times, a season of abundance even in the mountains. For a few weeks in spring, the dust of crumbling rock chippings which passes for soil becomes a treasury of wild flowers â erupting bushes of purple-flowered sword lily, blood-dipped poppies, alyssum, the leaves and golden heads of which in ancient times were supposed to effect a cure for madness.
Yet nothing would cure the madness that was about to burst forth on the side of the mountain.
George, fifteen and almost three-quarters, prodded the donkey further up the mountain path, oblivious to the beauty. His mind had turned once again to breasts. It was a topic which seemed to demand most of his time nowadays, depriving him of sleep, causing him not to hear a word his mother said, making him blush whenever he looked at a woman, which he always did straight between her breasts. They had an energy source all their own which dragged his eyes towards them, like magnets, no matter how hard he tried to be polite. He never seemed to remember what their faces looked like, his eyes rarely strayed that far â heâd marry a toothless old hag one day. So long as she had breasts.
