The Old Firm: An Armstrong and Burton Political Adventure (The Armstrong and Burton Series)

In 1963, popular, widely respected Tory MP Norman Armstrong is a young Home Secretary in the new Douglas-Home administration. His unlikely friend, left-wing freelance lobby correspondent, Alf Burton, is right behind the new Home Secretary’s crusade against police corruption and organised crime in London’s West End, and to bring all of the Euston mail train robbers to justice. Alf is also keeping a discreet eye on simmering government scandals, including the aftermath of the Profumo Affair, as well as allegations of bribery and sleaze engulfing local authority housing committees and a major Tyneside shipyard privatisation.

Nearly a quarter of a century on, Sir Norman Armstrong is Home Secretary once again, and finds himself idolised and loathed with equal intensity. As the Thatcher government triumphantly enters its third term, Alf is the nation’s premier political interviewer and commentator, but is feeling jaded and exhausted from his career-long struggle with conflicting professional, family, and class loyalties. Meanwhile, younger Armstrongs and Burtons are forging successful lives and careers of their own in the brutal battleground of 1980s Britain.

In the autumn of 1987, a multi-billion pound conglomerate, with uncomfortably close ties to senior members of the government, teeters on the brink of a major criminal investigation and imminent collapse. Old friends and political enemies must confront their complicated family histories, and their consciences, and unite in a desperate scheme to rescue many thousands of livelihoods and pensions, and preserve dynasties and reputations generations in the making.