It tells the story of the leader of a British right-wing populist party who has decided to have his internal rival assassinated.

Both Hopkins and Wilson admired a set of authors active around year 1900—George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton and Anatole France—and preferred these to the generations which had followed.

[1] The book was accepted by MacGibbon & Kee at the height of the angry young men movement, which Hopkins was associated with, and published in 1957.

Graham Hough of Encounter, a cultural magazine covertly funded by the CIA, called it "an adolescent power-fantasy, extremely shoddily written", and wrote: What is surprising, after the history of the last thirty years, is that even the naivest masturbations of the most unhappy young man should be able to take this openly Fascist form.

The fact that this performance has been treated in some quarters with a moderate respect shows that there is a dangerous vacuum in our present culture that could easily be filled with highly unpleasant material; though not, I should have thought, with anything as poisonously silly as this.