A Scandalous Man, By Gavin Esler

In between current affairs, Newsnight presenter Gavin Esler has found time to sire a series of political thrillers. There's a reassuring ring of authenticity to this book, which opens in spring 2005 with the suspicious attempted suicide of Robin Burnett, a disgraced Tory defence minister.

A close ally of Margaret Thatcher, Burnett fell thanks to an an affair with an Iranian-American TV reporter – a fact his estranged son, Harry, now a middle-aged translator, has to face. Aside from the excitements of "wet" eyes and "whispering" lingerie, Esler's novel treats us to an insider account of the increasingly incestuous relations between Britain and the US post-1979, and the consequences for Western security. Meanwhile, Harry attends a crash course in Arabic, and sees the more sinister long-term consequences of East-West estrangement.