See larger image The Reluctant Hero (Harry Jones) (Paperback) By (author) Michael Dobbs List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock Release date September 2, 2010.

My ambition is always to turn the written word into an adventure, so when I started on a new character, I wanted to set him out from the commonplace. I needed an unlikely hero. Harry Jones was the answer. For a start he’s a politician, a Member of Parliament, and heroism isn’t the standard stuff of modern politics. Then he’s rich, stinkingly so, a millionaire, and a man with a dark and bloody past from his days fighting dirty wars in the British army. Wealth, influence, and blood on his hands. It seemed a good basis for excitement.

Harry had an unlikely start. His father was a self-absorbed, self-made businessman who indulged his son in everything until Harry got a place at Cambridge university and suddenly his father cut him off. Completely.  From rich brat, Harry was on his own.  He had been used to every luxury – fast cars, even faster women, the south of France had been his playground. But now he was serving up Big Macs and working weekends in call centres to get himself through uni. Those were the Thatcher years, the time of the miners’ strike and the Winter of Discontent, with no easy options. Harry got involved, and that’s how he learned he was an activist, a survivor, and more than that, a natural fighter.

So when he fell in love with Julia, an Army brat, the daughter of a serving Army officer, it was a natural step for him to try the military. He’s brilliant, gets all the tough jobs: in Northern Ireland, behind the lines in the first Gulf War, and beyond the lines in many undeclared dirty wars around the world, conflicts in which Harry does dirty things in places the British army were never supposed to be. One of his former COs remarked there was scarcely a war in the world that could start until Harry had turned up. It brought him accolades, but also made him enemies, some of them on his own side.

Nothing lasts forever, not even marriage to his beloved Julia, who dies trying to keep up with him while ski-ing off-piste. That happens a lot in Harry’s life; women just can’t keep up with him. His father dies, too, in bed with a much younger woman, leaving Harry his fortune.

So the stage is set for the next act, when Harry turns to politics. Same story. He’s brilliant, and independent – too much so. Prime Ministers want Harry onside, but they don’t control him and never completely trust him; he’s more feared than favoured. He finds a new and thoroughly unsuitable wife, Melanie, but the open doors of politics offer plenty of distractions from his personal troubles.

He’s a friend of US presidents, gets a personalized Christmas card every year from the Queen, finds himself in all the wrong places at the right time – when terrorists hold he State Opening of Parliament hostage, when the Sizewell nuclear power station is primed for meltdown, when world leaders meet to discuss the threat of cyber war that is about to rip the Western world apart, when an old friend is about to be executed in central Asia, when a young boy is kidnapped in Trieste. There’s always some reason for Harry to add to his collection of scars.

So for the Rt Hon Henry Marmaduke Maltravers-Jones, M.P., P.C., G.C., M.C., MLitt., M.A. and much, much more, the future always holds a fresh challenge, even while his past is trying to catch up with him and wreak its revenge. Sometimes for Harry, dying seems like the easy option.

• Read an extract from The Reluctant Hero

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