John le Carre's guide to understanding world affairs

By far the best television in a long time is the adaptation of John le Carre's Night Manager. Like other le Carre stories, it is about betrayal, betrayal for self interest, betrayal for a greater cause, betrayal by powerful individuals, betrayal by governments. Roper, the villain of the piece, is an arms dealer. The current big news about Panamanian secret trust accounts, and New Zealand secret trust account for laundering ill gotten funds makes me think that fictitious Roper could have been a client of the Panamanian law firm at the centre of these revelations. He would certainly not have wanted his payments to be traceable. Roper, however, is a figment of le Carre's imagination. How about Serco or Halliburton, corporations that profit from war and human misery? All this is nothing new. As a teenager I was hooked on Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd stories. Upton Sinclair, a muckraking journalist as well as a popular novelist, author of the Jungle, a book that revealed the cruelty and exploitation behind the Chicago meat works, went out of favour during the Cold Warm and his Lanny Budd novels had been out of print for 50 years, but he described the corruption, business interests and politics over the years between 1913 and 1947, a virtual history of the era. The notable characters that appear in the eleven novels include Churchill, Hitler, Goering, Hess, Stalin, and F.D.R. Roosevelt. The world they describe preys on the common man, is cruel and  treacherous. As my old mate, King Solomon, said, there is nothing new under the sun, but people's memories are short. Upton Sinclair and his stories about the dangers that beset his times are largely forgotten.