Now in bookshops

My new book, The Plot Against Ireland, is a work of history for the era of ‘fake news’, the ‘Big Lie’ and the imperialist chauvinism of Brexit. It’s a narrative of unbridled chicanery, political intrigue, and a duplicitous institutional coup. The Plot Against Ireland: the Forger, Spies, Conmen and Terrorists who Conspired Against Irish Home Rule is the account of an extensive covert British government conspiracy, involving spies and agents provocateurs as well as the ‘trial by combat’ which saw The Times newspaper, in tandem with the Conservative government of Lord Salisbury, take on the elected representatives of Irish separatism at Westminster (the constitutional nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party led by Charles Stewart Parnell) in 1887/88 in what amounted to a British establishment conspiracy against Irish self-determination. In an insidious crusade characterised by blatant fabrication, espionage, and a deep sack of dirty tricks, the governing political party of the United Kingdom— fuelled by imperialist paranoia in the wake of the failed attempt by William Gladstone to grant Home Rule to Ireland in 1886—sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Irish devolution project (and avoid collateral damage to the profits of empire) by blackening the reputations of, and entrapping, the Irish leadership. In doing so it relied on a Rogues’ Gallery of spooks, informers and charlatans worthy of any Victorian melodrama.