ABSTRACT
In many ways, the novels worked as an archaeology aimed at retrieving a measure of complexity from the banality of populist arguments and rash commentaries: this debacular 'now' has had a long run-up and a number of equally catastrophic predecessors. The literary novel seemed far too finely woven a cloth for such precipitation. Time is at the heart of Autumn: its perception, its pace, its peculiar loops and cycles, its relativising quality, its ideological uses as 'the past', its waste as an abuse of power. The Profumo scandal is often cited as having discredited the Tory establishment, helping Labour win the 1964 general election and changing the relationship between the government and the press. The 'mass culture of lies' – from the Profumo affair to the sleaze of the 1990s to the Iraq dossier to the expenses scandal to the referendum – has steadily discredited politics and weakened democracy itself.
