In The Ultimate (1976), written under the pen name James Lund, Stonehouse described an IRA mortar attack on a cabinet meeting at Number Ten. The similarities between his story and what actually happened in February 1991 when John Major’s cabinet was nearly blown up by a mortar fired from a vehicle in Whitehall are so uncanny that one can’t help wondering if someone in the IRA had read The Ultimate and taken the idea from there.

Owen Bennett-Jones. (2022, April 21). The Thief and the Trousers. London Review of Books, 44(8).