who is Ian McEwan getting at in his new novella, Amsterdam (Cape, pounds 14.99)?
Private Eye has authoritatively stated that the two central characters, the composer Clive Linley and his friend Vernon Halliday, editor of a declining broadsheet, are portraits of Michael Berkeley and Will Hutton. Other reviewers, no less confidently, have identified Halliday’s newspaper, The Judge, as the Times and Hutton’s Observer. Meanwhile, it seems obvious to me that the unpleasant right-wing foreign secretary Julian Garmony borrows his CV and aspects of his public persona (though not, I should point out for the lawyers, his complex sexuality) from Michael Howard. McEwan is delighted to be the cause of all this speculation, but denies everything. Berkeley, for instance, he greatly admires, while Linley is supposed to be a pompous failure. As for Garmony, McEwan’s one concern was to minimise any resemblance to Douglas Hurd, who occupied the post at the time of writing. With Hurd chair of this year’s Booker panel, that looks lsuspiciously like foresight. “The one thing it isn’t is
