James Barr

On a drizzly morning in January 1984, Malcolm Kerr, the president of the American University of Beirut (AUB), was walking from the lift towards his office on the campus when he was shot dead. His two assailants escaped.   In 2020 Kerr’s widow Ann read Kim Ghattas’s book on Islamic extremism, Black Wave, and sent her an email:. ‘I would like to hear your thoughts about what lay behind Malcolm’s death. I wonder if you have more detailed information.’ Ghattas started hunting. Through the Kerrs’ and other stories she evokes the nauseous uncertainty of civil war Beirut – a place where people vanished and the Reagan administration came thoroughly unstuck.   At the beginning of the 1980s the Kerrs were living in California, where Malcolm taught at UCLA.

I bet that you are at best dimly aware of the Progress Trust, and that is what the members of this now-defunct fixture would have wanted. It was a misleadingly named group of comfortably off, often landed backbench Tory MPs, and its weekly discussions very rarely leaked. An unnamed member once explained why. ‘We have no shits,’ he said. The Trust, which would number Alec Douglas-Home and David Cameron, briefly, among its members, was secretive from the outset. It was established in 1943 to resume a more partisan style of politics, at a time when both main parties were still in theory committed to a ceasefire that the Conservatives felt Labour was breaking.