MARGOT AT WAR: Love and Betrayal Inside Downing Street (1912-1916)

Drawing on unpublished material from personal papers and diaries, Anne de Courcy vividly recreates this extraordinary time when the Prime Minister's residence was run like an English country house, with socialising taking precedence over politics, love letters written in the cabinet room and gossip and state secrets exchanged over the bridge table.

Margot Asquith was perhaps the most daring and unconventional Prime Minister's wife in British history. Known for her wit, style and habit of speaking her mind, she transformed 10 Downing Street into a glittering social and intellectual salon. Yet her last five years at Number 10 were a period of intense emotional and political turmoil in her private and public life. In 1912, when Anne de Courcy's book opens, rumblings of discontent and cries for social reform were encroaching on all sides - from suffragettes, striking workers and Irish nationalists. Against this background of a government beset with troubles, the Prime Minister fell desperately in love with his daughter's best friend, Venetia Stanley; to complicate matters, so did his Private Secretary. Margot's relationship with her husband was already bedevilled by her stepdaughter's jealous, almost incestuous adoration of her father. The outbreak of the First World War only heightened these swirling tensions within Downing Street. By 1916, when Asquith was forced out of office, everything had changed. For the country as a whole, for those in power, for a whole stratum of society, but especially for the Asquiths and their circle, it was the end of an era. Life inside Downing Street would never be the same again. A window on Britain in the years before a war that took most people by surprise and written from the perspective of No. 10 Downing Street, Weidenfeld are set to publish in November this year. Anne de Courcy's previous book THE FISHING FLEET went straight into the top 10 bestseller list on publication, it tells the story of the late nineteenth century in India where Britain's finest and brightest men settled to become businessmen, administrators and soldiers. Young women flocked to the area for intense socializing and found themselves caught up in a whirlwind of dances, parties and marriages. De Courcy's narrative and first hand resources, in the form of unpublished letters and diaries, make for a delightful read and was sold to HarperCollins in America and Newton Compton in Italy. Film rights are sold to Ridley Scott after an auction.