The Daily Clarion is an eccentric and rotten institution – a decrepit national newspaper in apparent terminal decline. As the paper prepares to mark its 125th anniversary it is on the brink of being exposed for its implicit involvement in the death of Colin Hayward Murray, Britain’s first ‘patriotic’ suicide bomber. In a period of literally dying readership, when circulation numbers and profit sheets could not be more important, the editor, Morris Honeyspoon, and his staff face doomsday as the day’s events spiral out of control. Morris – a wild little man with a Caesar fixation – has no idea that it is his only remaining journalist of stature, the columnist Verity Stokes, who has leaked the suicide bomber story in an attempt to finally finish Morris off. But with the Clarion in its death throes, could it be possible that Morris, a man peddling a terrifying vision of England hurtling into a new dark century, will turn out to be not a fool but a prophet?