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The Prime Minister is not the only member of the Government with a literary connection. New higher education minister Eric Forth's handle turns up on a slightly less exalted plane in Leslie Thomas' Come to the War (1969) featuring the Six Day War, a bizarre group of Israeli commandos and a randy pianist. Eric sadly is none of the above, but the pianist's manager - a marginal character who rates only two or three references and whose only stated characteristic is a propensity for statistical manipulation, reducing the pianist's age from 36 to 31 for publicity purposes.

It remains to be seen whether his namesake performs similar conjuring tricks with the unit of resource.