Sinatra also owned the rights to the film and after President Kennedy was assassinated withdrew it, supposedly for its prescient foretelling of the Kennedy assassination (it was 25 years before it was seen on the cinema screen again).Condon's writing often attracted that kind of controversy. The Manchurian Candidate bore no relation to the Kennedy assassination but he later wrote three novels based on that event. "I was 42 and I decided I had to get out - that publicity work is so will-o'-the-wisp".Two years later he caught the mood of the time superbly with a mesmerising thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, which married Cold War paranoia with Freudian and behaviourist psychology in its story of a United States war hero brainwashed to assassinate his stepfather, a presidential candidate.The release in 1962 of the award-winning film starring Laurence Harvey as the war hero and Frank Sinatra as his army buddy assured the book's world-wide success. In 1957, after three ulcers, he quit his high-pressure job to become a writer.

Born in Manhattan in 1915, Condon spent over 20 years as a Hollywood publicist, first for Walt Disney (he saw Fantasia 43 times) then for just about every other major studio. Based in New York, his job was to take care of visiting Hollywood stars in town to promote their films. "It was the publicist's responsibility to see that they were entertained, a euphemism for pimping," he once remarked. That kind of experience gave him a healthy cynicism and an understanding of corporate systems where the power is never where it appears to be. His most recent novel, Prizzi's Money, the fourth in a highly acclaimed black comic series which began with Prizzi's Honor (1982), was published in 1993 when he was 78. And a best-selling writer he remained, with over 25 novels to his credit over a career which spanned almost 40 more years.

Richard Condon started out promoting Snow White and Dumbo, went on to act as press agent for some of Hollywood's biggest stars then, at the age of 43, turned himself, with The Manchurian Candidate, into a best- selling novelist. However, it is far from an odds-on bet that all will turn out for the best. It would take only small changes in the world economy for Mr Clarke to turn out - like Labour's last Chancellor, Denis Healey - to be good but unlucky.. SG Warburg's economists have inflation rising to a still reasonably modest 4.2 per cent by the end of 1997.So Mr Clarke could well go down in history as a lucky Chancellor as well as a good one. The most pessimistic forecast for the target measure of inflation at the end of this year - from the former "wise man" Wynne Godley - puts it at only 3.3 per cent compared with the 2.5 per cent target. This means that a decent recovery from the pause at the end of last year is under way.Yet the pick-up is unlikely to be strong enough or happen soon enough to feed into higher inflation ahead of the election. (There would certainly be siren voices urging him not to sacrifice growth for the sake of shaving an extra percentage point or two off inflation.)Which will it be, dream or nightmare for the Conservatives? The straws in the wind are pointing Mr Clarke's way.

For every piece of bad news about the strength of the British economy, there is a counterbalancing piece of good news. The foreign exchange markets see sterling as a weak currency, prone to political risk, and the pound would dive along with the Italian lira and Spanish peseta.So if the timing went wrong, the Chancellor would face the prospect of having to tighten policy at a time of sluggish growth - or admit that he had given up on his inflation target. Monetarists have pointed out that policy has loosened across the globe. Although the general level of commodity prices, a classic early inflationary warning signal, is lower than a year ago, food and energy prices are rising again. The Bank of England's UK-specific commodity index has started to climb and was up 3.5 per cent in the year to December.