Gallipoli - The Final Bullet

Richard Page makes the argument in Gallipoli – The Final Bullet that treachery, not Government blunder and bungle, were responsible for the disaster of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign.


In this novel, beginning in the dying years of the 19th century and ending in the middle of the First World War, George Deighton tells his story through his diaries – which fall into the hands of David Peterson, his childhood friend, following George’s death.


Deighton – charismatic, good-looking, and perhaps even slightly flashy and subject to moods – visits  Constantinople, where he is picked up and seduced by a young Turk named Mustafa. As Deighton rises rapidly through the political ranks to the position of Junior Minister to Lord Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, Mustafa arrives in London to blackmail Deighton in a relationship that becomes a combination of fear, exposure, love, and sadism.


Meanwhile David Peterson, wounded while serving in the British Army in Gallipoli, finds romance blossoming with Hanna – Deighton’s sister. On Peterson’s return to England, the two men’s stories overlap when Peterson discovers that Deighton’s treachery had cost the lives of his friends and thousands of others on the beaches of Gallipoli.


Deighton’s brief homosexual affair in Turkey sows the seed that grows into a web of treason, passion, and betrayal – culminating in the slaughter of British and ANZAC troops at Gallipoli. His best friend David Peterson is faced with a choice –of exposing him or losing the love of his life.


Richard Page served as a British Conservative MP from 1976 to 2005 and as a trade and industry Minister under Prime Minister John Major. He was one of only 13 Tory MPs who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent course of its reconstruction.