fleming: Novel ideas

London, Sept. 20: Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and fiction’s most famous car in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, called for the whole of central London to convert to electric motors, a newly unearthed manuscript reveals.

The writer also proposed the introduction of park and ride schemes, long before environmental concerns became fashionable.

The article, entitled If I Were Prime Minister, was written for The Spectator in 1959. It also includes a suggestion to turn the Isle of Wight into a louche theme park with casinos and the most luxurious brothels in the world.

According to James Taylor, the curator of the Imperial War Museum exhibition, the slightly tongue-in-cheek article is interesting for the glimpse it gives of Fleming’s personal outlook.

“He didn’t put himself about and he was rather embarrassed by what we now call celebrity. Although he was still a journalist, Bond was his real mouthpiece; a Victorian clubland hero projected into the modern world.

“This article echoes everything we know about Fleming. On the one hand he’s very traditional; on the other he is incredibly modern in his views, particularly in his attitude to sex.”

As well as creating a “minister of leisure” who would oversee “a complete reform of our sex and gambling laws” he suggests a regime of low taxation, “enthusiastic encouragement of emigration” and “benevolent Stakhannovism” — bonus schemes in factories to encourage a greater national work ethic.

He also challenges “noise, carbon monoxide gas and exasperation caused by the traffic problem in our big towns”. The petrol-driven internal combustion engine is a “ridiculous steam-age contraption” that produces fumes that “we breathe day and night” before forming a harmful envelope around the world, he writes.

In his hypothetical first term Fleming promises to convert the whole of Central London to electric transport. “Very cheap, state owned garages would be built at the point of entry into London of our main roads and drivers would there transfer into electric buses or the Underground and later into cheap, state-run electric taxis.”