Claire Carlsen, MP
Claire Carlsen (Isla Blair) is a backbencher whose ability and intelligence prompts Urquhart to make her his Parliamentary Private Secretary even though he knows she is having an affair with his rival Tom Makepeace. Her sexual and professional relationship with Makepeace gives her the role of double agent: telling many genuine, and sometimes damaging, facts about Makepeace to Urquhart, while at the same time relating the cold, evil traits and weaknesses of Urquhart to Makepeace.
In the end she tries to help Makepeace destroy Urquhart, by fraudulently acquiring a paper documenting Lieutenant Francis Urquhart's killing of Evanghelos Passolides' two brothers in Cyprus in 1956 but Makepeace rejects her help as he already has the documents and spurns Claire's advances declaring her to be 'pure poison' as she is too closely associated with the discredited Urquhart.
Claire is less duplicitous in the novel and, after Urquhart's death, is made a minister.
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Famous quotes containing the word claire:
“The role of the stepmother is the most difficult of all, because you can’t ever just be. You’re constantly being tested—by the children, the neighbors, your husband, the relatives, old friends who knew the children’s parents in their first marriage, and by yourself.”
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