He'd attended University of Oxford: he'd been unpopular, barely scraped a second in a Law degree, and fallen into politics after meeting his future wife, a local activist. He'd become secretary of the college party (with nobody to run against). After several years of trying to get elected, he finally became MP for Eastchester West the year after he secured a legal practice.

As a young man, he'd watched Grosvenor and and Guest plant the Union Jack at Olympus Mons.

In politics, he'd gained the patronage of Lord Edward Greyhaven. Thanks to this and a (false) reputation for honesty, he'd become Home Secretary.

He was part of Greyhaven's coup plot, though was unaware of many details: he thought the Ice Warriors were going to send information and tech plans, not arrive in person. He helped get Probe 97 created by various private businesses and Lottery funding, believing it was to contact for the putsch. On the eve of the coup, he 'informed' the Director-General of MI5 (who thought he was an idiot) of a potential upcoming coup in order to, ironically, get security measures in place for the real one. When the Ice Warriors began killing the 97 crew, Staines was left shocked. (PROSE: The Dying Days)

Behind the scenes[]

• Staines is a new Home Secretary so Lance Parkin could hedge his bets on whether the Conservative Party or Labour Party would win the upcoming election. In his author's notes for BBCi, he said "one of the amusing things, though, was that Staines could comfortably be either a Conservative or a New Labour Home Secretary.^[1]

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