Has there ever been a decent novel written by a politician?
Having become leader of the Liberal Democrats by virtue of being the only person in the country who wanted the job, Sir Vince Cable is about to achieve a less esoteric ambition, one he shares, in fact, with a large chunk of the British public: he is about to publish his first novel. The book, called Open Arms, is a thriller. At 74, Cable is a little long in the tooth for a debut novelist, and would have taken even longer if his Twickenham constituents hadn’t given him a sabbatical in which to write it. He is, though, far from the oldest debut novelist in the political sphere: Jimmy Carter was 80 when he published The Hornet’s Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War. Mr Carter’s book, as I recall, was like its author: noble and kind-hearted to the point of tedium. Sir Vince’s novel is, happily, more bitchy. The heroine is Kate Thompson, a statuesque blonde Conservative MP, and Cable has fun depicting the Tories as superficial and venal – “you are near the top of the eye candy league table… at least on our side of the House,” the Chief Whip tells Kate when explaining why she’s been promoted, while the Tory Trade Secretary rages about the “politically correct” anti-corruption laws brought in by the “bloody Liberals” in the days of the Coalition Government. But the trouble with this larky point-scoring is that when you come across, say, a crack about Gordon Brown, you start to think “what was it old Vince said about Gordon in the Commons? Something about Mister Bean?” And then you’re off down the rabbit hole of Google instead of reading on about Kate dicing with death as she uncovers skulduggery in the international arms trade. The novel is entertaining enough, written in a pleasingly low-key, pawky style, but it succumbs to the fatal compulsion to tell, rather than show us what is happening, and the characters have little vitality, seeming to exist only to serve the political points that Cable wants to make. Reading Open Arms made me wonder if it is even possible for a politician to write a good novel. The best political novels tend to have been written by outsiders: failed candidates like Anthony Trollope, or journalist-speechwriters like Michael Dobbs, author of the House of Cards series. That hasn’t stopped the insiders from trying: a study by the University of Wolverhampton revealed that 350 British politicians have had novels published since the 1832 Reform Act – not including those who were novelists before they took office. Yet it is hard to think of any from the list whose novels were really worth reading. Benjamin “when I want to read a novel I write one” Disraeli is the exception. It is a shame that his fiction is now largely remembered for the slogan about the rich and the poor being two nations, quoted endlessly by earnest politicians, as his best novels have the same sparkling dandyish quality as his personality. Lothair (1870), written between his two stints as Prime Minister, is in an arch epigrammatic style (“My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me”), which was clearly an influence on Oscar Wilde, (who rated Disraeli above Dickens) and a
Edwina Currie’s A Parliamentary Affair
is probably the nadir of a very ropey genre
whole strain of English literature. But one wonders if the 349 others should have bothered. Iain Duncan Smith hoped to rise from the ashes of failure by becoming a literary sensation when he published The Devil’s Tune in the week he was deposed as Tory leader in 2003: the critics uniformly apologised for kicking a man when he was down, then uniformly trashed it; the novel never made it into paperback. Then there’s Nadine Dorries, the Labour MP who has become a prolific writer of dour sagas. The Telegraph’s reviewer, Christopher Howse, found her first, The Four Streets, to be “the worst novel I’ve read in 10 years”. I enjoyed the jokes in Boris Johnson’s Seventy-Two Virgins (2004), which features a shambling, philandering cycling-enthusiast MP as a central character, but after a few chapters I formed the view that his literary personality was best enjoyed at column length, once a week. Ann Widdecombe’s novels, including The Clematis Tree and An Act of Treachery, have been comparatively well received. Her latest, The Dancing Detective, draws on her experiences as a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing (beating Sir Vince, another Strictly alumnus, to the theme, which must be why he has had to settle for a geopolitical backdrop instead). I asked Widdecombe why so many politicians turn to novel-writing. “It’s a hobby that fits in with political life. If you join a choir or play sport you have to be in a particular place at a particular time, but I could write anywhere, I could write waiting for late-night divisions. The second reason is that most politicians are interested in words. Our job is to communicate ideas, after all.” Which politician-novelists does she admire? “Douglas Hurd. And I know it’s not fashionable to say it, but Jeffrey Archer.” Any she doesn’t like? “Edwina Currie. I like Edwina, but not her books. Too much filth. And I think they’re rather trivial. I do try to address fairly major themes.” Edwina Currie’s A Parliamentary Affair (1994) is probably the nadir of the politician’s novel, but it proved irresistible to the public: her bonkbuster about two outspoken MPs, Elaine Stalker and Roger Dickson, became a bestseller years before Currie revealed that the book had been a fictionalisation of her grande passion with John Major. Currie’s success changed attitudes to sex somewhat. Take Douglas Hurd. When he stood for the Tory leadership in 1990, the newspapers gleefully quoted lines from the thrillers he had co-written with Andrew Osmond (“Her breasts were so big she kept them strapped in a brassiere, otherwise they got in the way of her gun”); Hurd disowned all such remarks as the sole work of his co-author. But by 1998, Hurd had come to embrace the breast, so to speak: a passage from his novel The Shape of Ice (“They lay quietly side by side for some minutes, neither thinking of the other. It was he who began to kiss her breasts…”) was nominated for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award. Roy Hattersley, also a novelist, has joined Widdecombe in pleading for less sex and more politics in political fiction: “Political ideas are, or ought to be, far more exciting than fictional tittle-tattle about what goes on in ministers’ rooms after the Commons has risen for the night.” But is the novel the right vehicle to convey such ideas? The black-andwhite worldview that most politicians have seems to me to be inimical to the creation of good fiction. As a citizen, I approve of the proliferation of politician-novelists, on the grounds that politicians do least harm when they’re engaged in anything other than politics. But as a reader, I wish most would give it a rest.