Robert Harris

Robert Harris’ latest novel, Conclave, about the choosing of a new pope, centres on an election beset by shady, Machiavellian intrigue and plots. I asked him, firstly – given his tenure as its president during his time as an undergraduate here – to what extent the Cambridge Union had provided an inspiration. He laughed.

“Well, I wouldn’t say a direct inspiration, necessarily, but it was certainly my first introduction to actually fighting an election, and I guess it was a kind of enclosed order”, he laughed again, letting the parallel with the Vatican’s cardinals sink in for a few seconds.

Harris, a Selwynite and former Political Editor of The Observer, notes that writing a political thriller is challenging in current circumstances: “reality is often more bizarre than anything you could make up. I’m endlessly intrigued by the results of elections… they unfold like a real life thriller.”

So much of modern politics – like fictional plots – is driven by the big characters, he observes. “Whatever you say about the presidential election, it is all about Trump. When that happens it means that the opponents have to adjust themselves to the territory on which the stronger person is fighting. I felt that very much when I was covering Margaret Thatcher… all the elections were on her terms – she always had the dynamic force behind her. The Labour leadership was all about Corbyn, and it gives me pause to think about Trump.”

Despite Harris’ 118 60-80-year-old cardinals’ deliberating, scheming and voting being ostensibly cut off from this turbulent outside world, he tells me that he “wanted to see if [he] could engineer some ways in which the world would impinge upon them.” One particular way in which he does this – a car bombing outside the Sistine Chapel – proved a disturbing parallel. “The terrorist attack on the priest in France happened as I was correcting the proofs of the book, in France as it happens”, he recounts. “It’s always quite shocking when you find something in life imitating your art.”

However, his inspiration for the novel came in part not from modernity but the Ancient world and the end of his Cicero trilogy, the final instalment of which was published last year.

“When I saw all the faces of the cardinals in the 2005 and 2013 conclaves, when they were clustering at the windows overlooking St Peter’s Square, I remember thinking they look very much like the Roman Senate would have looked; some crafty, some innocent, some intelligent, some bland – all those elderly male faces…” In both stories Harris tries, he says, “to find a way of talking about politics that has universal applications – to universalise politics.”

Reading the novel, though, I was struck by how fundamental faith is to its working; at no point does religion feel like window dressing for a generic election drama. It is peppered with Bible passages and spiritual analysis. “[I] did not want to write a Richard Dawkins-like attack or satire on the Catholic Church”, says Harris. “I wanted to write from the inside and therefore with sympathy. And I also knew that God had to be a serious figure in the book, and prayer had to be an important part of the book if it was going to be true.”

The religious element may have taken more research – reading the gospels for the first time since school giving him “a sense of Christ” – but the politics seems to have always come naturally. Harris recounts a parents’ evening when he was seven, at which “everyone’s work was up on the wall – me and my pet, what I did on my holiday, that sort of thing – and mine was ‘why me and my Dad don’t like Sir Alec Douglas-Home’. My mother, incidentally, who was a mild Tory, was horrified to see this”.

Jumping forward 11 years, I was able to discuss one final topic with the former Editor of Varsity: the beginning of his writing career, at this paper. “It was a major part of my student life”, he remembers. “On the first Saturday of term when I was 18 years old I went to the lunch [now the Freshers’ Squash] and started immediately. I lived a kind of nocturnal life, staying up – as you know – till two, three in the morning… It was terrific, I enjoyed it hugely.” His first two years at Cambridge were “absolutely dominated by the paper – I got a great training from working on the paper, and it stood me in good stead for years thereafter actually.”

Yet he is lucky to have found himself in that position. He recalls later, as Editor of the Varsity Handbook, producing an anti-Silver Jubilee issue in 1977 because Prince Philip had taken up the chancellorship of the University.

“It got me into a lot of trouble. In fact there was a conversation at the Senate House about having me sent down. My Director of Studies wrote me a most pained letter saying I had let down the whole business of studying English as a discipline at university.”

“His name was Raymond O’Malley,” he added fondly, the interview drawing to an end; “and in Conclave I named the Secretary of the College of Cardinals O’Malley as – I hope – a tipping of my hat 40 years later, as an apology for the shame of Dr O’Malley.”