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Wednesday 3 December 2008

Blair said, ‘Let’s not talk about Iraq’

Blair said to me: ‘Let’s not talk about the war’

An interview with the novelist Robert Harris

Once settled on the 18:47 to London Paddington, I think back to our conversation in Harris’s vast but comfortable Victorian vicarage, and I realise that this decency is at the heart of his latest book too. The Ghost is about a writer employed to ‘ghost’ a former Prime Minister’s memoirs, and because it’s easy to read as a roman à clef, the press have so far focused on trying to spot who’s who. The charismatic ex-PM ‘Adam Lang’ is an obvious Blair, and his controlling, dark-haired wife a ringer for Cherie. Lang’s sassy blonde PA and lover, Amelia, is said to be modelled on Blair’s former aide, Anji Hunter, which has caused all sorts of gossip and fuss. But the fact is that, as Harris says, ‘It’s a bit unfair, all this talk about an exact replica of Blair and so on, because ultimately these are my characters, my inventions.’ And where The Ghost actually maps reality most exactly is in the author’s obvious outrage at the ease with which a once-moral Prime Minister can betray his principles.

The Ghost levels two main charges against Adam Lang, which are that he sells his friends down the river, and his country across the pond — to America. So too, Harris’s biggest beefs with Blair are his personal betrayal of Peter Mandelson — a friend of Harris’s and godfather to his daughter Matilda — and his blanket support for American foreign policy at the expense of British interests.

‘Well, yes, that is true, I do feel betrayed by Blair,’ says Harris, on his elegant sofa. ‘It’s because I was involved with the New Labour project from the beginning. My first stint on the Sunday Times in 1989 was as a ghetto left-wing voice at the height of Thatcher’s regime, and my brief was to annoy readers, so I wrote about this idea of a non-tribal pragmatic Labour party that represented the country. Then Blair rang me up and said let’s have lunch, so we went to l’Escargot. In those days we’d split a bottle of wine, and it was like talking to a member of the human race. I remember him saying: “It’s absurd the anti-metropolitan bias in the party. We’ve got to rethink all this.” And so they did. Harris, brought up in Leicester by his Labour-voting father to be a loyal party supporter, brought authenticity to the meeting, and his experience as a former political editor of the Observer. Blair brought his ability to think outside the old Labour box. ‘For all the cynicism about Blair, we have to remember just how astonishing the things he said were. He was by instinct a small c conservative, I think.’

More articles from: Mary Wakefield | this section

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