Robert Harris considers himself a lucky man. “I’ve been very fortunate in life,” he told me, gesturing as if to tap his head, then thinking better of it and instead reaching for the floorboards by his feet. “I got to Cambridge in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to do now – I mean, I hardly got any O-levels. I got to the BBC before John Birt started wrecking it. I got into Fleet Street when it was still the old days. And I got into novel writing when you could take time. There was no pressure on me to keep producing, which was wonderful, because I could easily have burned out.”
Instead, 32 years after the release of his bestselling first novel, Fatherland, set in an alternative universe in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War, Harris has produced his 16th work of fiction. Precipice begins in the summer of 1914, when Europe is on the brink of war and the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, is having an affair with Venetia Stanley, a socialite half his age. Asquith wrote to her obsessively, several times a day (there were 12 postal deliveries a day in 1914 London), even from key cabinet meetings.
“It’s a pretty extreme example of the kind of obsessions that politicians do often get,” Harris told me at his house in west London in early August. (He has another, in Berkshire, jokingly called “the house that Hitler built” because he bought it with the proceeds from Fatherland.) “One sees this again and again: the people who hold power and their curious drives – the thing that gets them to the top is often damage.”
Asquith shared with Stanley secret government documents, sending them in the post or showing them to her during their regular long drives out of London. These journeys were one reason Harris chose to imply in the novel that their relationship was physical. He looked up the model of the premier’s car, a 1908 Napier six-cylinder: “You sat in an enclosed compartment and you communicated with the driver through a push-button console. There were curtains and blinds everywhere. And I thought, well, this is why they went for an hour and a half drive every Friday afternoon…”
More extraordinary a breach of security was his habit of screwing up classified papers and throwing them from the car window once Stanley had seen them. The real-life discovery by members of the public of five such telegrams during the early months of the war gave Harris the idea for Precipice’s third, fictitious protagonist, a young intelligence officer, Paul Deemer. Looking at the letter in which Asquith told Stanley the discarded documents had been discovered, Harris thought: “I could invent that character; there must have been a leak inquiry. That would be my way in.”
When Asquith left Downing Street in December 1916, replaced as prime minister by David Lloyd George, he burned most of his private correspondence, including his letters from Stanley. “One of the attractions of writing this was I did want to write a novel with a strong female protagonist,” Harris said. Precipice is only the second novel in a 30-year career in which Harris has written one (the other was 2020’s V2, which featured a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force member). “It’s not that one has a kind of bucket list – ‘Oh, I must do this and that’ – but I thought the justification, in a way, for writing the novel was to give her a voice. He destroyed her letters. She has been rather forgotten and overlooked.”
Asquith’s letters to Stanley were preserved, and resurfaced around 15 years after her death. Precipice is constructed partly from Asquith’s own words, and partly from Stanley’s imagined replies. “Once I found myself inventing her replies, the relationship shifted. Suddenly, there were two people in it.” It was, Harris told me, the first time he cried finishing a novel. “I got very caught up… I found them both fascinating. This sort of tragic, doomed affair I found rather haunting.”
Harris does not see their relationship as significant enough to have changed the course of the war, but said Asquith was “certainly distracted at key moments”, such as during the disastrous Dardanelles campaign, from which the Entente powers withdrew after eight months and which took the lives of nearly 200,000 British soldiers. (Harris compares it to the war in Vietnam: “The constant attempt to keep sending men. You couldn’t wind back… because of loss of prestige.”) Another “huge mistake” was Asquith’s decision to send Stanley a letter from the war secretary, Lord Kitchener, about the shell shortage of 1915. Precipice recounts a rousing speech the prime minister gave in Newcastle in which he claimed, based on his reading of the letter, that there was no shortage at all. By the time he was challenged on his claims, his evidence was gone in the post.
But Stanley “clearly did give him political advice. If she had said to him, ‘You shouldn’t bring the Tories into the coalition government,’ he might well not have done that. And that was the last Liberal government.” By the time Asquith permitted the Tories to enter Downing Street, Stanley had ended their affair; Asquith’s last letters to her are full of despair, even notions of suicide. “It’s hard to believe, looking at the letters, that her absence from his life wasn’t a big factor [in his political fate]. He lost his nerve, I think.”
Since Fatherland, Harris’s novels have roamed from Ancient Rome (Pompeii, the Cicero trilogy) to 19th-century France at the time of the Dreyfus affair (An Officer and a Spy) to a modern Vatican (Conclave, a film adaptation of which is due in November), but the First and Second World Wars keep drawing him back. The novelist was born 12 years after the end of the Second World War – “So, what’s that? The equivalent of 2012. It seemed at the time a huge gulf, but now I see it was nothing” – and believes we still “live in its shadow”.
“I think 1914 is the pivotal year in modern history. There’s a world before that and then a world after that. It was a breakdown of international order that had been preceded by upheavals intellectually, socially, after a long period of peace. It’s not hard to feel one’s living in that kind of period now.”
Robert Harris was born in Nottingham in 1957. His father worked at a local printworks, and one of his earliest memories is of accompanying him. “I used to sit beside these huge printing presses, and he used to give me a pile of paper – not the sort you’d get in the shop; big sheets of paper – that I’d scrawl on. The smell of the ink and the paper I can remember now.” His desire to be a writer had begun. He first wanted to be a playwright, then moved on to writing “imaginary newspapers”. He edited the school paper, Memograms (a play on the school’s name, Melton Mowbray Grammar), with which he “caused a lot of trouble – I’ve always liked causing trouble”.
At Cambridge University he worked on the student paper and on graduating applied for a BBC trainee scheme. He chose television over print because at that time the National Union of Journalists ruled that newcomers had to work on a provincial paper before graduating to a national. “Well, I’d had enough of the provinces having grown up in the Midlands!” After eight years in TV, including as a reporter on Panorama, he moved to the Observer to be political editor, and later also wrote for the Sunday Times and the Telegraph.
Political journalism has changed almost beyond recognition since Harris left it to become a novelist, primarily because of the advent of social media and the 24/7 news cycle. He lamented that political positions have become far more entrenched. “[People] now tailor the news that they receive to suit their prejudices – they don’t want to be disturbed. That sense that you could write a column and argue someone round to a different point of view was probably quite mythical, but I certainly think it would be very hard to do that now.”
He became close to Tony Blair in 1997 when the Labour leader invited Harris to join him on the campaign trail, but they fell out over the Iraq War. It was one of the few times Harris signed a letter of protest; the journalist Paul Foot rang him up and said: “Come on, sign it, man.” In 2007, the year Blair left No 10, Harris published The Ghost, which featured a former prime minister, Adam Lang, a thinly veiled version of Blair, investigated by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Harris believes Blair’s readiness to go to war in 2003 came in part because he wasn’t of a generation with living memory of the world wars. “I think it was the generation that had fought in the war… [who] had a healthy respect for peace, and they desired to avoid war. Blair purposefully engaged and manoeuvred the country into a war we should never have fought. That’s not just hindsight: one knew at the time this was folly.”
Harris is keen to “lay [the] canard to rest” that he supported the Lib Dems during the Corbyn years. “The thing you can never rely on is a Wikipedia page!” (In my defence, I’d read it in the Telegraph.) “My politics is essentially the centre left, and within that boundary I’m ecumenical. I will vote to get the Tories out” – as he did this July. He has been a member of Labour for three brief spells, one in the Seventies, another after Blair’s 1997 win and the last to vote in the 2016 leadership election. Corbyn survived; Harris left soon after.
What does he make of the comparisons between Labour’s 1997 landslide and this year’s victory? “When you look back on it, that was quite a formidable Tory government that fell [in 1997] – Major, Heseltine, Clarke – and the economy was starting to boom. So it [was] a more significant victory, in a way.” There is nothing close to the Blair-mania of ’97 around Keir Starmer, and the mood around Labour in the 1990s was far more positive. “This was just anyone but the Tories… a sort of surgical strike on the Conservative Party… so it is different, and the inheritance is, frankly, grim.” Among the “intractable problems” facing Starmer’s government Harris counts the high burden of debt, creating growth outside the single market and an ageing population.
The Tories “seem to be heading to a very dark place ideologically and it’ll take them some time to pull back from it”. Does he see a route to recovery for the party? “One of the benefits of getting old and having studied politics is I remember that after Thatcher in the Eighties they said the Labour Party would never hold office again, and after Blair had his landslide, they said the Tories would never hold office again… They will revive, but the way it’s going, it’s going to take at least two terms, I would have thought.” Compared to our contemporary politicians, Harris told me, Asquith and his cabinet – Churchill, Lloyd George, Haldane – were of a different quality. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t flawed, but they operated on a much bigger stage… There are very few politicians like that these days.” Harris dislikes certainty in people, preferring what he calls “keep-the-show-on-the-road politicians” over “conviction politicians”. He sees Starmer as the former.
“The best politicians construct a narrative. They tell a story. They make us all participants in their story. The most gifted was probably Churchill, who convinced the British that they were heroes with immense courage in 1940 and everybody played along.” Thatcher was a storyteller, he said, and Blair, too, to a degree. “Those are the great politicians, they’re like artists. They’re like novelists. Does Starmer have that gift? We’ll see…”
“Precipice” is published by Hutchinson Heinemann
[See also: How to be human in an age of AI]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 28 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump in turmoil