What connects a novel by a former Labour MP and the latest far-fetched attempt to stop a no-deal Brexit? The novel is A Very British Coup written by Chris Mullin, later the MP for Sunderland South and, at the time of its publication, 1982, a journalist and close political ally of Tony Benn.

A Very British Coup tells the story of a short-lived Labour prime minister, Harry Perkins, elected on a left-wing platform of increased public spending, breaking up media monopolies and the closure of US bases on British soil. Perkins’s government is forced from office by a tight-knit conspiracy of industrialists and the civil service.

The latest harebrained scheme to stop no-deal is a “government of national unity” that would see the various political