Robert Harris’s gripping new novel, Conclave, has a contemporary setting, in the sense that the year is 2016, or thereabouts. But in another way, it’s not contemporary at all. The action takes place over 72 hours inside the Vatican, where the cardinals are sequestered to elect a new pope in a secretive process that dates from the 13th century. In charge of their various ballots – again and again they must vote, the idea being that with each round, one candidate grows ever stronger until, well, habemus papam – is Lomeli, the dean of the College of Cardinals. Lomeli is a good and holy man, but he is suffering a crisis of faith, finding it hard to pray, a situation that is hardly helped by the revelations that now begin to unspool around him and threaten to derail the election altogether. Who will win? Only God knows. At first, it is a three-horse race between Cardinal Adeyemi, whose victory would make him the first African pope; Cardinal Tredesco, a seething, outspoken Italian with traditional views; and Cardinal Tremblay, an ambitious but bland Canadian. But then, from nowhere, new candidates emerge, one of whom is, much to his horror, Cardinal Lomeli.

As it happens, Conclave’s author has a somewhat pontifical air himself, and I mean this in the best sense of that word, because he is about the least pompous famous writer I’ve ever met. Amiable, wise and pink-cheeked, with the same taste for the finer things we have witnessed in certain popes – let us remember Benedict’s red leather loafers – it’s all but impossible, once you’ve read his new novel, not to imagine how fabulous he would look in a white zucchetto, with a cape to match, and a socking great ring on his finger for journalists to kiss as they try desperately not to reveal the sin of envy in his presence (before he was a million-selling novelist, Harris was a hack just like them – and me). Not that he is a Catholic, or even a believer. “Though I’d be careful about mocking God,” he says, when we meet for lunch at a Bloomsbury hotel close to where he is attending a workshop for a possible theatre adaptation of one of his books (he has steak and chips, and three glasses of wine). “He is quite a character in the book, because I knew from the start that these cardinals would believe in God as we believe in electricity. But really, I just love politics in all its forms, and this is the oldest election in the world, and the most mysterious. I’ve been intrigued by it for years.”

His research for the book began with the Gospels, which he read again, very fast, for the first time in 40 years. “They unfold like a novel, and such a character emerges: a radical, quite tricky and contradictory figure, but still, a human being. It is a religion founded on love and charity, and my cardinals genuinely try to lead that life. But what fascinates me are the inevitable distortions and corruptions of the institution. You go in attempting to be good, but of course you soon lose sight of yourself, because no one monitors themselves constantly. And then there comes the enormous wealth, the architectural beauty, the privilege, and the whole thing starts to buckle.” The Vatican, he says, was surprisingly helpful, responding positively to his request – sent via his Italian publisher – for a private tour of the city. This enabled him to see the places he describes so vividly in his book: the Casa Santa Marta, the hall of residence-like building, staffed by nuns, where the cardinals bunk down during the conclave; the Pauline Chapel, with its two frescoes by Michelangelo, where they attend a sermon before withdrawing to the Sistine Chapel to vote; and the Sacristy, where the new pope is robed. Is the Casa Santa Marta as strange as it sounds in Conclave? “It does have a slightly weird atmosphere, yes. I spoke to one person who’d stayed there, who checked after a night because it felt too much like a private clinic.”

Unless the old electoral college is reintroduced, I think the Labour party is gone and we just have to accept that

As the world waits for white smoke to rise above the Vatican, the cardinals must know nothing of what is happening elsewhere. They are sealed off entirely. In Conclave, however, the outside world does permeate their holy seclusion. Lomeli, without giving too much away, has no choice but to consider both radical Islam, and the question of the ordination of women, even as the cardinals do their work. Does Harris think his novel will prove controversial, at least with some Catholics? “I don’t know. I do think the church is resolving its contradictions at the moment thanks to the personality of a remarkable pope. But there are greater difficulties ahead. Its attitude towards the ordination of women isn’t, I think, sustainable – and the rise of Islam highlights those anomalies in the Catholic church by mirroring them, to a degree.” For Harris, the persecution of Christians in the Middle East is also “one of the great untold stories”, for which reason, he made a central character in Conclave the archbishop of Baghdad: “Before Blair and Bush, there were 1.5 million Christians living relatively safely in Iraq. Now we’re down to 250,000, living in a state of siege.”

Conclave, Harris’s 11th novel, wasn’t an easy book to write, but it was a fairly fast one. It took just seven months. “When I was younger, there would be long gaps between books: three years, five years. But after Pompeii [which came out in 2003] something changed, and now I really like to be starting work on a new book before the last one is out. I’m at my most contented when I am writing. But it also distances me from the publication of the one that’s coming out.” It isn’t the reviews that he dislikes, so much as the whole business of publication. “Just as people who go blind are said to have more acute hearing, so I think that if, over 25 years, you become a writer, the aspect of privacy and living in your own head becomes very developed. It’s not that I’m shy or retiring. It’s just that I like the equanimity of living in my own zone.” He is suspicious of literary festivals, for all that he can pull in the crowds. “It works against you. They see you, and so they don’t buy the book. And with fiction, I don’t really know why you would necessarily want to hear the voice of the novelist; it gets in the way. It’s quite important that the voice in the reader’s head is neutral. One of the great strokes of luck for Orwell is that no recording of his high-pitched Etonian voice exists, and so this incredibly clear, modern, classless voice comes through in his writing.” His own voice is not neutral. Reassuringly (to me, at any rate), he still sounds like he comes from Nottinghamshire.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Miranda Richardson and Rutger Hauer in the 1994 film version of Fatherland. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar/MGM

But we should talk about politics, shouldn’t we, before we get to his roots? Conclave might well be set in a realm even more bitchy and anachronistic than that of the Palace of Westminster, but with its unbudging binaries – the cardinals are either liberal or not – and its talk of schism, not to mention the role pride and envy play in proceedings, it brings to mind nothing so much as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, which, as all the world knows, is shortly to announce the result of its very own election.

“Oh, God,” he says, pretending to throw his head into his hands (Harris, a former political editor of the Observer, has made no secret on social media and elsewhere of his opposition to Corbyn). “One is having to revise one’s views. I basically think, now, that MPs should elect the leader [of the Labour party] just as the cardinals elect the pope. I started to think it after Ed Miliband won. Everything that has gone wrong with British politics this year – and an awful lot has gone wrong – has been to do with getting away from parliamentary democracy. There has always been an admirable tension between the demands of the wider electorate and their representatives, [with] their conscience and judgment, and from between the two comes something valuable. This throwing of things glibly open to one member, one vote is a disaster. It’s true of the referendum, and it’s true of the Labour electoral system.”

His smile is wry. “In my old age, I find I’m a Burkeian conservative, a believer in the power of institutions. It’s counterintuitive that widening the franchise can be harmful for democracy, but I think it can be. One should not try to mix two different systems. That’s the moral of my Cicero novels. Mess around with your constitution, and it will fall to pieces. So now we arrive at a situation where the government and the political establishment is struggling to put through the most colossal about-turn for 70 years, an about-turn in which it does not really believe; and where Labour MPs know that their leader is not up to it, that he can’t form a government or even hold one to account, but are being dictated to by outside forces. It will end in tears.”

When history is written, Blair will be seen to have played a large part in what has happened to Labour

How should the parliamentary Labour party respond to Corbyn’s inevitable victory? “I don’t think, in the foreseeable future, there’s any way of removing him – and if he were to be followed by John McDonnell [the shadow chancellor], Corbyn might, in any case, look like the golden era. I saw an interview with McDonnell the other day in which he was asked: what are the four writers who have influenced you most? And he said: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg. You couldn’t make it up, could you?” He hoots with derisive laughter. “No, unless the old electoral college is reintroduced [under that system, individual members represented a third of votes, the same as the PLP and the unions], I think the party is gone and we just have to accept that. My view – although I know none of them want to confront it because it’s such an emotionally shattering trauma – is that there is a case for the PLP to elect its own leader, and form its own shadow cabinet. The point is that they [the Corbynites] don’t play by rules the rest of us would recognise. They genuinely believe purity is the most important thing. Well, that’s fine. But go and start your own party, don’t take over one of the great instruments for social progress in this country. It’s immoral.”









On Twitter, Harris has occasionally mentioned his background when debating these matters. “Council- house-born. Comprehensive school-educated. Voted Foot, Kinnock. But not for private-school apologists for IRA and Stalin,” he said, when Seumas Milne was appointed the party’s communications director almost a year ago. This isn’t, however, just another manifestation of the competitive prole-ier than thou speak that trails so many opinions in our media – by which I mean that it’s not even remotely an effort to disguise or distract from his current privilege. The point is: Harris thinks of himself as having been, from childhood, deeply lucky. “I was fortunate to have been born into working-class family where books were valued and you were the centre of your parents’ lives. There was never any doubt that you were important. I’ve been so blessed. I left university before they got rid of grants, I left Cambridge before structuralism took over, I left the BBC before John Birt took over, I left Fleet Street before that all collapsed, and I started writing novels before the supermarkets took over. I feel like Buster Keaton, the flats falling behind me every time I close a door.”

His father was a printer who loved to read. “When I was nine, he stayed up all night reading Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger. He read Greene, Lawrence, Joyce, and he did it all on his own dime. The last conversation I ever had with him was about Alan Bullock’s joint life of Hitler and Stalin, which I’d given him. He’d read every page of it. He left school at 14, but he had a rich intellectual life.”

Harris’s parents would take him and his sister to museums, and encouraged them to watch interesting documentaries on TV, but there was no pressure, no hothousing. “You see so many people who have been broken by their expectations having been forced on them.” His background was a bond he shared with Roy Jenkins, with whom he enjoyed a “great, late friendship… Roy’s father was a miner who had gone to Ruskin College [in Oxford; it specialises in adult education]. He’d done six months in Paris before the first war, and he had this row of classics – Zola, Balzac – and they were all in French.”

Harris took to Cambridge (where he read English) “immediately”, a response he traced back to his time at comprehensive school. “I was like Sergeant Bilko. I mean I had my own office, with a phone, and there wasn’t a school council, so I set one up and made sure I was head of it, and I did a school paper. It was bizarre! Rushmore [a comedy by Wes Anderson about an eccentric teenager] is one of my favourite films – because the boy in Rushmore was me!” So Cambridge, land of the swot and the, erm, weirdo, was perfect? “Yes. I loved it. My first Saturday, I went to the student newspaper [he ended up editing it], and I got involved with the union, and before I was even 20 I had met all these cabinet ministers and John le Carré.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pierce Brosnan as Blair-ish former prime minister Adam Lang in Roman Polanski’s film adaption of Robert Harris’s The Ghost. Photograph: Snap Stills/Rex/Shutterstock

After university, he didn’t fancy going back to the provinces, which meant that, thanks to Fleet Street union rules, his only option was to join the BBC (he’d known from the age of eight that he wanted to write). This, then, he duly did, working as a reporter on Newsnight and Panorama. “But by 28 or 29, I’d got as far as I was going to go. I was never going to be a presenter. So when I was asked if I would be interested in being political editor of the Observer, well, I knew that it was going to be tough, but at that age, you have enough guts to do it.” Later on, having resigned in protest at a long-forgotten office coup too complicated to go into here, Andrew Neil, then the editor of the Sunday Times, rang him and offered him more money than he was earning at the Observer full time to write a column one day a week. Things like that, I tell him, possibly a bit sullenly, just don’t happen any more. “Oh, I know,” he says soothingly. “I have children going out into the world.” (He is married to Gill Hornby, sister of Nick, and now a novelist herself; they have four children.)

Column writing was, he insists, the hardest job he has ever done, the deadline squatting over his week like a toad. As he tells it, he had to psych himself up like a prize fighter. But never mind, lightning was about to strike. On the days he wasn’t trying to work up an opinion, he began writing a novel that asked the question: what if the Nazis had won the war? This became Fatherland, for which the hardback rights went for £500,000, and the paperback for more than £1m. As a result, he was able to buy the swanky vicarage in a Berkshire village that he still lives in. He also has a house in the south of France, and drives an Aston Martin. In our current climate, there’s something rather old-fashioned about this (JK Rowling and Paula Hawkins apart). It makes me think of Arnold Bennett, whose novels financed the purchasing of yachts, or Somerset Maugham, who retired to a villa in Cap Ferrat. And like both of them, he is a very good if perhaps underrated writer (by which I mean that it’s easy for literary types to be snobbish about novels that read so smoothly), his imagination always turning outwards, where it fixes with apparent ease on some extraordinary new subject. The financial crisis, ghost-writing, Dreyfus: he has tackled them all.

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It’s time he was going, though I must say he’s looking rather comfortable on the hotel sofa by now. Before he does, though, I have to ask about Tony Blair, with whom he was once friendly – in 1997, Blair invited Harris to join him on the campaign trail – but with whom he later fell out after Blair sacked Harris’s old friend Peter Mandelson for the second time. What, I wonder, did he make of Blair’s response to the Chilcot inquiry, which took the form of a two-hour press conference? “Oddly enough, someone who sees him asked what I thought he should do, and I said, if I were him, I would call the press into a room and I’d say ‘ask me anything, and I won’t leave until your questions are exhausted’. I don’t know if that was fed back to him or not.

“In one sense, I’m reluctant to talk about him – it looks like I’m obsessed, and I’m not. I liked Tony very much, and in many ways, even though I haven’t seen him for a decade, I still do. But I think when passions have cooled and history is written, he will be seen to have played a large part in what has happened to Labour and the exit from Europe. A whole promising strand of political thought was sort of trashed and destroyed, not so much by the Iraq war, as by his subsequent behaviour. If he had said at any point, ‘I did what I felt was right, but it has not proved to be wise, and I regret it,’ he could have moved on from there. But when he says, after Chilcot, I still think it [the war] was the right decision… well, that’s wrong, and then you think everything must have been wrong. It’s like AP Herbert’s Misleading Cases.” He puts on a pedantic funny voice: “That is the 13th chime of the clock, which renders suspect the 12 chimes that have gone before.”

In his eyes, however, the real disaster is that Iraq, and Blair’s deluded attitude to it, has only encouraged the repudiation of Labour’s years in government first by Ed Miliband, and then by Jeremy Corbyn – which brings us back to the church. “Labour ought to be trumpeting its triumphs,” he says. “My children go to the local state school, and it’s fantastic; my mother-in-law has been in the local hospital and it’s very good. Both were built under the watch of a Labour government. But now it’s all trashed by their own side. One thing I learned from the Catholic church is that, as Cardinal Newman said in the 19th century, you can change all doctrine so long as it doesn’t contradict anything that has gone before.” Like a priest delivering the last line of a particularly interesting sermon, his tone is firm but pastoral, the last two words falling on the ears like a blessing. “You cannot have a situation in which a political party repudiates all that has happened before. You destroy the institution. You have to absorb what was done, and move on.”

Conclave is published by Cornerstone on 22 September (£20). Click here to order a copy for £16.40