Only the togas have changed

“I feel this book is much more personal to me and different to any of the others,” he says. “I’ve been able to put a lot more of myself in it. There are more of my obsessions in it. This really is the product of 35 years of interest in politics.”

The son of a Midlands printer, Harris as a teenager developed an interest in politics as anorakish as other boys’ obsessions with football or pop (as it happens, his brother-in-law is Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity). At the age of 16, he stayed up to watch both bitter 1974 elections. It was not only the political race that fascinated him. Each autumn he would watch the BBC’s gavel-to-gavel coverage of the party conferences and take note of the oratory deployed. Some call football the beautiful game. Harris agreed with Disraeli: politics was the great game.

After graduating from Cambridge, he became a reporter on Newsnight and Panorama and politics continued to compel him. In the late 1980s he spent a short, unhappy spell as The Observer’s political editor (during which the paper’s internal politics defeated him). He resigned and, a few months later, submitted to his agent the beginning of a what-if thriller set in a Nazi version of 1960s Germany. Although he joined The Sunday Times as a political columnist and later transferred to The Daily Telegraph, that 1992 novel Fatherland ensured that from then on Harris would be better known as a novelist than a journalist. Imperium marks his return to his old beat.

“My aim in writing the book and setting it in Rome is to write a universal book about politics. I think that politics is, like football, a universal game. Whether it is played in an African village or a sophisticated European capital, wherever you go, the basic rules are the same.”

Rome was not his first choice of location, but he was determined from the start to resist writing a Trollopean saga about new Labour. Although he was once reasonably close to Tony Blair and remains a friend of Peter Mandelson and therefore knows the turf, he thinks such a novel would be trivial, with readers and critics interested only in working out who everyone “really” was. Instead he wanted to write a dystopia in which the Walt Disney Corporation took over the world. After 18 months, he shook his head and realised that Disney was beyond satire.

“Having struggled to write this novel, I had to abandon it and happened to come across a cutting about new evidence on the destruction of Pompeii. I said to my wife, Gill: ‘What if I did this instead?’ Since I had decided that Utopia under threat was to be my theme, perhaps this was the way to do it. I almost immediately dismissed it from my mind, but it nagged away at me and I went down to Pompeii and hit on the idea of writing about an engineer and this aqueduct. It was conceived very much as an allegory.”

Published in 2003, Pompeii was a huge seller. It read partly as thriller, partly as whodunnit. For some the eruption of Vesuvius read as a parable for 9/11. In fact, Harris was thinking of climate change (and wondering heretically if, just as the Romans superstitiously blamed themselves for the Vesuvius catastrophe, the West is not unnecessarily flagellating itself now). By the time he had finished, he was thoroughly immersed in the affairs of the Roman Republic. Telling the story of Cicero, a familiar name but no more than that to most readers, might be the way to tackle the great political novel he yearned to write.

“I did two years’ full-time research. I wanted to know the Roman Senate at that time as well as I would the House of Commons or the American Senate chamber. When I came in the door I would want to know who was sitting where: not just the normal blank rows of white-togaed figures, but who these guys were, what their history was, how they voted, what deals were done and so on. I really wanted to write a Roman political procedural.”

I suggest Imperium resembles nothing so much as The West Wing.

“It’s West Wing on the Tiber,” he agrees. “And there were two brilliant moments in the research. In two books, out of the hundreds I must have read, I saw a reference first to the fact that the ordinary 300 or 400 backbenchers in the Senate were called the pedarii, the people who voted with their feet, shuffling from one side to another.

“The second thing was this place called the senaculum, the little Senate, which was an area just outside the Senate where they used to gather until there was a quorum, so they were standing around there for an hour or more and that was where all the horse trading and the back slapping and the fixing was done. Those are just two wonderfully modern images which reinforced this sense that politics doesn’t change. It was all there 2,000 years ago.”

But even nastier? “I think there was far less hypocrisy then in a way. You wanted power because it was good to have power. You didn’t dress it up with a lot of concern for the wellbeing of the nation or the starving poor. You just went for it. That’s not really allowed now. Tony Blair can’t say: ‘Well, of course, I want power because it’s nice to boss people about’.”

Harris so buries himself in his period that the parallels with contemporary politics are never forced. Some, however, leap from the page. The greatest is the burning of Ostia by pirates in 67BC, a crisis that led to the granting of extra- ordinary powers to Pompey the Great.

“The burning of Ostia was a kind of 9/11 for the Romans. The special powers that were then granted to this military overlord did, I think, begin the final stages of destabilisation of the whole system. On the one hand, certainly, piracy was a huge problem in the Roman Empire. On the other hand, the threat did seem to be wiped out virtually overnight (by Pompey). As Cicero points out, it makes one wonder if it was quite such a big threat to begin with.

“The Americans have suffered a terrible loss with the twin towers but they haven’t, actually, suffered anything since. For a country of a third of a billion people, that attack, terrible, awful, though it was, was the rough equivalent of the British loss of life in about 15 minutes on the first morning of the Somme. Yet it’s justified a complete turning upside down of American values.

“The question that’s posed quite acutely by the fall of the Roman Republic is: can you be the world’s only superpower and remain a democracy or must the demands of national security and the distortions and corruptions of money and the political process destroy the ideal of the citizens’ militia which is what Rome, as America, began as?”

DEMOCRACY UNDER THREAT, a world dominated by a single superpower, oratory, spin, electoral fraud . . . they are, as Harris knows, as much in the politics of today as they are in Imperium. For the political anorak, there are also buried in the text political quotations that have a familiar ring. In one speech Cicero borrows from a coruscating attack that Nye Bevan made on Anthony Eden during Suez 2,000 years later: “No, no, he may have believed it. In which case . . . you may reasonably conclude that he was too stupid to be a Roman governor (or Prime Minister).” Look out also for bon mots borrowed from François Mitterrand, Lyndon Johnson, Lenin and Harry Truman (“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog”).

For the reader, however, the question that haunts every page is “Who does this chap Cicero remind me of?” As we talk, Harris at different times compares the lawyer-cum-politician to George Carman, Benjamin Disraeli, Peter Mandelson, and Bill Clinton (“without the sex”). And then there is Tony Blair.

“By the time that Blair got in in ‘97 I had got to know him quite well. During the campaign I travelled around with him on his plane and I picked up endless things that I couldn’t really use: tiny things like nuances and atmosphere.

“For instance, I used to be with Blair before he’d go on and do a big speech maybe to a couple of thousand people and witnessed this odd business of him turning into himself, of being in the room but not being there, of going off and staring at the wall: zoning out. But he also had this love of the crowd and of performance. I can’t remember the precise context, but John Major had made a speech when he was Prime Minister and I remember Blair saying: ‘God, what I would have done with that material!’ It lodged in my brain along with lots of other things you can only really use in a novel.

“Why Cicero is attractive to me as a character is that he’s the ultimate professional, perhaps the first professional politician. I wanted to get away from this business of just writing about politicians betraying their principles. It is too easy to go down the Rory Bremner route and say that they are all criminals. I wanted to write about the exhilaration which takes people into it in the first place, and to regard it as an art form, if you like.”

In Harris’s hands, the great game becomes a beautiful one.