Robert Harris: If I wrote a book about Trump, no one would believe it

Yahoo

03-03-2025

Robert Harris will not be at the Oscar ceremony on Sunday night to see if the screen adaptation of his novel Conclave lands Best Picture. 'Not invited,' he says, 'though I was at the Baftas' (where the film won four prizes, including Best Film).
It sounds a little ungrateful, I suggest, since the much-lauded screenplay follows pretty much exactly the story and structure of Harris's best-selling 2016 tale of the machinations around the election of a new pope by cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel. It even borrows whole chunks of its dialogue.
'There's some truth in that,' replies the 67-year-old former political journalist, a key figure in the New Labour years.
He leans back to contemplate, sinking into an armchair in the yellow-themed drawing room of his vast Victorian Gothic vicarage in the Berkshire countryside, as he dangles one drainpipe-jeans-clad leg over the arm. 'I wouldn't have wanted to go,' he concludes, 'even had I been invited, to be frank.' Too much travelling and disruption to the latest novel he is working on. Still, I suppose he can stay up and watch it on television.
'I doubt it,' he replies. He is starting to come over a bit waspish, slightly Alan Rickman-esque. 'Well, I'm very distant from it, to be honest. And they are quite nerve-racking things. Why should I put myself through it?'
Not that distant, though, for he then reveals that, not only did the film's screenwriter Peter Straughan (nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay) sit where I am sitting on 'several occasions', but also how director Edward Berger and star Ralph Fiennes (nominated for Best Actor) came here to 'present' for his approval a tweak they wanted to make to the film version. It would make the central character of the book, Italian Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli, the Dean of the College of Cardinals who is in charge of the conclave process, into an Englishman, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence.
'The director wanted to have a multi-national cast, with Italians playing Italians and so on, so if Ralph had played an Italian, as he is in the book, it might not have worked. The change didn't really matter in the film because nobody notices, and Ralph is brilliant.'
The build-up to the Oscar ceremony is bizarrely playing out against a real-life drama in the Vatican. Eighty-eight-year-old Pope Francis has been in Rome's Gemelli Hospital since Feb 14 with pneumonia in both lungs and kidney problems.
Daily bulletins have described his condition as 'critical' causing obituaries to be prepared and odds offered on which of their number the 100 or so cardinal electors in the next conclave will choose to take over as pope. Harris's fictional account could plausibly be taking the film world's biggest prize just days before an actual conclave gathers in Rome.
'This,' he tells me firmly on arrival as we walk through an entrance hall dominated by tall bookcases filled with biographies and memoirs 'is the only interview I am doing because I want to talk about my latest novel, Precipice. I've been besieged by requests to be interviewed about or write about the Pope since the seriousness of his illness became apparent, and I'm not doing them. It smacks of real bad taste, as if his hospitalisation is an extra publicity opportunity for the novel and the film.'
We agree to restrict any talk about Pope Francis to the present tense and rule out all questions about his future, including whether, like his predecessor Benedict XVI, he will take the unusual route of retiring from the papacy. Reassured, Harris relaxes into recalling the impact on him of the night Francis was elected in March 2013.
'I was fascinated when I watched him come out onto the balcony above St Peter's Square. There was a sweetness about his face.'
But Harris was simultaneously taking in the whole scene as the TV cameras panned along the faces of the cardinal-electors in the windows on either side of the balcony. 'Some of them looked crafty, some of them benign and I thought, 'Look at that, my God, that's the Roman Senate, that's what it must have looked like'.'
Ancient Rome was very much on his mind at the time as he was working on the last of a trilogy (Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator) about Cicero, one of its greatest orators and statesmen. 'As I watched, I thought, 'There's politics here'.'
And politics has been Harris's thing, alongside history, from the moment he came down from Cambridge where he read English and joined the BBC, right through to the 15 novels he has published since 1992's Fatherland, an overnight sensation, selling in the millions, which imagined what would happen if Germany had won the Second World War.
'From a political angle, I liked the idea of the conclave as a sequestered world, an eyeball-to-eyeball election, raw politics in a way.'
As the novel that became Conclave started taking shape in his imagination, his famously thorough approach to research caused him to read the gospels. Growing up on a council estate in Nottingham, a love of words and books may have been nurtured in him early by his parents (his father was a printer) and by teachers at King Edward VII School in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, but there was very little religion.
'I must have read the gospels in parts but never in sequence. As a very secular person, their revolutionary nature startled me more than Marx, more than Lenin.'
That radical idealism, he then channelled into some of the cardinals in Conclave, while counterbalancing it with the more worldly side of the Catholic Church, which he refers to as 'this huge, stately, wealthy, encased institution'. Fiennes' Cardinal Lawrence labours to keep the two in check during the series of ballots in the Sistine Chapel.
As does the conclave system itself, and that ability has made the political pundit in Harris something of a convert to conclaves as a way of choosing leaders. 'I think it is an excellent system,' he says.
'We would have had better prime ministers if the political parties had allowed MPs and peers to choose their leaders rather than throwing it open to tens of thousands of party members. No Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, but, while logically it is crazy to have a conclave, crazy even to have cardinals, I can't think of a conclave in recent times that made a bad choice of pope.'
Though a long-time Labour supporter and donor, he had no time at all for Corbyn. Nowadays, on the whole, he approves of Keir Starmer, although 'I do slightly worry,' he cautions, 'that he is going about growing the economy in a very strange way.'
But he is worrying more today that his enthusiasm for conclaves as a system for elections has given a mistaken impression. He wants to make it plain he is not 'a person of faith'. Though, he continues, 'I wish that I were. It must be a marvellous thing to go through life believing that there is something else.'
Neither is he an atheist. 'Like a lot of people, I have an inchoate sense of a bigger thing.' And that refusal to condemn religion, he suggests, is part of why Conclave works so well.
'Hard-line atheists dislike the book even more than the hard-line conservative Catholics. Because it says there is something good about faith and, I would go so far as to say, appealing and necessary.'
And something good, too, about Pope Francis himself. 'He seems to be a thoroughly decent human being. He chose to go on living as Pope in the Domus Sanctae Marthae [the hostel that houses cardinals away from the world during the successive rounds of voting] rather than go to the grand papal apartments. He lives a humble life and drives around in a little battered car.'
When researching Conclave, he was granted 'remarkable' access to these private quarters. 'They even stopped the lift outside his bedroom door and showed me it. Francis likes to eat with the nuns rather than in any grand way, and when he travels in the elevator and the doors open, he says 'Come on in, I'm just another sinner'.'
But it is the forum of the conclave as a human, political and spiritual set-piece that has drawn in so many fans of the book and film. 'One gets the impression of good people struggling with enormous contradictions.'
Most obviously, as Conclave chronicles, there are the deep divisions over Church teaching. 'What it says on birth control, on divorce, on homosexuality, on the non-existent role of women, they are so against the current of the times that for me as an outsider it is a miracle that any institution can survive that.'
He has recently read, he says, a newspaper article arguing that 'to an eerie degree the choice facing the next conclave will be the same sort of candidates as in my novel'. Does he think that is right?
'Well, there will be an African who is very anti-homosexual, a Filipino who is very liberal, an ultra-conservative, and an Italian diplomat. I say this merely because I look at the pattern and these factions have always been there.'
Harris draws the line at going on to suggest any real-life names. 'I certainly wouldn't say a liberal type; that would almost certainly be ruination.'
He is more comfortable discussing his own characters. 'A surprising number of people have told me that their favourite in Conclave is Cardinal Tedesco [the ultra-conservative, played by Sergio Castellitto, who believes there are too many Muslims in Europe] because he stands for something and he argues it forcefully.'
For Harris, it suggests that the Catholic Church, at its core, is considerably less liberal than its current leader. 'They don't want a lot of wishy-washy, well-on-the-one-hand and then on-the-other. That is why the Church of England is now in a terrible state because it blows with the wind.'
Another aspect of conclaves is that, despite being shut off from the world, global events still have an impact. When, in 1978, the Polish John Paul II emerged as the first non-Italian pontiff in centuries, he played a prominent role in the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Might, then, the age of Trump, Putin and the rise of the hard-Right in European elections prompt an appetite for a more traditionalist pope? 'I'm getting old now,' Harris says, 'and I have come to the great revelation of my life, that things aren't rational. Human beings make emotional choices.'
He points, by way of example, to the impact of the internet. 'It should be a great tool of the Enlightenment, of reason. Instead, it has unleashed incredible forces of superstition, conspiracy theories and so forth.'
His words are a reminder that, as a historian, his novels seek out wider lessons from the past for today's world and so bring us neatly to Precipice. Set in the summer of 1914, on the brink of the First World War, it revisits the love affair between prime minister Herbert Asquith, and Venetia Stanley, half his age, a passion so obsessive that Asquith broke the rules to share with her top-secret documents that Harris suggests impacted on the course of political history.
There is a clear parallel to be drawn between the start of the First World War and the fear, at a time of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, of us drifting into a Third World War. 'The two world wars are burnt into our collective consciousness,' Harris agrees, 'so when you start to see the old peacekeeping order collapsing it is understandable that people start to get alarmed about it.'
'Precipice reminds us of the incredible decline in British power, compared to the navy Asquith had at his disposal, and to the economic strength that enabled Britain to finance the First World War.'
Harris sees links, too, between Asquith's leadership style and that of Cardinal Lomeli/Lawrence in Conclave. 'They are both trying to keep the show on the road. These are the characters I am always drawn to: decent, shrewd but flawed, in a position of authority, inheriting a duff situation and doing their best.'
Like Keir Starmer? 'Let us see. I would say that he has decent instincts. He's not a messianic figure, not the sort to get us into wars like Iraq.'
It is a pointed reference to his once great friend Tony Blair. They met in 1992 when Harris was still a journalist and Blair an Opposition spokesperson, their developing bond seeing Harris travel with him on the campaign trail in 1997. But they fell out over the Iraq war and in 2007 Harris published The Ghost (later filmed as The Ghost Writer), a novel that gave an unflattering fictionalised account of Blair's premiership and an even less attractive portrait of Cherie, his wife. Are they still in touch?
'Yes, I saw him just before Christmas.' Was it friendly? 'Very.' Even Cherie? 'She thought the film of the book was great because she got to sleep with Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor. That's an actual quote.'
He remains much closer to another of the New Labour triumvirate, Peter (Lord) Mandelson and was best man at his wedding in 2023. There is a picture of them at the ceremony on the sideboard.
How will he do as the new British Ambassador in Washington? 'We talked about it when he came here, but I wouldn't presume to give him advice. He might well turn out to be the right man in the right place. Whether you like him or not, few people have doubted that he is good at running a department or doing a job. He's got a heck of a job there.'
The rise, fall and rise again of Donald Trump would, I suggest, make a good subject for a Harris novel. 'No one would believe it,' he laughs, 'that's the problem. Constitutional monarchy [he is on good terms with King Charles and Queen Camilla and sends them each new book he writes] is another thing that is illogical, but it does separate state and politics. What you see in America now is an elected king.'
How does he anticipate this second term working out? 'Well, they've got themselves George III [known, as Alan Bennett's play highlighted, for his madness] but without some of George III's qualities.'
In such an uncertain world, Harris is well-cushioned financially, career-wise and in his domestic life, in so far as anyone can be. He met his wife Gill Hornby (sister of Nick of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity fame) when they worked side-by-side as reporters in his early days on Newsnight and married in 1988. She is a successful writer, too, her novel Miss Austen recently adapted by the BBC into a miniseries.
With another home in London's Notting Hill, they have an enviable lifestyle, though he has admitted to selling his open-top Aston Martin because it is unseemly for a man in his 60s. Working with words has become a family trait, with three of their four grown-up children, two boys and two girls, working as publishers or writers. The outlier has just gone into the production side of reality television.
The younger Harrises can no doubt rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad, but their father does worry a lot, more in fact than about a Third World War, about the plight of young people more generally. 'The difficulty they face in getting a stake in society because they can't afford to buy their own house is really wretched, and is very demotivating.'
He is acutely aware of the contrast with his own apparently seamless progress from humble beginnings to Cambridge, onto the BBC training scheme and buying his first flat when he was 25 in West Kensington. Part of that fast-changing picture is the BBC itself. Is he any more optimistic about its future?
'The BBC can be extremely annoying, but it is one of the great triumphs of Britain in the last 100 years. Again, the licence fee is irrational, but I've not heard anything that is much better.'
On the current standard of its news coverage – he worked alongside and befriended Newsnight's great interrogator, Jeremy Paxman – he is tougher. 'This does depress me. You cannot tell me we haven't dumbed down our politics and no one is pushing politicians to marshal their arguments.'
In particular, the loss of Mishal Husain from Radio 4's Today is, he judges, 'a disaster. She is everything the BBC ought to be. Now in the media, what we are down to is really like chicken feed being fed to battery hens.'
Harris is aware our discussion is turning distinctly gloomy. On one matter, he rallies himself to point out, he is unfashionably and perhaps surprisingly upbeat – the future of the Church and religion.
'There is a brilliant letter from Evelyn Waugh [the Catholic novelist] to George Orwell who had sent him an advance copy of his novel 1984. I am paraphrasing, but it began by thanking him for an extraordinarily powerful book, but said it was flawed because Orwell had left out of it the existence of the Church. Put aside the superstitious element if you will, Waugh warned, but as an institution it has endured for thousands of years and will continue to do so.'
Waugh was right, Harris firmly believes. 'There is a profound human desire for the irrational or the superstitious in all of us. When you combine it with the institution of the Church, then I don't think religion will ever vanish. In a funny sort of way, we are more prone now, because of what is going on around us, to things that are not explicable than at any other time.'
Precipice by Robert Harris is published in paperback by Hutchinson/Headline on April 25
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