Fienburgh was a Labour MP, was he not?
He was. There was a film made of No Love for Johnnie in 1961, which at the time was very well known. I’m quite a fan of political fiction but one of the problems with it is that a lot of it is not very good. You read a lot of political fiction that’s either written by outsiders so they don’t understand politics properly or it’s written by insiders, and not very well written. Fienburgh’s book is written by an insider, is very well written and a stand-alone novel. One of the reasons I like it is that it’s 50 years old now and yet, if you read the opening scene, for example, of a Labour MP arriving to give a speech somewhere and being told that the audience isn’t very big – they hoped to get more people and they haven’t, there’s terrible disappointment. It’s that sense of apathy in politics, a lack of enthusiasm for politics. These things that we erroneously think are new, that are products of the Blair era, Thatcher politics, or anti-Iraq war, have actually been with us forever.
