Robert Harris: From Tony Blair’s Inner Circle to Hollywood’s Conclave

0:02This is a global production. I saw a man on the brink of becoming Prime Minister. I said, how do you feel? And he said, I don't feel anything. It's a weird beat, isn't it? The Sunday political beat. It's kind of not like anything else. These stories in the Sunday papers on the front page, they're all made up, you know. On the very first morning that I started writing Fatherland, I just knew then this is what I want to do. The old acquaintance with Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell really didn't want this. Can friendship and power go together? It's pretty rare, to be honest.

0:43Robert Harris, I hadn't realised quite how much you'd done, professionally speaking. There's sort of two or three acts here, including protégé to Jeremy Paxman at one point. Yes, I owe him a lot, actually, because we worked together on Panorama when I was only about 22. And we made a program about the history of chemical and biological warfare. And a publisher rang him and said, would you like to do a book? And he came to me and he said, shall we do it together? So that was the first book I ever wrote was with him and thanks to him. And you went, I think people tend to go the other way now. You went from broadcasting to print.

1:24Yeah. People these days, I think most people in print think life in broadcasting is both better paid and quite a bit easier. Yeah, that's right. I was a rare thing. But I was always more of a writer than a television person. And you are, again, that very rare journalist who actually delivers on the dream that almost all of us have when we start, which is, of course, to get out of it one day and start writing actual books, which you did. But we'll begin at the beginning, which is in Nottinghamshire, on a Nottingham council estate, in fact, with parents who were, and it's one of those phrases that remains quite hard to pin down, but I mean an avowedly working class childhood.

2:03Yes, I mean, both my parents left school at 14 and my father was a printer. So, you know, wore overalls and he was a very good printer. And, yeah, I was born in Nottingham. We lived in a council house for the first six years of my life, and then we moved into it. My parents bought a new build. And, yeah, I went to a comprehensive school. I didn't want to play any kind of violin about this. I had a very happy childhood. I never felt at all deprived in it. But it certainly wasn't a middle-class family. It comes up a lot in this series, the fact that we only have one childhood, therefore we only have one frame of reference when we're children.

2:49and therefore people rarely do feel that they're missing out on things because they don't know what's happening on the other side of town. What did it mean? We never went abroad for a holiday, but we'd go to sort of, you know. Mainly we went to Norfolk, to Wales next to the sea. Before it was fashionable. Before it certainly wasn't fashionable. We used to go camping. If there was one vow I had when I grew up, it was that I'd never go camping again, and I never have. carrying your own toilet roll across a campsite is not an experience yeah and the sound of the rain coming down on the canvas and the zipping sound i i if i hear them now it brings back chills but it was clearly i mean i hope this is the right word to use it was clearly an intellectual house i mean it was a house where the inner life was yeah they both yeah they both would have gone to university these days of course and when people moan about the number of people going and you know that half the country goes now I think of them and I think you know this is progress actually they were because they were clever my father was a great reader and self-taught you know you know and he read James Joyce and Arnold Bennett and Graham Greene and I'm pass them on to me George Siminon was another person he liked a lot and I used to read those green spined penguins you were voracious then very yeah it was um you know anything children's books like just william sherlock holmes i adored um yeah i'd always had a book in my hand you got to school and presumably you were a little bit ahead of the curve given what had been going on at home like just a local primary school yeah it's a local pit country this school not really no close to it but no I mean but you know we weren't very far from DH Lawrence land and yeah it was local school and always you know bookish not very good at many things actually I was hopeless at maths and sciences but anything that involved reading so that touched on history as well that was very at home with.

5:05And did teachers pick up on this? Yes. I mean, when I look back at my school reports, which I haven't done for a long time, but I did found them a few years ago, I was quite naughty, actually. I mean, they're not the reports of some sort of studious child at all, but of slightly rebellious and cheeky, in a way. There's a sense of mischief that runs through all of your life, isn't there? I mean, when you got to Cambridge as well, you were usually causing trouble. Yes, I was nearly sent down from Cambridge for inviting the great train robbers to speak. There's a lovely line there. It said, the only one who didn't come was Ronnie Biggs.

5:46And you sort of think, yeah, I think I know why. Yes, Buster Edwards came. So, yeah, no, I've always made a bit of mischief. It seems to me one of the things that actually writers, journalists should do is stir things up, cause some trouble. And I've never been frightened of controversy. Was it an aspirational upbringing? Was it clear that your parents wanted more for you than they'd got for themselves? Oh, definitely. I think my father wanted me to be a solicitor in Nottingham. I remember him telling me that I could earn£100 a week, which to him was sort of, that was the aspiration. They never thought of writing or anything like that.

6:28And even when I got into the BBC as a trainee when I was 21, they were slightly sort of wary. And my father, whenever I saw him, would always say, are they pleased with you? It was old-fashioned, I would say, as much as anything else. Old-fashioned books, documentaries on the television, a lot of talk about politics, any questions, that sort of thing. It was great, really. Yeah, and did you have an accent? Has your accent eroded over the years? I think I've still got a slight flat A, East Midlands, Nottingham accent, but I suppose a lot of it was knocked out of me by just moving out when I was 18.

7:09That means that at some point at secondary school, regardless of not being very good at maths or science, you'd clearly demonstrated enough ability at English and history, or essay-based subjects, I presume, for them to say you could set your sights that high yeah i could do i was good at exams and i the moment i got to a levels i was really in my element because then i became specialist in in english history and geography and those i could do and the nightmare of sitting not understanding chemical formulas or um that that passed away and so really i took off in the sixth form and um it was one of those things that used to happen back in the 70s my english teacher had been at cambridge and the college kept in touch with those that had gone on to be teachers and um he put me forward because he thought i could maybe do english so i went and had an interview and took the exam and then i got in was it one or two children a year that would have been put up for those exams?

8:13I think in that year there were four. It was a big school, mind you. It was 1 ,700, 1 ,800 pupils. But it got people in, yeah. And I suspect because of your background, because of what your mum and dad had created at home, you were both daunted and not daunted by this. I mean, it was a world of letters, and you had grown up in a world of letters, and yet it was also a world of class distinctions that would have been a bit of a shock to you. I was eager to I mean I love my upbringing but I was eager to get on and get out into the world and I didn't find Cambridge daunting to be honest with you when I look back I think maybe because I was so young I was only just 18 I just took to it first week I went to the kind of lunch or kind of thing for the student paper signed up to work on that met a few people I still know so like Tom Sutcliffe the journalist who presents Front Row I imagine when I was 18 we both worked on the paper and I just, by doing the writing I was not daunted particularly I was I really enjoyed it that simple as that We've been hearing a lot recently about Andy Burnham's imposter syndrome when he arrived at Cambridge, obviously.

9:38Well, I think that that... Wasn't he known as the coolest guy in the college? I mean, I think that this is... Labour politicians like to, you know, hype it all up. They're like a mythology, don't they? They do. But I certainly... I mean, of course, some people would have felt it, but for some reason, I didn't. And I've never felt it. So where had the journalist... I mean, you turn up at Varsity in your first week. Where had those seeds been sown? Well, I was editor of the school newspaper, which was a weekly, and I turned it into a kind of scandal sheet in many ways. And I caused a lot of trouble with it.

10:19That was very amusing. I founded my own newspaper in the village during a school holiday and went around and delivered it door to door. And I was just always writing. I mean, the first thing I ever bought was a typewriter, a Remington Portable, which I still have. I taught myself to type. You know, it's a great thing in life to only be able to do one thing. Do you know what I mean? It was never any great discussion as to whether I might be a nuclear physicist or a carpenter. It's like when you're in a restaurant and the menu is enormous. You've got absolutely no idea what to have. It's so much easier if they just tell you.

11:02yes yes the smaller the menu the better the restaurant and i i so you know there was only one thing i was ever going to do and that that cleared the way for me i was fortunate when did you realize you were good at it robert um i realized when i was sort of in the sixth form that i had a knack for polemic I could stir people up with words and so I became aware of that I wrote plays as well if you've ever seen that film Rushmore that's me the guy in that so I did plays as well I was just hyperactive then or at least very productive a lot of energy yes but then I never played any sport I used to hide away and never do that.

11:54And I actually managed to fix myself up with an office with a telephone in my comprehensive school. Who would you ring? Well, the telephone wasn't actually for me. It was something to do with the department. But at any rate, I used it. And so there's more than a touch of Sergeant Bilker also.

12:18Yeah, it was a great time. And it was a really good comprehensive school. It's still got the vestiges of the old grammar school, but it had a very progressive headmaster who'd actually been a conscientious objector in the war and was chairman of the local Labour Party. And, you know, they really encouraged you to do extracurricular things. The only other guest on Full Disclosure who I think had a phone when they were at school was Rupert Everett, but his was not connected. he just used to sit in a in a stairwell at ampleforth pretending that he was talking to his agent back in london but there was the wire just drifted off under the carpet there was nobody very good there was nobody on the other end of it um i mean politics at home were labor labor politics not just at school the the i mean when you mentioned that your parents bought their own house when you were i think six where you were eight six six years old i mean that could have been a fork in the road politically couldn't it?

13:14I mean it could have been more Yes I don't think my I think my father got more labour as he got older actually he was certainly a big supporter of Harold Wilson and then of Callaghan I think he might have voted for Macmillan in 59 you know he was part of that post-war working class generation that began to get you know, a washing machine and a radiogram. And there was a general optimism and improvement in living standards that had started actually in the 30s, but was interrupted by the war and then the austerity. And mid to late 50s, it began to pick up again after a 20-year hiatus. so sort of traditional labour values but not to the point of tribalism well it detested Margaret Thatcher it was more almost opposition than anything else he wasn't fond of Alec Douglas Hume either was he?

14:24is this a true story? everyone else comes back with what I did in the holidays and you come back with why me and my dad don't like Sir Alec Douglas Hume that is completely correct and I was to go on writing variations on that for the next 40 years. Have you still got it? No, alas, I'd love to read it. Alec Douglas Hume, when he was Prime Minister in the 64 election, came to speak in Nottingham, and my father, I believe, went and heckled him in the town square. So we're seeing some, perhaps, chips off the old block in terms of mischief and engagement and polemic. When you framed these journalistic ambitions, was there any nobility attached to it did you see it as a noble profession or was it just the the mischief and the facility to write that drew you to it i would say that um i took it seriously i liked popularizing subjects i really enjoyed a very formative experience for me was working on the old panorama program which used to go at 10 past 8 on bbc one 50 minutes this was before the days of cassette recorders so vcrs so that it went out and that was it you know it was never seen again and you had to so you've got a big audience in those days you know five six million with quite a complicated story and you had to hook them at 10 past eight and somehow hold them until the nine o 'clock news and um there were very good reporters like jeremy and uh directors but they were like going out on the road and getting the story and they often for me as a young researcher they used to give me all the rushes and the and say what pull out what you think is best and how we might tell the story so i'm very early age i found myself structuring things and that was very formative um that was almost like being at university to to work to you know tell the story how do you intercut the the the the sink as we called it with the pictures and so on how did you end up at the bbc if if writing was your first love well this was uh the end of the 70s and um the only the nuj the national union of journalists had very strict entry rules and you could only go to london and work in fleet street on a specialist paper really the financial times which I didn't want to do.

16:52The only exemptions to this were the broadcasters, ITN, BBC, LWT. Otherwise you'd have had to come through the region. Otherwise I'd have had to go back to somewhere like Nottingham and work on a regional paper. And I was itching to get to London. Right. And so I rented a television during my time at Cambridge and kept up with programmes and applied to there were two trainee schemes at the BBC and I applied for both of them but for but yeah so you were I mean quite precocious but also a man with a plan I mean you you weren't floating around waiting for opportunity to prevent itself you would knock on doors well one thing I mean I was I don't hyping up my background but it was either I either made a success of it or you know I fell quite a long way you know that I mean I needed to press forward yeah yeah yeah no yes definitely I definitely it wasn't I couldn't be that dilettante about it because there was no safety net and no self-pity here you're not looking at any of your Cambridge contemporaries and thinking well you'll be all right you can live in mum and dad's flat in Pimlico and wait to wait until the the big time comes calling you've got to go out there and try and find it yourself no i never felt that i know i was done you could have been forgiven for doing so i suppose so i i just was um you know the thing is when you're what 2021 you are optimistic a lot of people go around i've got four children people are always saying things are tough for young people and they are tough for young people but they do have youth they do have the energy and the optimism that comes and I often think when one you know worries about them you you you forget that actually uh you're looking at it through the lens of someone who's getting a bit you know tired and stale and nervous about mortgages or whatever and you're just not like that at that age and so I I I didn't feel any great resentment and and of course in a way it worked out for me.

19:12Back up briefly how big a deal was it to mum and dad when you got into Cambridge not just to university but to Cambridge University? Oh huge I think yeah they were tremendously proud yeah and they used to you know that awful thing when they your parents drive you down at the beginning of term you can't wait to get shot of them and but they would just stay in cambridge even after they dropped me off because they it was just they just you know were so uh excited about it it definitely was yes a big thing for them and were you our robert would it be our robert rob i was rob the only people that ever called me rob were my mother and father and neil kinnock did you when did you start i mean it maybe you didn't but you're at panorama now you're offered a fair old lick published at 25 the book that you mentioned earlier that you co-wrote with with with jeremy paxton a higher form of killing the secret story of gas and germ warfare when did you start very yes it's not a comedy when did you um a year later you did a book about the faulkner's i think yeah that was my breakthrough really uh i was working on news night the bbc was in a huge row all the time with the government and i thought um i'll um this is quite a good story and so i wrote a very quick book i took six weeks off over the summer built up you know leave that i was owed and i uh wrote it in the summer of 82 and it came out in 83 so you're the you're the polar opposite of the old that old peter cook joke isn't it of one journalist says to another i'm writing a book and the other one says neither am i you you really got your finger out yeah no i was quite driven um that is certainly true always was um always pushing forward um it's storytelling though isn't it whether you're putting together a panorama film or whether you're thinking this this one's got a book in it had had there been had that thing that the paxman collaboration and notwithstanding, were you always on the lookout for a book you could write?

21:23Yes, I liked long form. Obviously, as a journalist, I then moved into print. I made my money, as it were my living, by writing columns in 1 ,200 words or whatever. But really, the best journalism I could do, actually, were those longer 2 ,500 words, what happened in the week that you get in the Sunday papers, which I used to do for The Observer. But the longer the form, the happier I was. And so books were something I really enjoyed doing. And I wrote several nonfiction books. I did Gotcha, as it was called, about the media and the Falklands. Then I did a biography of Neil Kinnock, just when he became leader of the Labour Party.

22:11And those two brought me to the attention of newspapers. and therefore when a vacancy came free at the Observer, Anthony Howard, who was the deputy editor, who was a great mentor of mine, he rang me up and said, do you want to apply for the political editor's job? And I had a comfortable billet by then at the BBC. I'd been a reporter on Newsnight and on Panorama, but it was just going to be more of the same. And I was 29, and I thought, come on, if you're going to take a risk in life, do it now. So there's no, I mean, did you enjoy being on screen? Because clearly you didn't enjoy it so much that you couldn't contemplate not being on screen anymore.

22:56I didn't think I'd ever be good enough to be in the studio. Okay. Obviously, Jeremy went that way very consciously, took the decision to stop being a reporter. And he went off and presented the London Regional Pay Programme. and then breakfast television, I got to the top, really, of being a reporter as a reporter on Panorama. And I realized that actually that would be it and that eventually I could just, with a bit of luck, I could have gone on doing it for 10 or 20 years. But there was this chance to go and learn how to be a print journalist. And so I thought, I won't be able to look at myself in the mirror if I turn it down.

23:40And, you know, sometimes in life you really have to force yourself to do something. And those early weeks on The Observer were not happy. Why not? Because I'd never written news stories. Because the news, it's quite a solitary thing, getting news stories. There was maybe mild resentment that I'd been brought in from outside the paper. I mean, all that quickly fell away. and I made wonderful friends and the great political columnist there, Alan Watkins and Tony Howard, taught me a lot. They both wrote their articles with a fountain pen. I mean, that was how long ago it was. But they were pro-stylists and after a few months, then I was really much more at home.

24:25How did you come into Tony Howard's orbit? How did he... I used to... Among the many things that I did, I was chairman of the kind of labour club of Fabian Society at Cambridge and he came and spoke there when he was editor of the New Statesman and so I sort of met him then and because I'd written that book on Kinnock I think which was reviewed and he was a political writer himself Tony I think that that's how I was spotted What were you like at Scoops then? Because before you became a sort of long-form columnist, it's a weird beat, isn't it, the Sunday political beat? It's kind of not like anything else.

25:13That's really where I wrote fiction and learned to write it. I didn't want to go that far. The flyers, the flyers. There's a very funny story Alan Watkins wrote, and he wrote a very funny memoir called A Short Walk Down Fleet Street, and I'm in it, and I go up to him rather puzzled one day, and say, these stories in the Sunday papers on the front page, they're all made up, you know. And it's true that about, Donald Trelford was the editor of the paper, and at about four o 'clock on a Saturday afternoon, I'd see him bearing down towards me across the newsroom, carrying a few bits of scraps of agency copy, which I somehow had to work up into a story that could go above the fold and would last until lunchtime.

26:00That was the main thing. I wasn't very good at getting great scoops. What I did develop an act for, as I say, was the longer form, long, longer pieces, what had happened in the week. And there I did get some scoops, actually. I mean, nothing anyone would remember now, but the calamitous attempt of the Social Democrats. there was a leader who burst into tears in the middle of some meeting um i was told about that i had quite good sources in the liberals and the labor party and virtually nothing in the tory party which was problematic given that the tory party was in charge and given also that the observer was at war with mrs thatcher um something to do with mark thatcher was it i can't remember now but anyway there was very bad blood but bernard ingham her press secretary was was always very uh generous to me actually what would the week involve then so you you get obviously sunday and monday off and then you you not a great deal to do on tuesdays wednesdays tuesdays well prime minister's questions used to be on tuesdays and thursdays so my working week would really begin on a tuesday afternoon i had a desk in the house of commons i was in the lobby uh what was a revelation to me because i'd always been fascinated by politics but i really didn't like the house of commons kind of the something it was dusty air gave me a headache quite often still is yes it wasn't i didn't like it very much um so yes i'd go there on a tuesday and then really there'd be an editorial conference on monday morning on wednesday morning and that's really when the week would begin and and you enjoyed it after you got through that that initial few months you've still there's still a sense of momentum you're still pushing forward you're still stretching yourself and looking for new things to enjoy that's right and they were they were going to take me off they were they offered me uh washington correspondent after i'd done two years as political editor but um in the interim dear tony howard launched a coup against trelford to try and become editor of the paper whilst trelford was out of the office he tried to get the job.

28:21What he unfortunately didn't know was that Telford was on the proprietor's yacht at the time. So the coup failed, and he was fired, effectively. And I thought, he brought me in. I'm going to go too, actually. And I, because at this point they'd brought my predecessor back, Adam Raphael. And that was very uncomfortable. I mean, he really tried to cause me difficulties. So I resigned. In solidarity with Tony Howard? In solidarity with Tony Howard. And I had no other job to go to. And on that Saturday afternoon, and it was in the Press Gazette or something, and on that Saturday afternoon, I was sitting in the Observer offices and in the newsroom, and the phone went, and it was Andrew Neil, the editor of the great rival paper, the Sunday Times, saying, I hear you're leaving.

29:16Do you want to come and write a column for me? so I went and saw Andrew so you only had about an hour and a half of examining the soul and wondering whether you'd made a terrible mistake I know, I know but still, it was that was another great break really because then Andrew said this is the peak Thatcher year really, this was the beginning of 89 peak Sunday Times as well and he said I want you to write a column to annoy Sunday Times readers um i don't you know go at thatcher go at the government you know so oh okay fine and he paid me more than i was getting full time at the observer and uh so i started doing that and i'd had this idea for a novel and that this gave me the time then to develop it because you didn't have to worry about scoops and things now you just you just got to do a kind of state of the nation piece every every Saturday for Sunday yes yes really written I had to hand it in a Friday Friday lunchtime but I yes exactly that and uh um it freed me up really I couldn't there was no point in worrying about what you're going to write in a column until Wednesday or Thursday because anything can happen so it gave me Monday and you know the weekend of Monday and Tuesday to just think write on a write a book and and that book was not selling hitler no that that that was the book that gave the idea for the book yeah the non-fiction went um so you were just knocking these non-fiction books out for fun effectively yeah but for fun for the challenge for the pleasure of it for supplementing income i mean my but you knew you wanted to write a novel at some point no i didn't know i would i mean i never knew i never at any point in my career knew what i was going to do actually things came along and i thought well i'll have a go at that so i did the book on kinnock and then i did um then i did the book on the hitler diaries fiasco which was a sunday times story which was which was caused me some difficulties at the beginning with the sunday times but then i uh and it was as i was writing um when i'd finished selling hitler that i thought which had made which entailed reading hitler's table talk and his plans for how the world would be after his victory that i thought this would make a good non-fiction book i tried to write it as non-fiction but i found it was so speculative it was just hopeless and also the two great questions were, well, how would the world, would they settle, you know, he wanted to settle 20 million Germans in Ukraine.

32:03Would they have wanted to go there, I thought? And also, assuming the war would have ended with America undefeated, how would they have explained the disappearance of European Jews? and it and would they would it have been like the victims of Stalin and Mao and the West would simply have said okay well you know still we'll have detente despite it and that meant that I could only tackle that by fiction and so I had an idea for a plot and it was simply I used fiction as a tool for as I for non-fiction if you like to answer the questions but I couldn't do it with fact but the best historical fiction does that doesn't it i think usually or at least it gives you that you're turning the page not just because of the plot but also because of the lessons that you're learning yes i think it's it's good if a book has a point as well as a sort of story and um generally for me the books are to answer a question you know what would this have been like what if um uh and and i often go back to history because i grew up in the shadow of the second world war and the choices that were made and the the way that it's been portrayed ever since um i feel that one of the big stories that's always interested me and and the question here because we're talking about fatherland for anybody who needs color by numbers guidance through this conversation.

33:39The question here is, what if Hitler had won, really? Yes. Was that... It's hard to imagine now, but when we're sort of back to the late 1980s, was that quite a novel inquiry? I mean, were many people wondering that? Well, no, not really. I think there had been documentaries and there was a book called, documentary if Britain had fallen Noel Coward I think wrote a play and above all there was Len Dayton's SSGB which imagined the German occupation of Britain I had something different in mind which was Berlin and Germany after Hitler had won and set in 1964 on the eve of his 75th birthday with the idea of the American, when it's announced that the American president is going to pay a state visit to Berlin.

34:40That was a novel concept. And I think that the thing that made the book more pertinent was that whilst I was writing it, the Berlin Wall came down and Germany began to reunify. And people were alarmed at the thought of this superpower, 80 odd million Germans once again in the heart of Europe and that I think gave the book a kind of journalistic almost edge. Yes I mean you've had many ideas since that is there a common thread I mean do you have a moment where something just clicks inside you and you go oh boy this is going to work um yeah i think you yes as i came to the end of writing um fatherland for example there was a horizon documentary about alan turing and uh i thought that's an interesting idea for a novel a code breaker uh at bletchley park who sees breaks a code he's not supposed to see or something like that that was the that was all i thought and that so that was a journey sort of a journey of three years really um to write that so yes things just sort of you never know where an idea is going to come from

36:07timings here are quite funny the novels then from what we've discussed so far and i think you're only 35 when fatherland comes out but but this is the first time i sense so far that you would be quite happy doing this for the next 30 or 40 years in a way that you wouldn't have been happy to stay at panorama or you wouldn't have been happy to carry on writing colin no i'd come home on the very first morning that i started writing fatherland it was i just knew then this is what i want to do it was really funny i actually had to go and lie down i remember i'd start it was a saturday and afternoon i wrote the first paragraph of fatherland which is exactly the same as it is in the book and uh i thought it was like vertigo i sort of went and lay down i thought i can do anything anything can now happen it was so i mean it sounds very obvious but i it had never occurred to me really i can make this whole thing up you're a master of this universe yes exactly it was so exhilarating tremendous feeling so i've never wanted to do anything else i've never wanted to be a screenwriter or a playwright or i novels are the thing for me there's that you're riding two horses for a while though because the the i mean the success of fatherland which we'll get on to shortly sort of coincides with your meetings with tony blair when he tells you and i think you initially disagreed that labour were going to lose in 83 you were quite close to kinnock i think you certainly an admirer of Neil Kinnick's and Tony Blair then I mean becomes quite a big fan of yours and you become quite a big fan of him yes I'm this was um I moved to the um Sunday Times in 89 and I'm in a little ghetto really of the left wing column was even put in different type to the rest of the paper and then gradually things really yes yes then then things began to change and um the thatcher premiership began to hit the rocks um are you going to claim the credit for this no no most certainly not but i did i was shifted then from being the kind of alternative columnist to the main column got it yes and this was all credit to andrew neal because my views hadn't particularly changed.

38:22But the country had. Yeah, and he was a big supporter of Heseltine. The paper came out for Heseltine when he stood against Thatcher. So I moved across, and suddenly it looked like Labour might be in with a chance. And so I was writing the main column in 92 when there was an election. and as you say I was rung up by Tony Blair's office and he was then I think Shadow Employment spokesman and they said he'd like to meet you and have lunch so I went and had lunch with him and Les Gargoy and we got on very well and he because it was a general assumption that Labour were going to win and he said oh no we're not we're not we haven't changed enough and the tax is going to do for us and then so we're going to lose and then there's going to be a real reckoning we've got to change the party and I don't know whether you'd like to be involved in that but it would be great if you wanted to be and so on and then I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't written Fatherland actually looking back on it but actually I said to him well I've just written this novel so I'm packing in the column so I think he put that down as a wasted lunch and uh yeah and you knew i mean so well a word then on on how quickly fatherland became huge yes i um had been paid by a british publisher to uh and had given an advance to write it because they thought it was a good idea uh and i started writing it got stuck put it aside for a year went back to it said it was 50 50 whether i was ever going to finish it but i thought come on let's really give it let's give it six months at this point my wife had just had our first baby and we she wasn't working so we i needed to earn twice what i normally did so i had to do a column and a book so i thought let's try and get this done and i wrote the first third um and i made big changes I was at one point telling it from multiple points of view, and I decided it was any interesting when the German policeman was on the page.

40:44And to supplement the income, I had the idea of writing a biography of John le Carre. And I wrote to him and said, what do you think? And he said, well, I won't encourage you, but I won't try and stop you. And armed with this, I offered to publishers in Britain and America a biography of le Carre. and this went to America, along with the first third of Fatherland. And I remember walking up the street to home and getting home and the phone rang and it was my American agent to say that seven publishers were interested in this first third of Fatherland and forget the Le Carre. He said, this is what we go for.

41:27and it duly sold and it went for more money, the American hardback rights, than all the money I'd ever earned as a journalist up to that point and so obviously everything changed and my life just changed then. It was quite nerve-wracking as I still had to finish the book but And also I mean it's quite a hefty responsibility. I know that you get to keep the money regardless of whether you sell any books or not but there was no absolute guarantee despite the publisher's instincts there was no absolute guarantee that it would be a smash no there was no guarantee and um when i then came to write the second book i had terrible writer's block the worst writer's block that i ever had because of the success of the first yes and i didn't know how do i follow this i don't know how I'd done it um I uh I I felt an imposter I suppose and so that was the first time really in my career that I was checked okay I was and of course was that frightening it was and it was it was frustrating we moved to the country it seemed to the house that Hitler built Oh, God, the joke's going to haunt you, isn't it?

42:43It is. We moved to the country with two young children, and it never seemed to stop raining. And I just sat in this big old Gothic house we'd bought. The rain came through the ceiling. And I struggled to try and put Enigma together. And it was a very different book to Fatherland. But I didn't have to write Fatherland 2. I didn't do you know I did something completely different and that was that again was a good thing to do while I was still quite young liberating actually those are getting off rails aren't you you're not straight-jacketed to the yeah and thereafter I learned my lesson and I thought well I'm not going to just sit here in the rain trying to figure out a novel I must do some journalism to to keep my hand in.

43:38So although I always found column writing quite hard, I went back to the Sunday Times and did a column for about two years or something. That's something of a conquering hero, though, as well. I mean, you'd have been a very different byline post-Fatherland to what you would have been before, from a reader's point of view, if not your colleagues. Yeah, I suppose so. I was also the old acquaintance with Tony Blair, who now of course had inherited the Labour Party after the death of John Smith and immediately I struck up a rapport with him to the extent that when the election of 97 came along he wanted me to travel around everywhere with him and write the campaign book Alastair Campbell really didn't want this and stopped me going for the first two weeks well of course he was keeping his own diary for us oh i see all right but also i think probably quite understandably if he were they were desperately trying to win an election he didn't want some guy from the sunday times sitting in on every strategy meeting and flying everywhere but when it was about halfway through blair obviously decided they were he was going to win and he rang me up and said ignore alistair just come and we're in southampton i think it was something like that come to the hotel and Angie will give you your accreditation and so I was I was given the accreditation as a member of the leader of the Labour Party's office and Alistair greeted me it looked like a cigar had just gone off blown up in his face but then he settled down and it was fine so the last two weeks or so of the campaign I was there through it.

45:25Did you enjoy proximity to power because you hadn't really had it before had you no i it was what it was fascinating and i i although i later had some falling out with tony blair i will always be grateful for for what for him letting me in and letting me see that because um i saw a man on the brink of becoming prime minister with a landslide and got to just sit with him i was actually standing on the living room rug watching the television in his constituency home when David Dimbleby announced the results of the exit poll and said which will be Labour with a majority of 140 um what did he do I said how do you feel and he said I don't feel anything and then the phone went and it was Bill Clinton calling to congratulate it was an epic night because before that I'd been to his constituency house and it was quite just a normal house when i went back that night to be with him when he got the result which had been agreed i would be allowed that access um it was ringed by men with machine guns it was a totally different atmosphere um because of course everyone knew that it was this was the transfer of power and so to see that to be a novelist very few journalists get that access yeah to be a novelist to get that access.

46:50That's what I was thinking. Well, that was real. That was gold dust. And are you in full eyewitness mode or is there a little bit of you that's thinking, crikey, Rob, you've come a long way from Violet Road? I don't think I did feel that. I mean, of course, bear in mind that I now had to write three and a half thousand words. It never stops, does it? It never stops. It was so desperate and tight time frame that I prevailed upon the editor of the Sunday Times by then, John Witherow, to charter a plane to fly me back from the north to London in the early hours of the morning. So I could go straight into the office to write the piece, which had to be done.

47:43No time for self-reflection when you're on deadline. No, no, there wasn't. and I yeah I mean that's good again good training really as a writer you've just simply got to do it there's no point in being precious about it a lot of quite serious professional people are standing around waiting for you to do your job thank you very much