'A Very British Coup'

A Very British Thriller:
a review of 'A Very British Coup' by Chris Mullin

Among politics junkies nowadays, Chris Mullin is best remembered for his laudable campaigns against miscarriages of justice. That's when he is remembered at all, for he was an obscure politician. What many don't know is that he also once wrote a rather good novel. 'A Very British Coup' is one of the most fun thrillers you will ever read, though it does help if you have a general interest in politics. Not real politics, but the type of counterfeit that requires you to vote tribally and thoughtlessly, placing an 'X' in a box once every few years.

In truth, politics is quite a dry business. In a way, Mullin succeeds here because he portrays the political game in a way that we would like to believe it is but which, deep down, we know it isn't. Here there are 'goodies' and 'baddies' of the type that resemble the cynical cut-outs portrayed in the popular media and from the demagogic margins. Real politics isn't like that, but the fantasy world depicted by the media eschews reality for false dichotomies, moral outrage, construed conflict and manufactured confrontation. The central character in 'A Very British Coup', and the hero, is 'Harry Perkins', a populist left-wing politician who somehow becomes Prime Minister. Perkins has campaigned in poetry and plans to govern in overt, hard-left prose. Railed against him are the shadowy forces of the Establishment: in the main, certain rogue figures in the intelligence community who do not want to see Britain transformed into what, presumably, Perkins would consider a 'fair' society. The plot charts the machinations of Perkins' enemies and the hero's fight against them. The plans to thwart Perkins get nastier as the story progresses.

The naiveté and political illiteracy of the premise doesn't matter. Mullin is working 'in-house' here, writing an Establishment novel for an audience that is, variously, priggish and credulous. It's not great literature, either stylistically or in its insight, but it's clever. There are those who think the Establishment is conspired against the Left. Then there are those who think Labour is part of the Left, but only with a Perkins knight-like figure who will assail instituted injustice and leaven, imperceptibly, the mores of socialites and 'elitists' alike towards ever-more egalitarian ends and objects. And there are some who even delude themselves that they are part of one of these conspiracies. These are people who are all on the same side, whether they realise it or acknowledge it, and whether or not they like it. They are all, also, wrong. 'A Very British Coup' is a novel about those people and their wrongness. It's a very British thriller in that it is largely clueless in its subject-matter, and knows it, but manages to be entertaining anyway, and reserves right for the end a brief flash of insight and reflection. Perkins - and therefore, by extension, the author - is asking us: 'Does the staged version of politics that we see each day played-out in the media actually do anything for us? Is it real?' What was lucky for me is that I read the book before I saw the TV adaptation, and so I managed to recognise that poignant side of it. The televised version is excellent, I might add, but the book has a much superior ending. Mullin, a politician formed in the satire boom and writing this during a period of increasing Realpolitik and cynicism, wraps up the answer in Perkins' fate.

T. T. Rogers