‘I couldn’t possibly comment’: Novels about political scandals

Thanks to the indelible characters found in the Houses of Parliament, and beyond, it sometimes seems as if there is nothing especially shocking that novelists could dream up for their fictitious political scandals. This means that stories about political naughtiness and shenanigans have to be that much more dramatic in order to ring true. Here are seven novels that mix fiction and reality in the most readable of ways. Rest assured, our current Prime Minister looms large in at least two of them, too.

Seventy-Two Virgins, Boris Johnson

To date, Boris Johnson has only written one novel, along with several works of non-fiction, but it’s surely one for biographers to seize upon. In its tale of Roger Barlow, a bicycling, classics-spouting Conservative MP, who accidentally finds himself caught up in an assassination plot by a group of Islamic extremists attempting to kill the visiting US President, Johnson manages to keep readers guessing as to what is absurdist invention and what is thinly disguised memoir.