Wrapped up in satire, a serious lesson about the fine line between success and scandal

Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church. When it rains, you abandon your flimsy tent and instead bed down in the hushed aisles. At the beginning of Ferdinand Mount’s new novel, Making Nice, Dickie Pentecost and his wife Jane, together with their daughters Flo and Lucy, are doing just that. In the morning they meet fellow champer Ethel, short for Ethelbert, a bewitching man with stony eyes and sticking-up hair. ‘Ethel,’ says Dickie. ‘I suppose they could have shortened it to Bert instead.’

After losing his job as the diplomatic editor of a national newspaper (‘Who needs diplomatic briefings on Chatham House Terms when it’s all out on social media and the Foreign Secretary himself is tweeting like a bloody blue tit?’), Dickie is hired as director of public affairs at Ethel’s dodgy PR firm Making Nice. From Osmotherley House, also known as Smothers, Ethel and his equally eccentric gang are seeking to engineer a paradigm shift:

You see, Dickie, capitalism may be the only game left in town, but it’s not a game people like playing much […] the ambition is to transform the System into a game you can’t help falling in love with.