HOWZAT

But even nastier? “I think there was far less hypocrisy then in a way. You wanted power because it was good to have power. You didn’t dress it up with a lot of concern for the wellbeing of the nation or the starving poor. You just went for it. That’s not really allowed now. Tony Blair can’t say: ‘Well, of course, I want power because it’s nice to boss people about’.”

Harris so buries himself in his period that the parallels with contemporary politics are never forced. Some, however, leap from the page. The greatest is the burning of Ostia by pirates in 67BC, a crisis that led to the granting of extra- ordinary powers to Pompey the Great.

“The burning of Ostia was a kind of 9/11 for the Romans. The special powers that were then granted to this military overlord did, I think, begin the final stages of destabilisation of the whole system. On the one hand, certainly, piracy was a huge problem in the Roman Empire. On the other hand, the threat did seem to be wiped out virtually overnight (by Pompey). As Cicero points out, it makes one wonder if it was quite such a big threat to begin with.

“The Americans have suffered a terrible loss with the twin towers but they haven’t, actually, suffered anything since. For a country of a third of a billion people, that attack, terrible, awful, though it was, was the rough equivalent of the British loss of life in about 15 minutes on the first morning of the Somme. Yet it’s justified a complete turning upside down of American values.

The Ghost by Robert Harris

The real Ghost is Robert Harris. And what a jubilantly spiteful ghost he has proved to be, says Rod Liddle

BACKGROUND

• Extract: The Ghost by Robert Harris

• A short extract from The Ghost by Robert Harris

• Only the togas have changed

• Summer reading for lawyers

• Harris points pen at a leader very like Blair

BACKGROUND

• Pompeii by Robert Harris

• Trapped between wife and mistress

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• Audio extract of The Ghost

“The question that’s posed quite acutely by the fall of the Roman Republic is: can you be the world’s only superpower and remain a democracy or must the demands of national security and the distortions and corruptions of money and the political process destroy the ideal of the citizens’ militia which is what Rome, as America, began as?”

DEMOCRACY UNDER THREAT, a world dominated by a single superpower, oratory, spin, electoral fraud . . . they are, as Harris knows, as much in the politics of today as they are in Imperium. For the political anorak, there are also buried in the text political quotations that have a familiar ring. In one speech Cicero borrows from a coruscating attack that Nye Bevan made on Anthony Eden during Suez 2,000 years later: “No, no, he may have believed it. In which case . . . you may reasonably conclude that he was too stupid to be a Roman governor (or Prime Minister).” Look out also for bon mots borrowed from François Mitterrand, Lyndon Johnson, Lenin and Harry Truman (“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog”).

For the reader, however, the question that haunts every page is “Who does this chap Cicero remind me of?” As we talk, Harris at different times compares the lawyer-cum-politician to George Carman, Benjamin Disraeli, Peter Mandelson, and Bill Clinton (“without the sex”). And then there is Tony Blair.

“By the time that Blair got in in ’97 I had got to know him quite well. During the campaign I travelled around with him on his plane and I picked up endless things that I couldn’t really use: tiny things like nuances and atmosphere.

“For instance, I used to be with Blair before he’d go on and do a big speech maybe to a couple of thousand people and witnessed this odd business of him turning into himself, of being in the room but not being there, of going off and staring at the wall: zoning out. But he also had this love of the crowd and of performance. I can’t remember the precise context, but John Major had made a speech when he was Prime Minister and I remember Blair saying: ‘God, what I would have done with that material!’ It lodged in my brain along with lots of other things you can only really use in a novel.

“Why Cicero is attractive to me as a character is that he’s the ultimate professional, perhaps the first professional politician. I wanted to get away from this business of just writing about politicians betraying their principles. It is too easy to go down the Rory Bremner route and say that they are all criminals. I wanted to write about the exhilaration which takes people into it in the first place, and to regard it as an art form, if you like.”

In Harris’s hands, the great game becomes a beautiful one.

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