Ferdinand Mount: ‘You couldn’t not be frightened of Margaret Thatcher!’

The literary editor and novelist has form in the dark arts of the political class - he ran Thatcher's policy unit in the 1980s - and puts it to good use in his latest, hilarious novel

As Ferdinand Mount's publisher happily notes, his latest novel, Making Nice, is what you might get if you crossed a little light Evelyn Waugh with Armando Iannucci's TV satire The Thick of It. But in truth, the book is far more clever and modish even than that suggests, and not only because it opens with a scene in which one of its characters goes champing (camping in a church, in case you're not up to speed). There can't be a person alive who would be able to read it without thinking of Dominic Cummings, the man whose antic spirit infuses its narrative like angostura bitters in a gin and tonic.

The book relates the adventures of Dickie Pentecost, the diplomatic editor of a newspaper that sounds not unlike the FT. Having been made redundant (we are reshaping our editorial capacity... who needs diplomatic briefings on Chatham House terms when the foreign secretary himself is tweeting like a bloody blue tit?"), Dickie joins a dodgy PR firm called Making Nice, founded by a charismatic but possibly insane younger man called Ethel (short for Ethelbert).