Tuesday

Well this has to be a fiction writer's dream, because you couldn't really make it up could you?

First the live debates, then the election results, the parties' machinations, the unlikely Lib-Conservative pact (who says it doesn't make a difference that they're both public school boys and that the smell of power isn't more over-whelming than principle?) And now Brown's resignation. I still think he was the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time, but still there's a poignancy in his limping away, finally beaten, like an injured bison.

It already has the feel of a novel. And yet we don't see our political world mirrored that often in our story-telling. Wilson, Heath, Thorpe, Scargill, the Gang of Four, Thatcher, Blair, here are "off-the-peg" characters and plots which enthral, infuriate, anger and sometimes even move us to tears. Interesting that most writers appear to shy away from them.

I'm still playing with an idea for another novel and how to interweave the Thatcher years into the personal story of a deluded would-be Kate Adie trapped in a going-nowhere job at the BBC of the 1980s. But all of a sudden I'm off on a story about two young teenage boys who meet at a chess match between their respective schools - Eton and Westminster - and sneak out for an illicit smoke and make a pact....