JACKIE MCGLONE

ROBERT HARRIS began his illustrious career as a political writer early. He was just six-years-old when he wrote his first-ever essay, Why Me and My Dad Don’t Like Sir Alec Douglas-Home. “My classmates wrote about what they did on their holidays, but I suppose you could say I started as I meant to go on,” acknowledges the former political editor-turned-international bestselling author.

“The grammar has improved but here I am at 60 still writing about Alec Douglas-Home – among many others – and, of course, about politics,” says Harris, who has sold more than 4.5 million books worldwide. The former Conservative Prime Minister plays a small role in Harris’s latest, gripping novel, Munich, which is his 12th and which, like so much of his fiction, is rooted firmly in fact, but with added spy drama.

Set during the peace talks in the sweaty summer of September, 1938, Munich relates how the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain – Douglas-Home, then Alec Dunglass, was his Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) – and entourage flew to Munich to negotiate with Hitler, determined to prevent another war. Their visit culminated in the infamous moment when Chamberlain returned waving a piece of paper claiming, “Peace for our time.”

“It was Chamberlain’s wife’s idea that he should say those four words,” says Harris, adding that Dunglass confided this to a secretary at No 10 – “who predicted that one day he would be PM.” Harris describes Dunglass thus, “...the heir to an earldom whose misfortune, or perhaps it was the key to his success, was to look as if he had just stepped out of a novel by P G Wodehouse.” Later, he notes the PPS’s “slightly goofy expression.”

A master storyteller, with a forensic eye for detail – who knew that tiny steel swastikas adorned the taps in the lavatory on Hitler’s train? – Harris is a splendid writer. Every sentence is smooth. His beady observations of the main players are a joy: in his Victorian wing-collars, Chamberlain is “corvine” and “ostentatiously modest,” while Hitler has the body odour of “a workman who had not bathed or changed his shirt in a week.”

“It is almost compelling how nondescript he was,” thinks Hugh Legat, a private secretary to the PM, one of two fictional, old Oxford friends on opposite sides of the diplomacy. The other is Paul Hartmann, a high-born diplomat in the German foreign office and member of the anti-Hitler resistance. The powerful story, one of loyalty and betrayal, is told through the eyes of the two men as the action moves from No 10 to the marble magnificence of the Fuhrerbau, where Hitler and Mussolini sat with Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier to settle the fate of Czechoslovakia.

Needless to say, although it is not possible to visit what was once Hitler’s apartment, in Prinzregentenplatz, Harris did so, after exploring “the geography” of No 10 Downing Street, particularly Chamberlain’s study. But then, Harris is the man who charmed his way into the Vatican to research his last, brilliant novel, Conclave, which takes place over 72 secretive hours during which the cardinals elect a new pope.

“I need a strong sense of place in my novels,” he explains. Of the rooms that made up Hitler’s apartment – now a police headquarters – he adds: “Seldom have I felt the presence of so many ghosts. I have written about that visit and it was as if the players in the drama of the Munich conference had only just stepped outside.”

And there’s the rub, continues Harris, speaking from the rambling Berkshire vicarage he shares with his wife, novelist Gill Hornby (sister of the writer Nick Hornby), with whom he has four children. Their home is reportedly known as “the house that Hitler built,” after Harris’s speculative, Nazi thriller Fatherland, came out in 1992 – the first debut novel to go to the top of the bestseller lists where it stayed for five years – and in which he asked, “What if Hitler had won World War Two?”

How do you write about Hitler? “I had started writing Munich and I thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ Putting the character of Hitler into a novel felt so awful, so cheap. It was too difficult. I told my publishers that I was going to have to abandon the book. Then I realised that if I introduced another character, my German protagonist, he could see Hitler on a balcony, say. He could glimpse him walking along a railway platform. He could also suddenly be taken into the presence although I never name Hitler in that scene.

“Introducing Hartmann unlocked the whole book for me. As a writer, I just didn’t want to be in the same room as Hitler. It was a big challenge. Somehow, I got through it. Hitler is radioactive in a novel – if you have him there, then he has to be behind heavy steel doors. Whereas, this book is a first – the first work of fiction to feature Chamberlain.”

Nottinghamshire-born into a loving, working-class family and Cambridge-educated, Harris acknowledges that there is a neat symmetry in the fact that 25 years after Fatherland, he has returned to the Nazi “thriller.”

“I had always wanted to write a novel about the Munich Agreement – this book is the culmination of my fascination with it,” he says. “In 1988, I made a BBC2 documentary, God Bless You, Mr Chamberlain, to mark the 50th anniversary of the conference. I have maintained a mild obsession with it ever since, because I’ve always taken the slightly contrary view of the Munich Agreement.

“Even 30 years ago I liked the idea of writing a novel about a civil servant involved in the appeasement, who flew to Munich with Chamberlain but who faces conflicts in his private life because of his wife’s infidelity. At what point do you stop appeasing? When do you make a stand? There are the moral dilemmas and there is the great drama of this summit meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler. Also, I really wanted to write a character who married the private and the public. I couldn’t find a way, however, until I came up with the German.

“But I also wanted to write about Chamberlain, for whom I have a great deal of sympathy. Yes, he was wrong; he had many faults. He was vain and he made a great mistake saying, ‘Peace for our time,’ when it clearly wasn’t. But I am not sure we would have won the war if we had not had Neville Chamberlain. The fact of the matter is the RAF did have 10 times as many planes in 1940 as it had in 1938.

“More than that, Chamberlain said it was a spiritual breakdown – it was just 20 years after 750,000 had died in the First World War. The country needed to see the government doing everything possible to preserve peace, which not only gave us extra time for rearmament, but also a moral authority, which Churchill was able to exploit. But it was Chamberlain who put that in place.”

When he finishes one novel, Harris immediately starts another. He writes from January to June every year because his publishers like to publish a new Robert Harris every September. “I’ve published three novels in the last three years so I may take a break next year, although I do have several ideas I’m thinking about,” he admits.

Currently, he’s stagestruck. The Royal Shakespeare Company is adapting his magisterial Imperium trilogy, about Cicero, into six plays opening at Stratford-upon-Avon in November. It stars Richard McCabe – recently seen on stage as “a brilliant” Harold Wilson in The Audience – and Siobhan Redmond as Cicero’s wife.

“Other books of mine have been adapted for cinema,” says Harris, whose novel The Ghost – about Tony Blair, an erstwhile friend of Harris, who concedes he has indeed known many powerful people during his career – became The Ghost Writer starring Ewan McGregor. “But I have never been behind the scenes on a huge stage production. It’s thrilling. The Imperium trilogy is also being adapted for a 12-part TV series.”

Finally, I ask him whether he thinks Munich has contemporary resonance – after all, at one point we are told that Hitler “wants to make Germany great again.”

“I think that that resonance is often subconscious on my part, but then all historical novels have contemporary relevance,” he replies. “They reflect the concerns of the novelist and I suppose the whole Brexit thing made me think about our relationship with Europe and how we view the past, how we understand one another. But also, I do have this strange, weird, unhealthy fascination with the Second World War and the Nazi era.

“It was such a huge event in human history – it still affects us so much, especially in the past 18 months. I think it is the duty of writers to confront the past while remaining true to the spirit of the times. I love it, it’s like time travelling – I’ve actually been with Chamberlain on that plane to Munich!”

Munich, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, £20). Robert Harris will be in conversation with Allan Massie at the City of Edinburgh Methodist Church, Nicolson Square, 7pm on September 25.