Novelist Robert Harris on uncovering the most scandalous secret love affair in British political history

Did they or didn’t they actually have sex? This was the question for Robert Harris, éminence grise of fiction, bestseller, political zeitgeister, father of three, and, at 67, newly a first-time grandfather.

His erotic quest concerned the relationship between married prime minister HH Asquith, the last Liberal Party prime minister to command a majority government, and Venetia Stanley, a beguiling young socialite 35 years his junior.

Heir to le Carré and John Buchan, Harris is the classy English novelist who, in both quality and quantity, reaches the parts most writers cannot reach. The bestseller list seems to keep a place waiting for him, and every book of his is read by the Queen before its publication date. The latest, Precipice, is no exception.

He is no “literary” fiction writer, and such fancy prizes as the Booker have eluded him, perhaps because he is rooted in plain Orwellian journalism and his bestseller DNA causes snobs to disqualify him. Critics underestimate his consummate style at their peril. Nevertheless, his books stand out and make you stand to attention. Which is why his sex inquiry matters.

For more than a century there has been something of a political cover-up, as Asquith was portrayed by his family and most historians as loyal to his wife, perhaps having only a soupçon of platonic tendresse towards the young socialite Venetia Stanley.

Historians have generally steered a wide path to avoid any hint of impropriety, let alone infidelity. Step forward Harris exactly a century later: the author of Fatherland – which imagined a world where Hitler had won the war – and 14 prior novels has turned the perceived narrative on its head, with a nuanced, high-class, kiss-and-don’t-tell account; a serious, intelligent historical novel based on written evidence.

He uses 560 secret letters penned by the Liberal PM, which for many years were partially withheld by Asquith’s family from public view. He weaves into his narrative these letters, which show the full story of the private passion and the secrets spilled by the ardent politician to his young mistress. He then uses his novelist’s skills to recreate her enticing replies – as her actual letters were purposely burned by Asquith to avoid anyone ever discovering any whiff of this scandal.

Rather than a whodunnit, it becomes a who-did-it, a pacy account of an Edwardian love affair, using Asquith’s real letters as the foundation to recreate, along with Venetia’s imagined replies, a compelling roman à clef.

The core of the book is formed of the letters Venetia kept. “They were discovered by her daughter just after her death in 1948,” explains Harris. “Asquith liked to receive a letter a day from Venetia, which, ideally, he could wake up and find on his bedside table in Downing Street. She couldn’t always do one a day, but sheer arithmetic suggests she should have written to him something like 350 times. He appears to have destroyed all the letters. In December 1916, when he left Downing Street, he had a bonfire and got rid of everything.”

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There was almost no opportunity for shared bedrooms, let alone a night in a hotel for this unlikely couple. So, if it was physical, where did it happen? Harris reinvents the term “sex drive” with his controversial conclusion. The eureka moment to solving the riddle of “did they or didn’t they have sex” came during Harris’s research into the actual car in which the couple were driven. It was, as you ask, a black Napier 1908, six-cylinder, 45 horsepower, and became the mise en scène for their trysts.

“The revelation came as I investigated what they drove, and I was astounded to discover it was not the sort of car one would expect. It had a fixed glass screen. There was a curtain. There was even a push-button console with instructions which would light up on the dash, and then silk blinds on all the other windows. So I thought, ‘Now I know why they went for an hour-and-a-half drive every Friday,’” he says.

It was a carnal Bond-like boudoir on wheels, and so gave Harris the opportunity to show how this PM was even more liberal than most had thought. This has been much to the annoyance of some of Asquith’s family – Asquith’s great-grandson Lord Oxford voiced his displeasure at the fictional account.

“It clearly was a physical relationship,” insists Harris, before adding an Edwardian twist. “It was physical – but not, I think, a relationship in which she might have got pregnant! You will have to use your own imagination, but I can tell you he was notoriously unsafe in the back of cars with young women. We were being asked to believe that this Venetia Stanley was the only woman in London he’d ever tried it on with. I don’t think so!”

Sex was not the only critical issue, as HH Asquith often risked Britain’s security during the run-up to the First World War: he sent Venetia confidential cabinet papers as well as kisses and billets-doux, a clear violation of the Official Secrets Act. “It was actually illegal under the act he himself brought in in 1911,” says Harris.

Sex and politics have often entwined Asquith, so was he the unlikely forerunner to Clinton, Johnson, and JFK, each of whom risked their office to pacify a restless desire for sex? “Some at the top channelled all their drive and excitement into politics; for others, libido and ambition were in lockstep. Asquith falls under the latter category.”

But Harris avoids any moral censure. “It would have been easy to take this story and write a #MeToo version of it, with a predatory older man abusing his position to put pressure on a woman less than half his age. I think Venetia was a strong character. She encouraged him. It amused or flattered her to have a relationship with Asquith. And I think that’s her business. And in the end, she broke off the affair.”

Sex of a rather peculiar kind became part of Harris’s research. “Frottage was common-ish... there’s a lot of corridor-creeping in country house weekends. And it was just sort of tacitly understood that, quite often, couples got married because they were the right families, and so on. And after a couple of children, both the man and the woman in a marriage would quite often strike up some other romantic liaison.

“And sometimes, to be blunt, the withdrawal method went wrong. That was known as ‘leaving the church before the sermon’! And so you get Lady Diana Cooper, who was not the daughter of the Duke of Rutland, but was brought up as though she was. Clarissa Churchill Eden was not the daughter of Jack Churchill, Winston’s half-brother. She was the daughter of a Liberal MP called Harold Baker.”

Harris is convinced that the letters relating to this affair were stage-managed by the family to reduce any inference of impropriety. The historian and former home secretary Roy Jenkins was shown the letters, but was not allowed to use them freely. “None of the endearments were printed, and he was at pains to suggest it was just a light diversion, no more than a distraction to Asquith, as singing was to Lloyd George.”

It was something of a new venture for Harris to incorporate such a major role for a woman in his fiction, and as he wrote the final pages of his book, he confesses that a tear did roll down his cheek as he bade her farewell. The novel makes clear that it was a passionate and heartfelt friendship, in which Asquith appreciated Stanley’s common sense, good judgement and wit as well as her physical allure.

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Cemented as one of the great novelists of his generation, Harris is still remembered for his extraordinary journalism at The Observer and The Sunday Times. And his political assessment remains sharp as our conversation turns to more recent politics.

“Austerity was pushed too far by Osborne. The besetting problem in this country has been right-wing nationalism, and successive Tory leaders – including John Major, actually – who never said a good word about Brussels. William Hague, Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith all erected Europe as an easy bogeyman to whip, and to whip up nationalist feeling.

“And I don’t think, in his heart of hearts, David Cameron truly believed this, and he didn’t realise the demons he was unleashing. But I don’t think he said one positive word about Europe, and when he called the referendum, he assumed he would win and failed to realise that he wouldn’t. He was relying on the left to win it for him. And yet he’d never met a trade union leader, and he didn’t seem to have noticed that Labour now had an anti-European leader in the form of Jeremy Corbyn.”

He adds, “It has been a melancholy time in this country, and a lot of people have not really been happy since the night of the referendum. The last 10 years have been a complete failure of statesmanship.”

With the other Tory leaders, no punches are pulled. “May started to land us with the most extreme form of Brexit, triggered Article 50, and then went charging ahead trying to appease the unappeasable right wing of her party, the anti-Europeans. And they had her in the end.

“And then Boris got in and won the election by pretty brutal means, proroguing parliament and a slogan ‘Get [Brexit] Done’. He was a man utterly unsuited to being prime minister, paving the way for a woman even more unsuited in the form of Liz Truss. And then Rishi – a man no one had heard of, who did nothing memorable.

“I am more than disappointed. It’s been a kind of cloud over my sixties, which I never expected and I’m sorry about it.” It is easy to see why Harris’s diversion into liberal politics a century ago was something of a solace.

In the end, Harris is exceptional at taking historical stories and making them irresistibly readable, with a huge emphasis on the writing. “For instance, ‘A man was waiting for me when I came into the room.’ Not a bad sentence, but ‘When I came into the room, a man was waiting’ is slightly better,” he explains, giving a simple masterclass in how to keep the reader hooked. Precipice is, of course, about going over the edge – but always, it is about keeping the reader on edge.

Robert Harris will be in conversation at Henley Literary Festival on 29 Sept; henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk. ‘Precipice’ is out now, published by Hutchinson Heinemann