Anthony Clavane: Who needs political thrillers when real-life politics is this Machiavellian

It was, she enthused, “a fast-paced political thriller”. Which is my favourite kind of unputdownable page-turner. Kuenssberg did not elaborate on the plot but it seemed to be mired in the political dark arts, mixing comedy with tragedy and featuring lots of dissembling, grudge-settling and in-fighting.

The BBC political editor was, of course, telling News at Ten viewers all about the day’s dramatic events at Westminster. Three cabinet ministers had resigned, the Chequers consensus had imploded and an embattled prime minister was insisting she would fight all comers. In other words, Theresa vs Boris part two.

Almost a year ago, the Beeb screened Theresa vs Boris part one. This fast-paced political thriller was an engrossing account of how May snatched the Tory leadership from under Johnson’s nose. With a little help from a bespectacled backstabber known to his former chum as Brutus. Anyway, it brought to mind House of Cards, the superlative TV adaptation of Michael Dobbs’ fast-paced political thriller about the machinations of a Machiavellian chief whip, which was responsible for the phrase ”You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment” entering the national consciousness.

I am very partial to a bit of old-fashioned, brutal, Tory bloodletting, real or fictional. House of Cards was screened in 1990 during a Conservative leadership contest triggered by Geoffrey Howe’s uncharacteristically savage attack on Margaret Thatcher. In the 1960s, Randolph Churchill wrote an exhilarating account of how Alec Douglas-Home emerged from the party’s magic circle to take over from Harold Macmillan.

Who needs novels, plays and tense TV dramas when you have the twists and turns of such real-life scheming and treachery to keep you entertained? It’s been almost six weeks since Hugh Grant gave the performance of his career in A Very English Scandal – and I need my fix. For those who missed out on this highly-praised three-parter, it chronicled the rise and fall of an ambitious Eton-educated politician. No, not Boris. The central protagonist was Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe who, in the 70s, allegedly arranged the attempted murder of his ex-lover Norman Scott.

For all his faults, we should be thankful that Johnson continues to charm, engage and captivate our divided nation. As Kuenssberg, clearly angling for Mary Beard’s job as host of the arts show Front Row Late, told Huw Edwards: “Sometimes Brexit feels like a long complicated novel that’s a bit boring and you forget the plot by the time you’ve got to the middle of a chapter...”

We need Johnson to liven things up. Boris’s truth is often stranger than Boris’s fiction. And that’s pretty strange. He once wrote a novel about a gang of bumbling terrorists penetrating the heart of parliament. He is often compared to fictional characters, mostly comedy ones. Only this week his former editor Max Hastings referred to him as “Blackadder in a blond wig” and an EU Brexit negotiator reckoned he was tilting at windmills – an allusion to Don Quixote’s addiction to fighting futile battles.

The former Foreign Secretary even has a fictional namesake. I once read a sci-fi novel called Agent of Chaos, published in 1967, which followed the adventures of a buffoonish rebel called Boris Johnson. The antihero, wrote the author Norman Spinrad, was “quite willing to babble on, and did so at every opportunity, but the man was a fool.”

The prime minister will be hoping Spinrad turns out to be a prophet. After a failed attempt to depose the ruler of the universe, his great rival gloats: “It was all a trap, Mr Boris Johnson, and you walked right into it.” Only time will tell whether the real Boris’s jostling for position turns out to be a futile gesture or part of a cunning plan. One thing is clear, as the politicians like to say – however entertaining they may be, the Tories’ dramatic shenanigans appear to be taking precedence over the good of the country.