18 OCTOBER 2008, Page 22

New Labour, no publisher

Sir: Denis MacShane (Diary, 13 October) asks why someone doesn’t produce a novel on the Blair–Brown years. Five years ago I penned a pastiche which I thought might come well from an Oxford contemporary of Peter Mandelson. But the agent to whom Sandra Howard referred me wasn’t up for it, despite describing the draft as ‘amusing and imaginative’; Ian Hislop didn’t serialise; Politico’s told me that political novels won’t sell.... Whatever the true explanation, my favourite was offered by a Westminster spin doctor. ‘You’re up against it,’ he said. ‘Which publisher’s going to jeopardise his chance of a peerage?’

John Bunyard

Ashford, Kent