“Our ruling class have never been up for reelection before, but I hereby serve notice on behalf of the people of Great Britain that their time has come.” These were the concluding words of the Prime Minister’s election night address in Chris Mullin’s classic A Very British Coup, spoken by Harry Perkins, the lifelong socialist who had been catapulted into power.

When A Very British Coup was written in the early 1980s, the scenario seemed plausible. Tony Benn, who Mullin collaborated closely with at the time, had narrowly missed out on election as Labour’s deputy leader. Faced with the emergence of Margaret Thatcher’s project to remake the country in capital’s image, the Labour Party’s grassroots were increasingly leaning left.

Of course, Tony Benn was never to ascend to the Labour leadership, and with the emergence of Neil Kinnock, the party began a long move to the right. This would culminate in the New Labour governments of the late 1990s and early 2000s in which Mullin himself would serve, recording his experiences in a series of popular and largely sympathetic diaries about the Tony Blair years.