Nearly four decades on, Chris Mullin’s 1982 novel A Very British Coup remains a classic piece of leftist fiction and, though billed as “a delicious fantasy” by the Observer, its impact was largely owed to the real world resonance its story carried. Pitting the fictional Sheffield steelworker Harry Perkins and his Labour majority government against a shadowy cabal of interests from across the British establishment, the book is an all-too-plausible rendering of exactly what could happen if an unapologetically socialist administration ever did come to power in the UK — and the threats it would undoubtedly face, both from without and within.

Later adapted into a captivating three-part miniseries by Channel 4, A Very British Coup’s prophetic quality has only grown since its publication thanks to what is now known about the extent of the efforts undertaken by Britain’s political and security establishments to undermine the socialist left. MI5 literally kept a file on Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, who, it has since emerged, narrowly avoided a 1968 coup plot with its origins inside the royal family. Police spied on Tony Benn (with whom Mullin was aligned when the book was written) and a number of other Labour MPs, including future leader Jeremy Corbyn.

A Very British Coup may have been the product of a different moment in British politics, but Corbyn’s surprise ascendency in 2015 undeniably gave it a second life. When the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, wrote ominously in the Daily Telegraph that the MP for Islington North was “a danger to the nation” and “unfit to govern,” he could have been ventriloquizing the novel’s antagonist, Sir Peregrine Craddock, who fights Perkins at every turn in his capacity as the head of Britain’s security services.