Robert Harris looked doubtful when I asked if he’d be glued to his television set for the Pope’s funeral. “I don’t know. I’m almost conclaved-out, to be absolutely honest with you,” he said.
One small part of the Pope’s legacy is that a moment during his election, back in 2013, inspired Harris’s thriller Conclave—which was adapted into last year’s Oscar-winning film. The book and film took us behind the scenes after the death of a pope and showed the chapel intrigues and hostel politicking as cardinals maneuvered to succeed him. What Harris calls the “ultimate election” was revealed in a way we had never seen before.
Harris, whose 16 bestsellers include several set in ancient Rome, embarked on Conclave after seeing the faces of the cardinal electors as the Pope appeared on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square after his election. “They reminded me of the Roman Senate: elderly men of power. I thought, there’s a good story here.”
The resulting work of fiction captured the popular imagination and filled the information vacuum about this opaque process so successfully it was hard to find an article or a news bulletin about the death of the Pope that did not reference it.
Why are so many of us—Catholic, Anglican, of another faith or of none at all (as he is)—still captivated by the death of a pope and the election of a new one? “There’s the human drama: of someone who’s supposed to be God’s representative on Earth who is mortal and dies, like the rest of us,” says Harris. “And then there’s the ritual of the Catholic Church, designed to awe and amaze. It’s incredibly visually strong. There is also that medieval element to the whole thing, which is very powerful.”
And then there is the conclave itself, the election of a new pope behind the closed doors of the Sistine Chapel, beneath Michelangelo’s fresco, which will take place this month.
“The conclave is a huge world event. The ultimate election,” says Harris. “The world comes to a stop to watch. It’s riveting.”
Bigger than a U.S. presidential election? The pope may not have an American president’s ability to shape events, he concedes, and the impact of what one says may be debatable. “The famous quote of Stalin—‘how many divisions does the pope have?’—remains absolutely true.”
However, there is a “huge spiritual dimension” with a pope leading 1.4 billion Catholics. “This is the only global election. It takes place in one of the jewels of the Renaissance. And the whole psychological process of imprisoning these people—sequestering them from the outside world—and forcing them to come up with a verdict is like an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery on top of everything else.”
It is also exciting. “It’s a race, and anyone who thinks they know who’s going to win is a fool. No one predicted that Francis was going to win.”
The Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who will participate in the conclave, said that while the film made “great drama”, he and his peers would be relying on the prompting of the Holy Spirit to make their decision. Harris chuckles. The rules preclude pacts or promises of a vote, on pain of excommunication. “Well, prove it. People are locked away in the Casa Santa Marta [the hostel built to house the cardinals during the conclave] for lunch and dinner and breakfast. They meet in corridors, the chapel and in their bedrooms. Of course they go into groups and talk. They may not actually have a deal—‘I’ll make you secretary of state if you deliver me five votes’—although it might come close to that.”
There is one golden rule. “It’s important not to appear ambitious. That’s the kiss of death.” But many crave the top job. “A lot of them, maybe a quarter, vote for themselves on the first ballot.”
When he wrote the book, Harris, known for meticulous research, spoke to a cardinal who had attended a conclave and was given a privileged tour of the Vatican that included the sacristy, known as the “Room of Tears”, where new popes are robed. He was also shown the door of the modest apartment occupied by the late Pope in the Casa Santa Maria, where he chose to lodge instead of in the grandeur of the Apostolic Palace. “Someone said it’s like a private clinic. The idea that he should have chosen to live there all this time is extraordinary. We wouldn’t want to live there.”
We are talking in the drawing room—full of books and pictures—of the splendid gothic Victorian rectory, on an idyllic rural canalside in Berkshire, which he bought with the proceeds of Fatherland, his first book. The novel’s premise was that Hitler won the war and Harris, 68, jokes that this is the “house that Hitler bought”.
Tucked away here in a large, pleasingly untidy study, he has written more books than he would have done if he had stayed in London, he believes. His wife, Gill Hornby, also a successful novelist (and sister of yet another novelist, Nick Hornby) is elsewhere in the house. Maisie, their golden retriever, lies on her back between us, soliciting tummy rubs.
A conclave is a “rather brilliant system,” contends Harris. “You have to find a consensus around a candidate. If British political parties had elected using a conclave in the last few years, we would have had better prime ministers.”
Reporting suggests the cardinals are split between liberals and conservatives and that there will be candidates for the first African and Asian pope, as well as a group championing an Italian pope. This sounds familiar from his book. “These fault lines have been there since the 1960s.”
Will the cardinals follow the trend towards conservatism in the political world? “You could say the zeitgeist appears to be more authoritarian. It’s perhaps more likely that they will react against it and see that the importance of the Christian message needs to be strongly put across and that they’ll need someone capable of doing that.The ultimate irony is the last person that Pope Francis was photographed with was JD Vance [the US vice-president] who has come to Europe and lectured us on Christian ethics. It looked to me like the Pope was quite aware of who he’d got in his room and was pretty keen to see the back of him.”
The Pope criticized Donald Trump over his policies towards migrants, but the US president attended his funeral. “Trump and Vance have launched an all-out assault on everything that the Christian message is. I find it extraordinary that they say that we have turned our backs on our Christian heritage [which is] for the welcoming of strangers, the nurturing and nursing of the poor and the sick and the vulnerable. We’re preached at by billionaires and tech bros without any apparent sense of irony.”
Harris is currently working on a book about Marcus Agrippa, the Roman general who helped Augustus become the first emperor, and sees echoes of the end of the Roman Republic in what is happening in America today.
“They took great care to preserve the facade of [the Republic]: consuls and magistrates and debates. But it became a hereditary oligarchy. Billionaires stirring up the masses against the elites; the denouncing of the Senate as corrupt and full of unpatriotic people and a general sense that the Republic divided 50-50 and neither could comprehend what the other thought it was supposed to be.The assault on institutions in America, the deportation of people who shouldn’t have been sent away, the attacks on the universities: this is authoritarianism and once that takes hold, it’s like dry rot. I think we’re moving into something rather like the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire. I hope it won’t be attended by the sort of bloodshed that happened then.”
Does Trump share similarities with any Roman emperors? “Definitely there’s an element of Nero. Presiding over the dinner table in Mar-a-Lago, that’s very like Nero.”
Trump, he says, has the world hanging on his every word in a way no other figure has since 1938, a period he wrote about in his book about the Munich conference. “I’m not making a comparison here, but not since 1938 and Adolf Hitler has one man got the whole world jumping in the way that Donald Trump has. Everyone has to pay court to him, everyone worries about what he’s going to do next. Nobody can work out whether he’s rational or whether this is all kind of completely mad. We really have not seen anything like that for, what, 87 years?”
Harris’s last book, Precipice, was about the slide into war in 1914. “Our grandparents and parents, who went through 1914 and then 1939, built up institutions like the U.N., like Nato, to try and make sure that nationalism never occurred. That seems to lead almost inevitably to war. We now have an American president who believes firmly in nationalism, as do a lot of politicians. And we are tearing up all those things that were built so carefully. There’s almost a sense that the storm has to break.”
One of the photographs in his drawing room features Lord Mandelson, an old friend and former president of the board of trade, who is now ambassador in Washington. Perhaps one day he will be able to write a book about how Mandelson beat the odds to save us from Trump’s tariffs. “I do think a book called ‘The Ambassador’ would be rather good. I’ve spoken to him a couple of times on the phone. He certainly seemed to be enjoying it. And he’s probably the right man at the right time. He knows a lot about trade. He’s adept and experienced. And even his worst enemies can’t say he wasn’t an effective minister.”
A Labour supporter, Harris was close to Tony Blair as a journalist before 1997, but disagreed with him about the Iraq war and portrayed him unflatteringly in his book The Ghost. There has been a rapprochement. “I’ve seen him and he’s always been friendly.”
Sir Keir Starmer is “curious”, he says. “What the Romans would have called a tabula rasa [blank slate], which is not necessarily a bad thing at a time of flux. He astonishingly changes his views on things. He seems to learn on the job. Most people would surely hope that he can pull it around, because we don’t seem to have any other serious contenders.
“The country is in the worst state of my lifetime because of debt. The pain that will be required to deal with this will test democracy. But one of the attractions of history is however bad you think you’ve got it, someone’s had it worse in the past. For me this is one of the great consolations of history, almost like a secular religion: there’s something very moving about how humanity struggles through all these things and somehow copes with them. For that reason I’m always, deep down, optimistic.”
Damian Whitworth is a features editor at The Times of London