“It hit a nerve at the time,” says Mullin, in its depiction of a left-wing government being undermined by a corrupt establishment. Busy now with constituency work, Mullin finds no time to write. But his colleague in the Tony Benn camp, Brian Sedgemore, has managed a couple of what a politician might call “disappointing” novels (after completing such worthy tomes as The How and Why of Socialism) of which Mr Secretary of State (1978) was his first (“drunk and saturated with sex, he wanted to be Prime Minister more than he wanted people to like him”). Disappointing, too, was Joe Ashton’s gruelling cloth-capped Grass Roots, published the previous year Ashton on Soho: “It was a world of Chinese, West Indians.. of whores, homosexuals, con men, tricksters.. porno magazine shops and everything cheap and decadent…

what did these people know about the pits and slag heaps of Yorkshire? Why didn’t they care about the unemployment in Gritnall.” Quite.The single most distinguishing characteristic of the Westminster novel would appear to be the almost complete absence of quality. Like the celebrity novel, most of these books are unpublishable without a famous name attached to them. All the famous MP-novelists of the previous generation – Maurice Edelman, Lawrence Fienbrough, David Walder, AEW Mason – have been consigned to the unpurchasable sections of second-hand bookshops, and completely forgotten The same fate surely awaits the current crop. When Francois Mitterrand died recently, it was revealed that he’d always wanted to write novels; after all, Caesar, Napoleon and Churchill all harboured literary ambitions (Churchill wrote one obscure novel aged 23, its original title was the Edwina-esque Affairs of State).

The French should be grateful that Mitterrand confined his contribution to culture to green-lighting great buildings rather than writing great fictional tomes. But with the possibility of giving up the day job increasing as a general election looms, British politicians are unlikely to kick the literary habit.SEVEN ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS OF THE WESTMINSTER NOVEL FOR ASPIRING MPs:1. Always start at least one chapter: “Big Ben was striking when…”2 Get your own back Julian Critchley does. And Edwina Currie’s alter- ego, Elaine Stalker, chillingly suggests an over-sexed MP cool his “ardour” by sharing “crab paste with Anne Widdecombe”.3 Get a rent boy in there somewhere Or go “back to basics” with a female prostitute.4 Get the Libyans to hi-jack something.5 Quote Browning at some point.6 Dedicate your book to the PM or Chief Whip.7. Sun headlines are essential and fun to write (Douglas Hurd’s effort: “Out you Go”).. Raimund Hoghe, Pina Bausch’s dramaturge for more than a decade, sits neatly on a dark stage while behind him burns a carpet of candles.

To begin the performance, a young man throws handfuls of earth on the candles to extinguish them; earth to earth, dust to dust. An old recording of a mellifluous tenor singing an aria from Lucia di Lammermoor begins, and Hoghe quietly walks to the middle of the stage, undresses, and stands with his back to the audience. Shadows play on the curves of his back, exaggerating the deformity which a severe curvature has left. From time to time, he jumps up to a trapeze suspended above him and hangs, utterly alone and naked on the huge stage. Meinwarts is a requiem for the German tenor Joseph Schmidt, who fled from the Nazis for nine years before dying in a Swiss internment camp at the age of 38.