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I felt I had a sort of duty."The book's first half concerns John's relationship with a rent boy, Giacomo, whom he kills in a classically motiveless acte gratuite; the second narrative thread concerns John's two daughters and their obsessive entanglement with the same man, Henry. The novel is written with a nervy, formal elegance couched somewhere between the work of Brigid Brophy and Hensher's friend Alan Hollinghurst, of Swimming Pool Library fame, although the gay sex scenes are handled with less muck-sweat-provoking explicitness.Characteristically, Hensher manages to align the Fall of Thatcher (who appears, at certain times, to be narrating the novel) with the rent boy's murder. It's not supposed to be a roman a clef ..." A weary look passes over his face. He is a little fed up having to explain these things, to point out that he is not offering a gay retread of Edwina Currie's A Parliamentary Affair. "I really set out to write the most serious novel I possibly could Parliament's always treated in this bonkbuster fashion.

I felt I had an opportunity to write about it in a different way ... "I set myself a technical task of not naming any MPs or offering hints about who people are. We are human, and we cannot write down what happened, not everything that happened. We can only write down the significance of the events, in the end; we can only write down, and record, the decisions that are come to."No real-life MPs feature in the pages, although Mrs Thatcher appears at several points to be narrating John's story. Long exposure to the Journals Office had rendered it, in Hensher's mind, as a large and potent metaphor of human behaviour.

"They kept the minutes of the House, which was called the Journal of the House Everything needs its minutes to be kept. Everything needs to be reduced from what occurs to what it means. By the time he started Kitchen Venom, he had got a new position in the Journals Office, which keeps the minutes of whatever decisions ("votes and proceedings") the House may have come to. Tantalisingly, he set much of the novel in the same office and made the central character, John, a Clerk of the Journals and homosexual like himself. Some nice-looking, if un-stunning, women like Virginia Bottomley or Harriet Harman become much more attractive. Whether it's got something to do with the sexuality of power, I don't know."At all events, it got Hensher writing again.

A lot of the reason for Mrs Thatcher's success, for instance, was that a lot of people were sexually fascinated by her. There's a slightly artificial hothouse atmosphere, in which the sexual side is very much exaggerated. People readily become obsessed with members who are even remotely good looking or attractive. Clerks get the witnesses to come and give evidence, and write the questions the ministers are supposed to ask.