A Very British Coup is a 1982 novel by Chris Mullin, and a 1988 British television adaptation of the novel, adapted by Alan Plater and starring Ray McAnally. The television series, first screened on Channel 4, won Bafta and Emmy awards, and was syndicated to more than 30 countries. The journalist Johann Hari has cited the novel as offering a valuable contemporary insight into the thinking of the Bennite faction of the Labour Party at the time it was written.

Story

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Harry Perkins, an unassuming, blue collar, very left-wing Labour politician is elected Prime Minister, much to everyone's surprise, after Margaret Thatcher. The priorities of Perkins' government include the break-up of all newspaper monopolies, removal of all US bases on UK soil, unilateral nuclear disarmament and real open government. There is immediate scheming to depose him, with the U.S. playing a key but covert role.

The book was written around 1982 - 83, at a time when the Labour Party was in deep trouble and there was much debate about the direction in which it should go. It also has strong echoes of the persistent rumours that have circulated over the years (first becoming widespread public knowledge around 1986, after the publication of the novel but before the broadcast of the TV version) about attempts by the British and American security services, and other wings of the British Establishment, to undermine and depose Harold Wilson's Labour government of the mid-1970s. The endings of the novel and the television version are significantly different. Perhaps unsurprisingly, right wing tabloids like The Sun and Daily Mail condemned the series as socialist propaganda.

External links

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• Chris Mullin, The Guardian, 7 March 2006, "When the threat of a coup seemed more than fiction"

1982 novels | British novels | English novels | Channel 4 television programmes | PBS Masterpiece Theater