Journalist Quentin Letts’s first foray into fiction is an odd undertaking. One would expect a certain gleeful stereotyping of the iniquities of parliament from such a savage political sketch writer. The man who bawled out “happy clappy” hymn composer Graham Kendrick in a previous book, 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, also has little time for 21st-century Christianity in The Speaker’s Wife. But to shoehorn these two ideas into a satirical narrative about a chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons who gets caught up in a political plot to sell churches – and then drop in a stabbing and some unthinking Islamophobia – lends this debut an uneasy, uneven tone.
So while Letts might like to think there’s a vaguely State Of Play-esque takedown of corrupt political systems here, it actually comes across as a throwaway combination of Rev and The Thick of It, as directed by Richard Curtis – there’s even a save-the-day sprint from a funeral. All of which might be quite fun, if the plot wasn’t so overlong and Letts wasn’t so obviously contriving to be waspish.
