Slow Horses author Mick Herron has compared the “rightwing bogeyman figure” from his popular spy series to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The 62-year-old novelist was at Balliol College, Oxford at the same time as the former Tory leader, who read classics at the university from 1983 to 1987.
Herron said his floppy haired, bicycle-riding MP character Peter Judd, played in the TV series adaptation by Samuel West, shares Johnson’s “self-obsession” and “complete disregard for ethics”.
“Public school educated, a sense of entitlement, self-obsession, complete disregard for ethics or morality or integrity,” Herron summarised Peter Judd’s character to The Guardian.
“I mean, Boris Johnson fits that. But so do many other politicians,” he said.
Herron’s spy series follows a group of intelligence agents investigating espionage, based at the fictional Slough House – and the author attributes the success of the series with the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Slow Horses first hit shelves in 2010, with Herron struggling to find a publisher for the book’s sequel, Dead Lions, until 2013.
The series really took off with the publication of London Rules two years after the Brexit referendum in 2018. “The country’s misfortune was my good luck,” Herron said.
Seven further books followed, with his eighth, Clown Town, to be published alongside the release of the fifth series of the franchise’s TV adaptation this month.
The series has reached a whole new audience thanks to the Apple TV+ adaptation starring Gary Oldman as the dishevelled, mildly alcoholic leader of Slough House, Jackson Lamb.
Oldman stars in the show alongside Kristin Scott Thomas as MI5’s deputy director Diana Taverner and Jack Lowden as River Cartwright, an ambitious but naive field agent.
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Each season of the critically acclaimed show is based on a different book in Herron’s series, with season five dropping on 24 September.
The latest novel, Clown Town follows 2022’s short story Standing by the Wall. Taverner is pulling political strings behind the scenes and Lamb is determined to expose career-ending MI5 secrets.
When asked elsewhere in the interview about his series’ success, Herron, who previously worked as a sub-editor at a legal journal, said: “There was never a moment in my previous life where I thought this was possible.”
