Michael Dobbs wears several hats – author, politician and, most famously, creator and executive producer of House of Cards – and he is absolutely clear that he can only wear one at a time.
So, when asked whether his amoral anti-hero Frank Underwood would have come to London to deliver a lecture to Britain on why it should remain in the EU, as President Obama did last month, his face drops and it is quickly made clear that I should withdraw the question. Fiction and fact are not to be melded.
Over tea in the House of Lords, where he sits on the Conservative benches as Baron Dobbs of Wylye, we first talk about the origins of House of Cards, the novel he published in 1989 which was turned into a hit series for the BBC in 1990 and then rebooted by Netflix in 2013.
“The whole [House of Cards] story began with me sitting by a swimming pool and going through the tempestuous time I’d just had with Mrs Thatcher. On my writing pad I wrote the initials F.U.”
Did that stand for ‘f*** you’, I ask?
“That’s why he’s called Francis Urquhart (and in the US series Frank Underwood) and that’s what his character is, too. It may be childish but it’s my form of therapy.”
He goes on to explain that he and Thatcher fell out during the 1987 general election campaign. She fired him as her chief of staff, in which post he was labelled a “baby-faced hitman”, when he was 38.
He had worked for and around her for a decade in various senior jobs, so he might have expected a less brutal exit from her inner circle, but he still regards her as the greatest peacetime prime minister Britain had in the 20th century.
“It was fantastic to be around her but occasionally it was a bumpy ride,” he says.
“It was a week before the 1987 election. She thought I was incompetent and disloyal and plotting against her, which was utter nonsense. It was all about her having been there a bit too long. This is what happens to prime ministers. They almost always end up getting backstabbed and chopped to death, dragged out with their fingernails in the carpet. They never know when to go. But as I say, she was the greatest thing. They’re still making extraordinary films about that fantastic personality. But she had to be dragged out, too.”
So, he channelled energy from this experience into creating Urquhart, the scoundrel who plots his way to the top of the political tree.
Almost three decades later, Urquhart may have become Underwood but he remains a key fixture in Dobbs’s life.
“I have a great relationship with [House of Cards’ current broadcaster] Netflix,” he says. “They’ve been incredibly supportive and co-operative and I happen to think they’ve done a brilliant job. Part of my role is almost spiritual. I’m the only person who can connect what is going on now with the very origins of it. House of Cards is now an industrial phenomenon – a global series in the sense that I have had conversations with the President of China about it. I am the only person who personifies that progress [of House of Cards].”
He goes to Baltimore, where the show is made, every year and is in regular contact with the team behind it.
“I don’t write it. It’s 13 parts a year – the equivalent of five feature films – but we’ve set up a system whereby if I fell under a bus tomorrow the whole thing would carry on and I think it’s just brilliant the way the whole thing has created a life of its own. I just feel incredibly proud. They are creating something very special.”
He adds that he thinks the American series has improved on the original because it is about the relationship between the Underwoods.
“My original book was really about [just] him. The dramatic possibilities mean the whole thing has much stronger legs. We’re now into a series which is not really about politics at all. The real driver is the characters. I think the characters are stronger in this version than in my book.”
He won’t be drawn on how many more series might be made, though a new one is now being written and filmed, a process which takes about a year and could, perhaps, draw on events in the forthcoming US election.
Are the Clintons fans of House of Cards, I ask, bearing in mind they are a political power couple in the same way the Underwoods both aspire to high office?
“I’m not sure about the Clintons but I know Obama has tweeted about it. David Cameron watches it and I’ve discussed it with the presidents of China and Kazakhstan, so it has quite a reach.
If Dobbs had a vote, would he back Clinton or Trump in this year’s presidential election, assuming they are the chosen candidates?
“I’m pissed off with American leaders coming over here [to Britain] and telling us what to do in our votes, so I don’t expect to return the favour,” he fumes, citing as evidence his horror at Obama’s comment that Britain would find itself at the “back of the queue” in any trade deal with the US if it votes to quit the EU in next month’s referendum.
“Frankly, I found that language insulting and utterly unnecessary so I am not going to get into the same business of telling Americans which way they should vote.”.
I put the question another way. Who will win – Trump or Clinton?
“In that great revolutionary society called America, which railed against the hereditary principle, the right of kings and royal families, the Americans do seem to have a fascination with Roosevelts and Kennedys and Bushes and, yes, Clintons. So if you look at the last 100 years [of results] you’d say the family will win – and at the moment that’s the Clinton family. It is strange how American leaders seem to be able to perpetuate themselves in their sons and even their wives.”
Tomorrow: Dobbs on Trump, Brexit, and the danger of ‘safe spaces’