Harris was born in 1957 in Nottingham. His father was a printer and while he says "we had very little money, but I had no sense whatsoever of being poor and had an extremely happy and culturally rich childhood. My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter. The classic family story is us going to a school event when I was about six and all the other children reading out stories about what they did on their holidays, but mine was called 'Why me and my dad don't like Sir Alec Douglas-Home'.
There's a lot of moaning today about too many kids going to university, but my parents were bright people and I wish they had had that opportunity." Harris made his name as a novelist with Fatherland, his vaguely Orwellian, 1992 debut that posited a counter-factual history of Europe after Hitler had won the war. He followed it with bestsellers set among the second world war code-breakers of Bletchley Park (Enigma) and in the aftermath of Stalin's Russia (Archangel). He has transported contemporary political issues back to ancient Rome and, drawing on his close association with New Labour when a political journalist on the Observer and the Sunday Times, conjured a character very like the post-Iraq Tony Blair in The Ghost (2007).
The books have received warm reviews with a quote from Martha Gellhorn adorning the Fatherland jacket:"Powerful and chilling ... convincing in every detail". They have notched up even more impressive sales. Harris and his wife Gill, sister of Nick Hornby, and their four children live in a large old vicarage in Berkshire that was once visited by Jane Austen. It is usually described as "the house that Hitler built".
In thinking about his latest book Harris's new wealth and his old politics came together. "When Lehman Bros went down people were saying AIG was going to be next. That rang a bell because almost all of my money was in some sort of AIG bond, but like most people I didn't understand the first thing about this world. When I looked into it a bit more it was terrifying and shocking. We're all like mountaineers on some rock face lashed together. We're clinging on for dear life. And at the same time there has been this alarming rise in the super-rich class, which has been somehow facilitated by new technology."
Harris says he had little interest in writing about the new rich. "I have met some of them and they seem to me to be both boring and often themselves bored. But I was intrigued by these enormous amounts of money, all floating free of tax, which is profoundly undemocratic. We've all been like saps buying our pension funds and tracker whatevers, and while we've been left for dead, these people have cleaned up. Anger was not the least of my emotions in writing this book."
Harris read English at Cambridge but spent most of his time editing the university newspaper. In 1978 he joined the BBC trainee programme "largely because at that time NUJ rules meant if you went into print journalism you had to start work in the provinces. I'd just come from the provinces and didn't particularly want to go back." While working on Newsnight and Panorama he co-authored a book with his friend Jeremy Paxman about the history of germ and gas warfare; he then wrote books about the media's handling of the Falklands war and an account of the forged Hitler diaries fiasco. By 1987 he was political editor of the Observer.
