It’s the US paperback publication of #Anatomy of a Scandal today - and once again the timing could hardly have been more prescient. The issue of what happens when entitled boys become powerful men has been thrown into sharp focus by a televised drama that has gripped America: the Senate judiciary committee hearing into whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford at a teenage party 36 years ago.

Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee is alleged to have clamped a hand over the then 15-year-old’s mouth and wrestled with her clothing. Giving evidence under oath, Dr Ford said she believed she was going to be raped and accidentally killed, and was “100 per cent” certain he was the 17-year-old who pinned her to a bed against her will. A visibly irate Judge Kavanaugh repeated that he was innocent. But while the President immediately tweeted his support - his performance “showed America exactly why I nominated him,” - Judge Kavanaugh’s injudicious behaviour has raised doubts about his suitability as a Supreme Court justice. As an article in the New York Times yesterday opined: “Retribution and distemper — even under extraordinary stress, which can obscure but also amplify a person’s character — are not qualities one should seek in a Supreme Court justice or a judge of any kind.”

Without creating spoilers, Anatomy of a Scandal - my #metoo marriage thriller/courtroom drama - explores the sort of frat boy culture that Judge Kavanaugh is alleged to have enjoyed at Yale law through a fictitious Oxford university dining club called The Libertines. (Itself, a thinly disguised Bullingdon Club, to which the former prime minister David Cameron, and former foreign secretary Boris Johnson belonged.)

In my present day story, when my charismatic politician James Whitehouse is accused of raping a parliamentary aide with whom he’s been having an affair in a House of Commons elevator, he retains the backing, at least in private, of his ally, the Prime Minister - just as Judge Kavanaugh retains the support of President Trump.

I’ve written about the cognitive dissonance of writing fiction only to see it reflected in real life here for the US literary site, CrimeReads: a piece prompted by the Westminster sexual harassment allegations, that led to the resignation of two Cabinet ministers, last October (and included three claims of an MP groping in a lift.)

A year to the week that the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke, Anatomy of a Scandal’s themes of power, privilege and consent, and its examination of a certain kind of toxic masculinity have not only been seen in Hollywood, sport and the City but are now being discussed in relation to a nominee to the Supreme Court.

In the words of People magazine which picked it as their book of the week, it’s “a nuanced story line perfectly in tune with our #metoo times.” To quote New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell it “completely skewers the zeitgeist.”

I hope it enrages, as much as it entertains.

So much has happened since I last posted here - not least Anatomy of a Scandal soaring to number 7 in the Sunday Times bestsellers list, spending 3 weeks in the top 10, and six in the chart in total. It remains in the e-book bestseller chart - 15th bestseller throughout February and peaking at number 10 - and is riding high in the audio chart, too. 

I've done a promotional tour in Madrid and Barcelona, involving 18 interviews, two on TV, and the most forensic questions - covering Trump, Deneuve and Woody Allen; an imminent Catalan rape trial; and the reach and impact of MeToo.

I've also written about the cognitive dissonance of writing about something only to see it reflected in real life for @CrimeReads, an offshoot of the US literary site, lit hub. You can read the article here.

For someone who hates listening to her own voice, I loved participating in two podcasts. First, @TheWords podcast on feminism with the hugely impressive Everyday Feminism founder, Laura Bates, and writer Ann Helen Peterson, which Grazia and The Guardian chose it as their pick of the week's podcasts. (You can listen to it here.) And then the two crime writers podcast, with Luca Veste and Steve Cavanagh. I'm episode 53 and you can download it here. Both give a fantastic insight into why I wrote Anatomy of a Scandal, and the Words includes two audio excerpts, my first taste of the incredible narration.

There have also been events at Heffer's, Cambridge, Waterstone's Gower Street in London,  and Booka Bookshop in Oswestry with fellow authors Elizabeth Day and Fiona Cummins, as well as a First Monday Crime panel at City university which I loved. Pics to be posted soon.

And S&S are also sending me out on tour again, from Glasgow to my home city of Exeter, with Oxford, Bristol and Liverpool thrown in too. I've loved the events I've done so far and this time I'm paired at each one with at least one other writer, which always makes for the most interesting conversations. I'd love to see you. Do come along!

"Everything is copy," said Nora Ephron. It's a phrase I think about a lot. Because while I have reservations - I'm insufficiently ruthless to use my friends or family - I couldn't have written Anatomy of a Scandal without working as a journalist, both covering high-profile court cases, and as a political correspondent.

The columnist and author India Knight has tweeted that the novel is "so good, so forensic, and so authentic."  As well as working in Westminster, I'd shadowed a barrister in a sexual offences, and then a rape case while writing it, I explained. "You can tell. It adds this whole other layer that is (oddly) very rare," she replied.

Other reviews have picked up on this experience - which not only taught me about the worlds on the court room and the House of Commons, the language used, and the rhythms and cadences, but about the drama of a breaking news story or inherent in a trial.

And so I'm reposting a Waterstone's blog, in which I explain how being a journalist - for 2 years at the Press Association and then 11 on the Guardian - informed Anatomy of a Scandal:

The young man formally acquitted of murdering the black teenager Stephen Lawrence stood just over a metre from me in the witness box - and smirked.

It was February 1997. I was 24, had been a trainee reporter for just over a year, and as the only member of the press present at the very start of the inquest into the black teenager’s death was scribbling away at the old-style wooden press desk just in front of him. I looked up: pen poised, hoping for an intro-worthy line with which to nose my story. He remained silent. And then his lip curled.

Neil Acourt, his brother Jamie, and the other members of their gang, Gary Dobson, David Norris, and Luke Knight, had maintained what the QC Michael Mansfield would describe as a “wall of silence” during the inquest, repeatedly claiming the common law right of privilege so as not to risk incriminating themselves. But their continued repetition of the phrase gradually polluted the atmosphere of that dark Victorian coroner’s courtroom, so that it shifted from the ridiculous to the dramatic and taut. 

As the QC drove on, his questions acquired a hypnotic rhythm while the young men’s stonewalling and swagger conveyed their acute lack of compassion and exposed them, in the words of the Macpherson inquiry, as “the prime suspects” for the racially motivated crime. A year into a career that would see me covering murder trials and sexual abuse trials at crown courts and the Old Bailey, I saw at first hand the inherent drama, the high stakes and extremes of emotion that could be played out in court.

If my day in that coroner’s court illustrated the power of a courtroom drama – a power I’d try to harness nearly 20 years later when I came up with the idea of Anatomy of a Scandal - my experience covering criminal investigations such as the Soham murders confirmed how a narrative can turn on a comment, or a plot twist and then veer off course. 

Eleven days after the 10-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman disappeared from their tiny Cambridgeshire town, the caretaker of the local secondary school, Ian Huntley, told a journalist colleague he might have been “the last person to see them alive.” When the East Anglia correspondent for the Press Association asked to take a photo so that the story could be syndicated around the UK, and a TV reporter asked to film him, Huntley became shifty. And by the time I was begging him for an interview, he stood, arms crossed and immovable. 

His behaviour – sparked by a fear that police in Grimsby might remember his predilection for young girls and three alleged rapes, might recognise him - rang alarm bells with journalists and detectives, and late on the Friday afternoon, 12 days after the girls’ disappearance, the police called a press conference to say that a man had been arrested. 

“It’s the caretaker.” The whisper spread through the assembled hacks, as we noticed that the ubiquitous Huntley was absent from his usual spot at the back of the school hall. The man who’d kept an eye on police proceedings, during press conferences for nearly two weeks, who had tried to court and manipulate the media, had been undone by his cockiness.

But while courtrooms and murder investigations helped me to write a thriller, it was through becoming a political correspondent that I became even more conscious of power, privilege and entitlement - all issues at the heart of Anatomy of a Scandal. I watched charismatic, psychologically complex characters at work - and saw how the truth could be obscured. Nuance of language became increasingly important as Number 10 countered allegations that they had “sexed up” of the dossier into weapons of mass destruction. “Off-the-record” and “deep background” introduced layers of meaning beneath the official line. 

The theatre of the courtroom was replaced for the theatre of the Commons chamber. Bound by the same rules of privilege, the stakes were high – not prison, but reputation - and robust egos were now thrown into the mix. 

I witnessed moments of high tension. The resignations of cabinet ministers Peter Mandelson, over the Hinduja affair, and Robin Cook, over Iraq. Ken Clarke’s blistering speech during the debate into whether we should go to war. Most powerfully, I was with Tony Blair, on a trip to Istanbul, when the news broke that the former weapons inspector Dr David Kelly had committed suicide. I watched the blood drain from the prime minister’s face as a tabloid journalist asked him: “Do you have blood on your hands?”

I also saw how sex scandals involving politicians broke and played out. I was in the lobby when the Home Secretary David Blunkett was exposed by the News of the World for having an affair with the publisher of the Spectator; and I saw Boris Johnson colourfully deny and later admit to lying over, his affair with Petronella Wyatt. 

Working on news stories showed me how the media generates and drives the news agenda – something that has intensified since my days in the lobby with the arrival of social media and 24-hour news coverage. Alistair Campbell famously said that if a story was on the front page for over a week – 8 to 10 days, the figure’s been debated – the minister would have to resign. Though political expediency means some ministers currently seem untouchable, I suspect the period would now be shorter.

All of this fed into my writing Anatomy of a Scandal – a novel I couldn’t have conceived without that experience of working in the lobby, or those early years of court reporting, when I sat, straining to capture each choice quote in 110wpm shorthand.

Westminster inspired me but perhaps the idea of writing a novel that’s part courtroom drama and part psychological thriller, came from that moment in Southwark coroner’s court, when I witnessed the power of a QC’s examination – and a story conveyed by the absence of words.

My clever, loving 12 year-old daughter is nothing if not ambitious for her mother. For Christmas this year she bought me a present I refused to wear. A tiny badge, from Southwold Books, with a single word on it: Bestseller. 

I felt bad refusing to play along with the joke but even more uncomfortable at the thought of pinning it to my sparkly top, over a fortnight before publication. 

"But you will wear it if it happens, won't you?" 

"I don't think it will," I said - not because I lacked faith in my publishers but because, like an actor refusing to name The Scottish Play, I couldn't countenance thinking - let alone talking - about something that seemed so unimaginable. 

"But if it does..."

I needed to manage her colossal expectations.

"I really don't think it will but, if it does, I promise."

Reader, I'm wearing that tiny badge now because just three days after being launched Anatomy of a Scandal thrust its way into the list of Sunday Times bestsellers. Backlit tube posters are on show at Westminster tube station and my novel - about power, privilege, and consent - has been catapulted into the very apt number 10 slot - a number that inevitably makes me think of an address at the heart of government, Number 10 Downing Street.

I'm hugely grateful to the fellow authors who read it as a proof and provided me with wonderful quotes; to my editor and the team at S&S who have marketed, sold and publicised it so passionately; and to the book blogging community and journalists who reviewed it in force and championed it on social media.

This would never had happened without you.