Sarah Vaughan has Boris Johnson to thank, at least in part, for the genesis of her bestselling thriller Anatomy of a Scandal. The former Guardian reporter was on call on a Sunday in November 2004, the day after Johnson had been sacked from the Conservative frontbench because he’d lied about having an affair with Petronella Wyatt, and Johnson had telephoned her about the story.
“It was the fact he had no compunction in lying that struck me,” says Vaughan. “There was a lot of flummery and flannel; lots of chuntering and ‘all chaps together’-ness about it. He was writing a lot for the Telegraph so there was a definite sense that we were hacks together who wouldn’t stitch each other up – but yes, he confirmed the story was true and didn’t seem to express any remorse. It was the first time I was aware of a public figure admitting to lying and not seeming to be bothered by it.”
Then, in 2014, the footballer Ched Evans was released after serving a prison sentence for rape – he was later found not guilty on appeal – and “Allison Pearson wrote a column in the Telegraph where she quoted girls from a local beauticians saying that when this 19-year-old girl who was picked up in a pizza parlour went back to his Premier Inn, she wasn’t expecting to have a game of Scrabble,” says Vaughan. “And I just thought about how women judge each other.”
The two observations came together, and Vaughan’s story of James Whitehouse, an Old Etonian, Oxford-educated minister who is accused of raping the parliamentary aide he’s been having an affair with, was born. The novel, her third, was published in 2018 and became an instant bestseller. A screen adaptation, starring Rupert Friend as James, Sienna Miller as his wife, Sophie, Michelle Dockery as prosecuting barrister Kate and Naomi Scott as the aide, will be on Netflix in April.
“To me, Anatomy is really about entitlement and the scandal of entitlement,” says Vaughan. With her journalistic hat still on, she carefully stresses that Johnson is “not in any way James”. “I obviously don’t think he’s guilty of any sort of sexual offence. It was his approach to the truth that interested me. As Theresa May put it in the Commons recently, either he ‘didn’t read the rules, or [he] didn’t understand them, or [he] didn’t think they applied to him’.” Or, as James puts it in Anatomy of a Scandal: “I told the truth, near enough. Or the truth as I saw it.”
Anatomy, with its exploration of consent and privilege, felt uncannily timely when it was published four years ago. Vaughan’s forthcoming novel, Reputation, might be even more so. It opens with a body at the bottom of the stairs – that of a tabloid journalist – and goes on to explore how MP Emma Webster ended up standing over the corpse. Webster is a Labour backbencher and single mother who is relentlessly trolled when she starts a campaign against revenge porn. She tries to keep the worst of it from her teenage daughter, Flora. But Flora has social problems of her own, and Emma – the name a nod to John Webster’s revenge tragedy about reputation, The Duchess of Malfi – finds her life spiralling out of control. What is she, and what is Flora, without their reputations?
Vaughan details, chillingly, the steps Emma takes to keep herself safe. The bottle of water on the desk in her constituency in case of an acid attack. The chair placed just so to deflect potential attackers. The bag-checks for knives; the abusive tweets; the anonymous texts; the terror of cycling home at night alone.
The germ of the novel was an article Vaughan read about Labour MP Jess Phillips, who’d said she had multiple extra locks on her front door and a panic room in her constituency office. At around the same time, Anna Soubry was also being abused over her anti-Brexit stance, and Luciana Berger was receiving a stream of antisemitic attacks.
“I just remember thinking, ‘God, what must it be like to live like that?’ The level of threat that you’re being exposed to is so extreme: how would that alter your thinking, how would you react, under that level of pressure?” says Vaughan. “At the same time, my daughter would have been 13 and I was aware that children are exposed to social media bullying as well; that the abuse you see on Twitter happens in a different form on Snapchat or Instagram Stories. So I thought there was something to be written about that.”
As she was working on her novel, the MP David Amess was killed while holding a constituents’ surgery at a church hall in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. “The whole issue of MPs’ security in their constituencies then became really heightened,” she says. “There have been lots of DMs I’ve received from other authors saying, ‘Have you got a crystal ball?’ I think it’s just spending too long on Twitter every day, reading the news, listening avidly to Radio 4 when I’m cooking.”
It’s also down to her years as a journalist. Having studied English at Oxford – where she met boys who, like James in Anatomy, “behaved as if, of course, they were going to get firsts, and that the world was theirs for the taking” – she spent a year waiting tables in Devon and trying to gain work experience on newspapers, ending up with a Press Association traineeship in 1996. “It was a real baptism of fire,” she says, with stories ranging from the Aldwych bus bomb to doorstepping Julia Carling over her husband Will’s supposed affair with Princess Diana.
She started at the Guardian in 1997 (using her real name, Sarah Hall), spending 11 years there as a news reporter, then political correspondent. She covered the Soham murders and the arraignment of Ian Huntley – she interviewed him when he was the school caretaker and got into an argument with him; the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne and Roy Whiting’s trial; the opening of the inquest into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. Later, there was the resignation of Peter Mandelson, the “sexed-up” dossier during the Iraq war, Tony Blair under pressure – and of course Johnson’s sacking.
Vaughan left the Guardian in 2008, taking voluntary redundancy after having her second baby. She freelanced for various places, and began writing her first novel the week she turned 40, when her youngest started primary school. The Art of Baking Blind, about five amateur bakers in a competition, was published in 2014, and The Farm at the Edge of the World followed two years later. Darkness and difficult situations feature in both those books too – but Anatomy was definitely a venture into deeper waters.
“My first book is about the impossibility of perfection, and why we bake, and motherhood really. I came up with the idea for Anatomy as my second book, but I was told that it was too big a jump to write a book about baking and then a book about consent, so I came up with The Farm,” Vaughan says. “But The Art of Baking Blind is also about coercive control, and sexual assault, and The Farm has depression, suicide, the near death of a baby – I threw a lot of dark things into my first two books, so I was probably always going to go in a darker direction.”
Simon & Schuster paid a seven-figure sum for Reputation and another novel, and the former was recently optioned for screen by the same team who have made Anatomy of a Scandal. Vaughan is adamant she wouldn’t have been able to write either without having worked as a journalist, learning how a court case works, seeing “privilege work in Westminster, observing power imbalances and entitlement and how that all plays.”
“Having worked in that environment, and listened to the news avidly for the past quarter of a century, I’m attuned to the doublespeak, the slipperiness and the moral ambiguity – or vacuum – of such characters,” she says. “I wanted Emma to be hugely sympathetic but James, in Anatomy, isn’t. Working in the lobby, and also reporting on trials, has meant I’ve seen characters with big egos continue to assert their power, and I’ve questioned why they would put themselves in this position when they have so far to fall.”
Reputation is a key theme for Vaughan. Her fourth novel, Little Disasters, in which a paediatrician is forced to confront the truth when her friend brings her baby into A&E with injuries that don’t make sense, looks at it on a more domestic stage. “They’re all about judgment and control and power,” Vaughan says. “I do think there are huge double standards still in the way that women are perceived compared to men. You only have to look at Meghan and Harry. Or even Carrie Johnson – she’s clearly getting it in the neck and is going to be the scapegoat for Boris’s behaviour for some people.”
Prescient again, Vaughan tells me this in early February – shortly before Tory peer Michael Ashcroft’s new biography ladles more blame on to Carrie. Fodder for a future novel? “Well I’ve started my new book; all I can say is I’m finding the news agenda as inspiring as ever,” she says.
