Since the next Nic Costa novel is due very shortly it's best I make something clear given current events in Italy. The book -- <em>The Blue Demon</em> in the UK, out February, and <em>City of Fear</em> in the US, out May -- is my first set directly in the world of Italian politics, and concerns a dust-up between a fictional president of Italy and a fictional prime minister.

It posits that the prime minister -- called Ugo Campagnolo -- came to power after the fall of Berlusconi followed by a brief centre-left government led by the real-life former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. Ugo, a colourful chap to say the least, is very definitely seen as Berlusconi's heir.

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Sadly the chances of Walter Veltroni becoming prime minister of Italy in the near future seem incredibly slim. One reason Berlusconi would probably win an election tomorrow is that the opposition are in a complete mess, divided, bickering among one another, unable to gather strength to fight the real fight (which is what happens in the book too).

Modern elections are, it seems to me, lost more than they are won. People vote for the politician they loathe least. After watching the Conservatives in Manchester this week I can't put their popularity in the polls down to any great love for David Cameron and his colleagues. It's just that people hate them rather less than they hate Gordon Brown.

Still, I digress. The point is  I can't claim any great foresight in seeing Berlusconi's downfall, and certainly never seriously meant I expected Veltroni, an interesting man who ought one day to be prime minister, would succeed him in the short term.

Before the reviews come out saying this is 'based on current events' let me make the true chronology of this book crystal clear. It was started in 2007, before Berlusconi even returned to power. In fact when I began it the belief in Rome was that <em>Il Cavaliere</em> was gone forever. As a result the original prime minister in the book bore a perhaps unhealthy resemblance to him. Close to the completion of the first draft the hapless and hopeless Prodi government collapsed and, yes, Silvio was back in power, so I had some rewriting to do there.

And now it seems he may be out of power, or even returned to power once again to face criminal charges, by the time the book actually appears. Which just goes to show: politics in Italy can move more quickly than the publishing business.

I've never written a novel set so directly in the political process before. It's going to be intriguing to see how it's received. Oh -- and the book has generated so much interest in Italy that Fanucci, my Italian publisher there, is skipping the order of the novels to bring out <em>The Blue Demon</em> early, next spring, before returning to the original sequence. I wonder what the shape of politics in Rome will be by then.