His new novel is set during the former PM’s brief premiership, so what happened when they had dinner? The author on politics, cosy crime and bingeing Friends

Jonathan Coe takes himself off to a classical concert when he’s stuck with his writing. Some authors walk it out, or nap to get around a mental brick wall, but for Coe, who at 63 is publishing his 15th novel, the experience of “sitting there for two or three hours with your thoughts wandering, but in a disciplined way because the music is guiding them” can help resolve the toughest of literary puzzles. The process works particularly well, he adds mildly, at those concerts “where you’re not really into the music”.

For Coe, this approach to problem solving was especially necessary during the writing of The Proof of My Innocence, a hugely enjoyable, genre-busting novel set during the 49 days of Liz Truss’s premiership. The book, which is divided into three discrete sections, is a murder mystery, a piece of dark academia and an experiment in autofiction. Like so much of Coe’s writing, it takes a big, ambitious swing at the recent past – all the venom, absurdity and sentimentality of British political life since the pandemic – and metabolises it to bring about something like meaning. Coe did this most famously for the Thatcher years in his hit novel of 1994, What a Carve Up!, and more recently in Middle England, his attempt to explain to himself as much as to anyone else why so many people had voted for Brexit. In The Proof of My Innocence, Coe’s project was to examine the decades-long rightwards drift of the Conservative party and the polarisation of public discourse; the fact, as he puts it, that “what’s different about Edward Heath and Harold Wilson in the 1970s and, say, Keir Starmer and Liz Truss now, is that [their] narratives don’t intersect at all. Which is alarming, I think. If we can’t agree on any form of shared truth, then it’s very difficult to have public conversations about anything.” A description, perhaps, that makes the book sound rather serious. Because it’s Coe, of course, the whole thing is as light as a souffle and tremendously funny.