Philip Hensher

“Political intrigue, sexual chicanery, disappointment, betrayal” combine with “dazzling” effect (Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph) in this scandalous novel that exposed the secrets of Margaret Thatcher’s government.

As a senior clerk in the House of Commons, John is a man of gravitas, a well-respected widower with two grown-up daughters, who upholds establishmentarian codes of morality and decency. What his colleagues don’t know is that he harbors a secret predilection for rent boys. Afternoon assignations in his current squeeze’s discreet Earl’s Court flat are one thing, but when his reputation, his job, and his relationship with his friends and family are all threatened, John takes desperate measures to protect himself. Set during the last days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, and ingeniously narrated by an all-knowing incarnation of the Prime Minister herself, Kitchen Venom is a lethally entertaining story of sex, secrets, and scandal.

A sensation when it was published in the UK in 1996, Kitchen Venom cost Philip Hensher his own job as a clerk in the British House of Commons—an achievement “all the more remarkable,” the Independent noted, given the vehicle of this ruination was “a stunningly intelligent, assured and compelling novel.”