Drama, politics, intrigue... Electing a pope is the stuff of novels - and Amen to that

I lost my journalistic virginity at the age of 29 in the back of Michael Heseltine's limousine, travelling north with him on a visit to Liverpool. It was 1987.

- Robert Harris, author of Conclave

I had just been lured away from a comfortable job as a reporter on Panorama to cover politics for The Observer by the paper's deputy editor, Anthony Howard, a journalistic hero of mine. I had never worked in newspapers. I was all at sea. Tony demanded I write an article for that week's leader page: "Come on, you've got to do it eventually." I had never attempted such a thing before. After letting me scribble away in the back seat for several hundred miles, Lord Heseltine kindly agreed to pull over at a motorway service station so I could file my copy by telephone.

Thirty-eight years, and many hundreds of articles, have passed since then. But I have never forgotten the nervous dread that came with trying to write against the clock, nor ever entirely shaken it off.

I have gone on writing about politics all my professional life. It has been an obsession since childhood, expressed nowadays in the far less nerve-racking business of writing novels, set in all manner of locations and eras - but always, essentially, political.

In 2013, I watched the live TV coverage of the result of the conclave that brought Pope Francis the papacy. Just before he appeared to reveal himself to the faithful, the camera panned along the windows that flank the balcony overlooking St Peter's Square, filled with the faces of the cardinals who had just elected him. I knew nothing about conclaves, but it did occur to me that these elderly gentlemen - some looking benign, some shrewd, some crafty - had just taken part in the ultimate election, indeed the World Cup final of elections, to determine God's representative on Earth.