Clunky prose is sprayed carelessly across many pages. The book opens with a genuine Bulwer-Lytton (‘It was a brutal morning, the mercury close to zero, the sun still in foetal position’) and is shot through with lazy clichés (‘The people of Wentworth wore their environmentalism like a high visibility vest’; ‘the torment of Vietnam – the memories of what he and his comrades endured – kept flooding back’). And that is before we mention the eye-wateringly terrible sex scenes, of which no more shall be discussed here.

Lewis and Uhlmann’s plot is quite engaging, confecting a vaguely plausible imbroglio of Chinese spies, union thugs, a struggling prime minister, a gumshoe journalist, and an ambitious, recently deposed former party leader. But the authors break the first rule of a decent genre novel by regularly taking leave of the action to instruct the reader with page-long diatribes about the importance of the Brookings Institution or the hypocrisy of the Greens.

The end result is not even enjoyable as a guilty pleasure; indeed, I found its combination of misanthropy and casual anti-intellectualism quite depressing. Like most conveyors of conventional wisdom, Lewis and Uhlmann seem unaware of their own prejudices. This makes The Marmalade Files a little like a conversation with a cranky uncle at a family barbecue: shallow, boorish, and ultimately dull.