Westminster in the 2020s where the business of governing is the lasting on the agenda for anyone worth their salt. In the SW1 bubble, politics moves fast, schemes are hatched and foiled – through both accident and conspiracy within hours, and sex and power preside.

When Bobby Cliveden decides to campaign against the closure of her local mental health unit, she secretly thought it would take her straight to the heart of the UK’s bustling political centre. She heads to London to work for her local MP, the ambitious Simon Daly, and moves in with her two old university friends, Jess a new lobby journalist, and Eva, a junior Downing Street adviser. The three of them quickly become wrapped up in the political circus of glamorous parties, insufferable bosses and demanding workloads- and desire to win. Beneath the headline-grabbing battle of a male-dominated leadership contest, they discover the secret, soft-skilled machinery behind so much political change at the very highest level of government: Women.

What would you do after leaving government: lobby for shady regimes, give speeches to greedy banks or, if you are Boris Johnson’s one-time chief advisor Dominic Cummings, vent your anger in interminable blog posts.

Celo Watson, an adviser to Johnson and before that Theresa May, promised a bodice-ripper after leaving Downing Street in late 2020.  Although Watson was not a senior, but saw enough, she once claimed to have acted as Boris’s nanny, overseeing the prime minister’s Covid-19 tests. An ally of Cummings, she was ejected after is fall because Johnson, she said compared her to “an ugly old lamp”. Her leaving do, inevitably was accused of breaching Covid rules.

“Honesty, not everything’s about you”. This put-down would be more powerful had the characters not plainly been drawn from flesh and blood MPs. There is the unclubbable female prime minister failing to get an international agreement through parliament (MAY0, the womanising former prime minister still beloved of Tory Party members ( Johnson) and various other parallels – the manipulative wife, the bullying journalist, the sex-obsessed cabinet minister. You encounter sex on pages 4, 37, 69 with saucy dialogues like “ Look, I’m pretty short on time so you can just shove it in dry if you want”.

The narrative centres on three young university friends trying to make their way in parliament: political adviser Eva ( the closest to Watson herself), unintimidated journalist Jess, and local campaigner turned MP’s assistant Bobby. Each in her own way learns about the inevitability of political betrayal and the need to get your retaliation in early.

The vision of Westminster is mostly Cummings-esque. They dream of making weather but are continually blown around stormy teacups.

Watson begins with “UK  unemployment hits 6 per cent , North Korea launches test missiles”.

Eva, Jess and Bobby do not speak like Gen Z: and capture a new generation’s experience of politics.

You read about the real-life case of the MP who started watching porn in parliament after searching the internet for tractors, or the chief whip who kept a pet tarantula on his dwesk in a pathetic attempt to intimidate , the bar is quite high.

Whips by Cleo Watson, Corsair £20, 400 pages.