Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:
Last year, while I was working on a late draft of my novel Best of Friends, a story broke about a club known as the advisory board. It was organised by the former Conservative party co-chair Ben Elliot, and made up, at least in part, of donors paying £250,000 to the Tory party. It was an odd thing to read about, given that I had invented for the novel a club called the High Table for political donors who paid £200,000 to the party of government – I’d wondered if I was setting too high an entrance fee. I’m not claiming any kind of clairvoyance, just as I won’t claim clairvoyance for inventing a British-Pakistani Tory home secretary who becomes embroiled in a high-profile citizenship-stripping case in Home Fire, which was published before Sajid Javid became home secretary and stripped Shamima Begum of her British citizenship. All I had been doing in both cases was paying attention to news stories when they were still minor rather than headline news, and thinking about the directions in which they could and probably would move, given Britain’s political climate
More here.