Culture : MP Novelists Have ‘Common’ Touch : * British lawmakers have a long tradition as novelists, and the current recipe runs heavy on spice. ‘A Parliamentary Affair’ has everybody talking--and reading.

LONDON —  Unlike their American counterparts, British political figures from Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to contemporary members of Parliament have moonlighted as novelists.

But where Disraeli wrote genteel political comedies, modern lawmakers have veered toward political thrillers, and, more recently, to what the press calls “bonkbusters,” books with plenty of sex.

In recent years, MPs who have written popular, bodice-ripping novels include Jeffrey Archer (“First Among Equals”), Rupert Allason (“Murder in the Commons”), Julian Critchley (“Hung Parliament”), Brian Sedgemore (“Power Failure”), Michael Spicer (“The Cotswold Murders”), Stuart Bell (“Paris 69”), Lord Rawlinson (“The Jesuit Factor”) and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd (“The Palace of Enchantments”).

Joining their ranks this month is the energetic, publicity-keen legislator for Derbyshire, Edwina Currie, whose “A Parliamentary Affair” is the talk of the Palace of Westminster, home of the House of Commons and Lords.

Even before the book, with its reported $150,000 advance, is opened, Currie hints of its contents with an official stamp on the cover: The parliamentary seal is affixed to the stocking seams of a shapely lady in stiletto heels. This gimmick has earned Currie a reprimand from Commons Speaker Betty Boothroyd.

The slinky stockings give a hint of the sex scenes inside, and as Currie says: “The reason the cover works is that she’s so threatening. Here’s this stunning, confident woman walking into--God help us--the House of Commons, and taking her sexuality with her. She’ll wreck the place!”

In the course of the book, a Cabinet minister gets involved with a young male prostitute; the environment minister is having an affair with the heroine, a back-bench, or less prominent, member, and the parliamentary secretary is bedding a female journalist.

Westminster insiders are speculating on possible identities of the characters in this presumed roman a clef since the female Parliament member, Elaine Stalker, in many ways is a dead ringer for the author: bright, ambitious, pushy, abrasive.

In the incestuous style of London literary circles, Parliament member Julian Critchley, whose own novel, “Hung Parliament,” was called “salacious” by fellow member Enoch Powell, reviewed Currie’s book. He found it “tedious.”

“I took against it,” he writes, “not so much for its explicit and all too frequent sex, not because I am prudish, but because it is entirely without humor. Sadly, I cannot remember who said that sex was God’s joke upon the world. Edwina, please note.”

On the other hand, Critchley, like many Tories, is not a great fan of the high-profile Currie. A working title for his new parliamentary thriller is reputedly: “Who Killed Edwina Currie?” because there would be no shortage of suspects.

American television audiences are familiar with sexually tamer machinations in Parliament and the government ministries in Whitehall through imported British series such as “Yes, Prime Minister,” a comic portrayal of a British leader. A sinister depiction of the office came in “House of Cards,” in which the prime minister resorts to murder to serve his political purposes. A sequel called “To Play the King” is currently on American TV.

Benjamin Disraeli’s prose was properly Victorian. A sample, from “Henrietta Temple”(1837): “They sprang into each other’s arms. Ah, that was a moment of rapture, sweet, thrilling rapid! There was no need of words, their souls vaulted over all petty explanations; upon her lips, her choice and trembling lips, he sealed his gratitude and devotion.”

Foreign Secretary Hurd raised the temperature, but not too much, in “The Palace of Enchantments” in 1985, an account of Parliament written with Stephen Lamport: “He began to fumble awkwardly at her clothes pulling a button off her shirt as he did so. His mouth searched her neck and a smooth white shoulder. . . . His body was excited now, and he broke away to undress.”

But Currie has moved quickly into the bonkbusting major league: “Her head was spinning with the wine, but with more than that, with a heady delight in her own unexplored sexuality and her power to turn this daft bloke on. She leaned back invitingly, as in all the magazine photos. He took a deep breath and began kissing her breasts. . . . “

In Currie’s book, as in Archer’s and others, one does learn from insiders the workings of the House of Commons and its murky world. As Currie puts it: “Very little in the novel is completely out of line. It is intended to have a strongly authentic feel.”

A prominent Labor member of Parliament, Gerald Kaufman, says most parliamentary fiction, including Currie’s book, is “on the whole unutterable trash.” Yet he admits that her complaints against the barriers encountered by women in Parliament are “entirely justified.”

In “The Palace of Enchantments,” novelist Hurd writes: “At the moment of climax Sally sighed a great sigh, as if the ills of the world were cured.”

Foreign Secretary Hurd, faced with the intractable problems of Bosnia and Northern Ireland, should be so lucky.