The headline in The Observer on an interview with Robert Harris, the author of the new thriller Conclave, read: “MPs should elect the Labour leader as cardinals elect the pope”.

It’s an intriguing idea, if a bit late now. In any case he didn’t mean exactly like the papal election, with locked doors, burnt ballot papers and the invocation of the Holy Spirit. But he told Rachel Cooke: “In my old age, I find I’m a Burkeian conservative, a believer in the power of institutions. It’s counter-intuitive that widening the franchise can be harmful for democracy, but I think it can be.”

That, of course, raises the question of what kind of pope we might get if his election was open to a universal franchise of Catholics. It’s a prospect that Harris might consider for his next thriller. In the meantime, he has been saying how pleasantly surprised he was by the helpfulness of the Vatican in throwing its doors open for him to research the scenes for his novel.

Oddly enough, it was not the Pauline Chapel, with its two frescoes by Michelangelo, or the glories of the Sistine Chapel that Harris was struck by, but the strange atmosphere of the Casa Santa Marta, the ecclesiastical hostel where Pope Francis chose to keep on living after his election. “I spoke to one person who’d stayed there,” he told The Observer, “who checked out after a night because it felt too much like a private clinic.”