In his first work of fiction, to be published next week, the presenter of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, James Naughtie, promises secrets, betrayal, loyalty, death and blackmail. But The Madness of July, a political thriller, also features The Tablet as part of the plot.The book is set in the 1970s and the central character is a Foreign Office Minister and former spy, Will Flemyng. His brother, Mungo, is on The Tablet’s “advisory board” and admires the paper’s “questioning tone”. The Flemyng brothers even attend a Tablet party, where they find “a mixture of Catholic grandees … and a couple of wizened and talkative priests, stooping and smiling, one of them wearing, to Flemyng’s amusement, a soup-plate hat of the kind he thought the