Political thrillers can be either validated or overtaken by real events. Charles McCarry (1930-2019), a great Catholic writer who died recently, wrote a kind of legislative sci-fi. The Better Angels (1979) predicted both the use of passenger planes as terrorist weapons, and the possibility of elections being stolen by technology, more than two decades before these scenarios became American reality. Tom Bradby, who daylights as a thriller writer when not presenting ITN’s News at Ten, has had McCarry-like luck with his terrific, topical seventh novel, Secret Service (Bantam Press, 368pp, £12.99/$16.99), in which a populist, controversial foreign secretary is the front-runner in a party leadership election that will make the winner prime minister. The book was published in the same week that Theresa May announced her departure date, triggering Boris Johnson’s latest attempt at Number 10. In Bradby’s book, James Ryan, an erratic would-be Churchillian occupant of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, is running against education secretary Imogen Conrad, rather than, as in what passes for real political life, the premiership depending on a battle between ex-FCO and current FCO overlords. And, as Bradby is writing a thriller rather than a Trollopian political novel, Ryan is facing a suspicion avoided even by the scrape-prone Johnson. An MI6 operation, led by Russia desk officer Kate Henderson, eavesdrops on Putin-friendly oligarchs on a yacht boasting that one of the leading contenders for British PM is a Moscow agent. This is a stupendous set-up for a thriller. As Kate immediately realises, the salty gossip might be kompromat, false information released to confuse the other side. However, another remark recorded on the boat suggests that the Russians do indeed have a mole in the cabinet. Ryan is the most likely candidate to be Putin’s invisible running mate, but it might be Conrad; and Bradby, being a skilled suspense operative, complicates things with a surprise late entrant to the race. Spy Kate is an impressive creation, plausibly caught between professional duty and family guilt. The domestic scenes have an emotional strength rare in thrillers, and a subplot involving chronic insomnia appears to draw on the sleep difficulties that took Bradby off air last year. The prose sometimes lets down the plot: the editor should have asked for alternatives to off-the-peg sentences such as “the first fingers of light felt their way over the horizon”. Otherwise, though, Secret Service is the smart, classy beach read for this summer, giving readers an even better time than it already would because of its prescient timing.