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Perhaps we should not be so surprised by the news that Alastair Campbell has become a novelist at the age of 50. After all, as a Downing Street spin doctor, he was renowned for telling tall stories and stretching credulity to the limit. To be published in November, his debut, All in the Mind, is the story of a psychiatrist, his patients and family and "the pressures they bring to bear on each other'' over a long weekend.
Though Campbell insists that the book will contain no politics and that the characters are entirely fictional, insiders say that some details were "informed'' by the mental breakdown he suffered in 1986, induced by stress and alcohol, when he was a journalist. As Ernest Hemingway observed, it is much easier to write about what you know than what you don't know.
Campbell joins a distinguished roll call of people who have done the most unlikely jobs before turning to a writing career. Paul Torday worked in engineering and industry for 30 years until he published his first novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, at the age of 60 last year.
Magnus Mills was a London-bus driver for 12 years and wrote his 1998 Booker-shortlisted debut, The Restraint of Beasts, between shifts on the 159 route from Brixton to Streatham. The impecunious West Country widow Mary Wesley knitted for a living before having her first novel published to acclaim, aged 70.
For drudgery can be a nursemaid as well as a spur to creativity. TS Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank in London to help make ends meet and Philip Larkin was a librarian in Hull for most of his life. Their boring, humdrum jobs provided them with the necessary stability and security to write.
Careers other than bus driving and banking have also proved fertile ground for the creative imagination. Fay Weldon, Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie all toiled as advertising copywriters before becoming novelists. Somerset Maugham was a medical student at King's College, London, for five years. Far from being a creative dead end, he saw this as the ideal chance to observe "life in the raw" and experience a range of emotions.
And cutting up cadavers turned out to be an invaluable experience for another former medical student, JG Ballard, who kept a human skeleton in a wooden box under his bed.
And so even if, these days, novel writing has become just another branding exercise - Alastair Campbell's namesake, supermodel Naomi, makes a virtue of not even bothering to read "her" novels - it still helps to have a hinterland. But whether it will make Alastair's latest fictions any more believable is another matter.
