You see them, heads close together, chatting quietly, in their favourite restaurants in Rome. It might be Velando, close to St Peter’s Basilica. Or they might go further west to Rinaldi al’Quirinale, where members of the Italian intelligence service enjoy the seafood as much as the princes of the Church do. Not that those princes – the elite squad of the Roman Catholic Church, its cardinals who elect the Pope – seem all that different to other priests, as, for lunch, they dress down in black suits and Roman collars. The giveaway is the heavy gold ring each wears – placed on their finger by whichever pope made them a cardinal.

Now, those lunching cardinals are becoming more gossipy, more conspiratorial in tone. On December 7, Pope Francis will create another 21 cardinals in a lavish Vatican ceremony. But there are mutterings about the health of the Pope himself, who is in his 87th year and often in a wheelchair. Who should be the next Pope, they ask, and how can someone ensure his favoured fellow cardinal reaches the throne of St Peter?

The plotting that surrounds the election of a Pope is the stuff of Conclave, the film based on Robert Harris’s novel of the same name, and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow, released this weekend. It is set when a fictional pope has died and cardinals from across the world are locked into the Sistine Chapel for secret deliberations until they reach a two thirds majority decision to elect a new pope.

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