The novelist Martin Amis yesterday dismissed Britain as a global irrelevance dominated by "touchy, vain, power-hungry male politicians" who are all but irrelevant.

Amis, whose best-selling books include Money and London Fields described the dramatic social change which took place under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and said her successors' efforts could safely be ignored. "British politics doesn't matter because it doesn't matter in the world, notwithstanding that everything is reduced to personality and gossip," he said at a literary festival in Paris. "There are no great issues – nothing that heats the blood."

While the Thatcherite revolution ultimately increased the UK's profile abroad, the Liberal-Conservative coalition of David Cameron was having next to no impact, Amis suggested. "You have to make a great effort to get interested in British politics," he said. "Every atom of your being has to be working to take an interest."

Amis added that "the aggressive posturing" of almost exclusively male politicians was a major problem, and that female traits needed to be introduced into government. He said governments today were dominated by "not very nice people – touchy, vain, power-hungry male politicians obsessed by maintaining face."

Describing his artistic process as one of "anxiety and ambition", Amis made it clear that he was finding it increasingly difficult to find inspiration. Even the subjects of modern sex and the permissive society, which dominated his early successes such as The Rachel Papers, were becoming staid, said Amis. "Writing autobiographical sex is disgusting," he explained. "It's awful when you write things like, 'Coming towards morning I took her again. She fainted for the second time'."

He criticised John Updike, who died last year, for his obsession with sex, saying: "He sends in a little Japanese camera crew into the bedroom, and the bathroom. Where is this getting us?"

Instead, Amis argued, modern societies have managed to divorce sex from emotion, as reflected in the huge popularity in internet pornography.

Amis has just produced a new novel, The Pregnant Widow, which includes a three-page sex scene. He said: "It's pornographic sex. It's easy to write because the emotion has been withdrawn. It's cynical and it's recreational."

Amis, who was interviewed by fellow author Will Self at the Shakespeare & Company bookshop literary festival in the French capital, has not lost interest in the UK altogether, however – his next book will be called The State of England.

Amis, who was interviewed by fellow author Will Self...