by Jonathan Coe
‘Oh, something will come up. Bound to. It always does.’
39.
November 2017
Britain had voted. It had sent David Cameron packing. It had made its views on the European Union clear. And now, having made this momentous choice, it did not want to think about the matter any more, but preferred to return to its everyday concerns, and leave the problem of implementing its decision to those traditionally charged with such tasks: the governing class. In November 2017 the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill was still passing through its committee stage in the House of Commons. A number of troublesome MPs had tabled more than four hundred amendments and new clauses, each of which had to be debated and voted on. These amendments were designed, primarily, to prevent the government from awarding too many sweeping new powers to itself, but there was also one detail of the Bill to which the rebel MPs particularly objected: the prime minister’s decision to impose a deadline (eleven o’clock on the night of 29 March 2019) for Britain’s withdrawal from Europe. ‘It is quite unnecessary,’ one of them argued, ‘to actually close down our options as severely as this, when we don’t know yet what will happen, when it is perfectly possible that there is a mutually beneficial, European and British, need to keep the negotiations going for a time longer to get them settled.’ But certain sections of the press, and certain sections of the public, did not buy this argument. They were convinced that these dissenting Tories had another, more sinister objective in mind: to overturn the referendum result altogether.
Gail found it hard to understand how this popular fantasy had taken hold. Even her own Constituency Association was not immune – to the extent that one Friday afternoon in November she was obliged to visit its chairman, Dennis Bryars, in order to offer him reassurance on this point. She found him feeding his pigs.
‘What handsome creatures,’ said Gail, who was not fond of pigs.
‘Beauties, aren’t they?’ said Dennis, who was extremely fond of them. ‘They’ll be even better when they’re sliced up on your plate with some mushrooms and scrambled eggs.’
It was a grey and cheerless afternoon, with a bone-chilling wind blowing in from the east, and Gail felt that she had come ill-prepared in her lightweight mackintosh. The pigs, however, housed as they were in thirty or forty straw-bedded huts heated with overhead braziers, looked warm enough. Dennis believed in rearing them humanely prior to slaughtering them.
‘What are you feeding them?’ Gail asked.
‘Wheat, barley,’ he said, scattering the feed on the ground to the grunting approval of the ravenous animals.
‘Sounds very healthy.’
‘Threonine. Metheonine. Lycine HCL.’
‘Very nutritious, I’m sure,’ said Gail, less certainly.
‘Waste of bloody money if you ask me,’ said Dennis. ‘In the old days we just used to give them swill. Cost us next to nothing. Better for the environment than this stuff, as well.’
‘Ah – yes,’ said Gail, who knew exactly what was coming next.
‘Of course, the EU knew better than us,’ said Dennis, sure enough, ‘and soon put a stop to that. But hopefully one of these days we can go back to being a sovereign nation again, and start making our own laws. Not that you lot seem to be in any hurry to get on with it.’
‘About that …’ said Gail. ‘I do hope that the Association understands why I shall be voting against the government on some of the amendments.’
‘People have their theories,’ said Dennis, moving on to another hut.
‘As you know,’ said Gail, hurrying to keep up with him, ‘I voted Remain myself, but I absolutely respect the referendum result.’
‘So you say.’
Gail felt a squelch underfoot and looked down to see, as expected, that she had just stepped in a large puddle of liquid pigshit. She walked on gingerly, rubbing the side of her shoe against the ground.
‘But I feel I would be failing in my duty as a member of parliament,’ she continued, ‘if I didn’t make sure that the legislation was fit for purpose.’
‘It seems to be good enough for most of your colleagues.’
‘Yes, but this idea – this stupid idea of setting a particular date and then having to stick to it …’
‘Look, Gail,’ said Dennis, turning around and laying both of his buckets to rest for the time being. ‘I don’t see eye to eye with you on this. None of us see eye to eye with you on this. You want to defy your own Constituency Association – not to mention the whips – and vote with your conscience, fine. As long as you accept the consequences.’
‘Consequences? What consequences?’
‘Let’s wait and see,’ said Dennis.
Gail was incredulous. ‘Are you threatening me?’ she asked. ‘And if so, with what?’
‘Don’t forget that you’ll be depending on our support for the nomination, when the next election comes around. Other candidates may be available.’
That had been her first intimation of the difficult days ahead. Worse was to come the following Monday evening, when she and her fellow rebels had to sit through a long and stormy meeting in London with the party whips, whose threats of recrimination were even more explicit. And yet neither of these things prepared her for what was to happen later in the week.
*
Gail’s duties in Westminster required her to spend four days of each week in London while parliament was sitting. Her son Edward was away at university, but her daughter Sarah was still at school in Coventry, and so Sarah would typically spend those four days at her father’s house. This week, however, he happened to be away on business. In these circumstances Doug (as had occasionally happened before) volunteered to move into the house in Earlsdon and assume the role of carer.
It was a role he took on with mixed feelings. Having failed, fairly comprehensively, to build a satisfactory relationship with his own daughter, he had been sceptical at first of his chances with another fourteen-year-old. But over time he had started to grow fond of Sarah, even though it was hard to tell whether she felt the same way. She had none of Coriander’s self-assurance or sense of entitlement. She was quiet, obedient, studious and a little bit dowdy. She wore braces on her teeth and horn-rimmed glasses that gave her the look of a tomboy. She had no boyfriend and showed little interest in acquiring one, appearing happy instead to live a life of quiet domestic contentment with her mother (and Doug, if he was around). A few years earlier he might have been concerned by her lack of rebellious spirit; now he was simply relieved to be spending time with someone who gave him so little trouble.
On the morning of Wednesday, 15 November, shortly after seven o’clock, he was busy in the kitchen, preparing Sarah’s breakfast and packed lunch. It was still dark outside and Sarah, although she was awake, had not yet managed to drag herself out of bed. Doug was in the middle of mixing some salad and cold pasta together in a tupperware box when his phone rang. It was Gail, calling from London.
‘Have you seen it?’ she said. Her voice was strained and unsteady.
‘No. Seen what?’
‘The paper.’
‘What about it?’
‘I’m on the front page.’
‘Really? What do they –?’
‘I should just go out and get one.’
The newsagent was only thirty seconds’ walk away. After shouting up the stairs to tell Sarah her cereal was on the table, Doug hurried around the corner of the street. He quickly saw what Gail was talking about. Word of her meeting with the whips had leaked out and one of the papers had decided to make a front-page splash of it. Hers was one of sixteen faces pictured under the banner headline: ‘THE BREXIT MUTINEERS’.
The headline was nasty. The publication of each MP’s photograph was done with a clear intent to point the finger, to identify. In the fevered, polarized atmosphere that still pervaded the country more than a year after the referendum, it was a dangerous thing to do.
Hugely irresponsible, in fact: that was Doug’s first thought, as he walked back to th
e house with a copy folded under his arm.
Sarah was in the kitchen. She had finished her cereal and was spreading Nutella on a slice of toast. Doug called Gail from the sitting room and spoke in a low voice.
‘Well, that’s pretty horrible. Any fallout yet?’
‘I’ll say. My Twitter feed’s gone berserk. Emails too.’
‘Bad?’
‘I’ve forwarded the worst on to the office and they reckon four or five of them should be passed on to the police. Do you want to hear them?’
‘Not really. But go on.’
‘OK, so we’ve got … Ransom you bitch – that’s Ransome without an “e”, of course – you will burn in hell for this. Look over ur shoulder when u r walking home tonight. You attack the people the people will attack you. Oh, and this is a nice one: Remember Jo Cox it could happen again.’
‘Jesus Christ. Are you OK? Do you … I don’t know, do you want me to come down?’
Gail sighed. ‘I don’t think so. Life has to go on, doesn’t it? I don’t suppose anyone’ll come round to the house, or anything like that. Just make sure that Sarah’s OK.’
‘Sure.’ He looked at the headline again, with the newspaper spread out in front of him on the coffee table. ‘I can’t believe they’d do something like that.’
‘I know,’ said Gail. ‘I mean, I never liked its politics, but that used to be a respectable paper. What’s going on, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. This country’s gone mad.’
‘I hope Sarah’s all right at school. I hope nobody says anything horrid to her.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Doug said. ‘I’ve got my eye on her.’
*
It was tempting to think, at times like this, that some bizarre hysteria had gripped the British people; that the pitch of collective madness to which everyone had risen during the campaign of 2016 had simply not abated yet. But Doug was not entirely satisfied with this explanation. He knew that a headline like that was calculated. He knew that the outrage it was designed to foment was being stoked because it was valuable to someone: not to any one individual, of course, or even to any one clearly identifiable movement or political party, but to a disparate, amorphous coalition of vested interests who were being careful not to declare themselves too openly. The first thing he did, after walking Sarah to school, was to settle down at his desk upstairs and reach for a Manila envelope containing forty or fifty pages of A4 which had arrived in the post, anonymously, three days after his meeting with Nigel Ives.
There had been no note accompanying them: no written farewell message from the eccentric informant with whom he’d shared so many bizarre, circular conversations over the last few years. Doug had simply been presented with the papers, and expected to make what he could of them. Briefing notes; draft press releases; minutes of confidential meetings; reports marked ‘Classified’ and ‘Not for Publication’. Many of them bore the initials ‘R. C.’ or the signature ‘Ronald Culpepper’. Most of them were printed on the headed notepaper of the Imperium Foundation.
He had read through these documents many times, and knew exactly where to find the one that seemed most germane to today’s events. It was a paper of some two and a half thousand words, jointly authored by an academic and a well-known journalist and commentator. The title was: Keeping the Fires Burning: Media Strategies for Sustaining and Harnessing the Energies behind the Referendum Result.
Doug flipped to the first page. The paper began:
The EU referendum result of 23 June 2016 presents a great, and unexpected, opportunity to further the aims that Imperium has always supported.
The narrow victory for the Leave campaign represented a coalition of different groups, all of whom wanted something different from Brexit. Some voted to restore sovereignty and to repatriate laws, some to reduce immigration and to increase border controls, some were hoping to restore Britain’s sense of self-worth as an independent nation, while some (a small minority, perhaps, but the group with which Imperium is itself most closely aligned) voted to liberate Britain from the EU’s oppressive tax and other regulations and allow it to become a genuine free-trading country with its principal endeavours directed towards Asian and US markets.
Thus we have an opportunity for radical and permanent change. However, the window of opportunity is small. It must not be allowed to close altogether.
A complete, immediate, root-and-branch break from the EU would have been the ideal outcome, but given the smallness of the Leave majority, arguing that a mandate for this exists is problematic. The government has embarked upon a protracted period of negotiations and, while we have had some success in arguing for the imposition of a deadline to leave (currently set at 29-03-2019) this will be followed by a transitional period of two years or more. The grave danger regarding such a gradual and incremental process of departing the EU is that public enthusiasm for Brexit might wane if negative economic effects start to become apparent.
This paper will set out the steps we can take to minimize this danger, with specific emphasis on the role played by the building of friendships and informal alliances with the print and broadcast media, thereby putting the Foundation in a position to influence editorial direction and tone. (A separate paper will be prepared on social media strategy.) Imperium already has excellent and close relationships with a number of broadsheet and tabloid newspaper editors: these contacts must be renewed regularly and exploited to the full.
Our central argument is that the various and disparate forms of discontent which led 51.9% of voters to vote Leave must not be allowed to fade away until the Brexit process is complete. This discontent is the energy which will power our programmes. If Brexit was fuelled, first and foremost, by a sense on the part of many of the British people that the political class had betrayed them, that sense of betrayal must be sustained. Indeed, it can now be focused more accurately since, with the reframing of Leave’s narrow majority as the ‘will of the people’, public anger will be turned most effectively on those members of the political and media establishment who can be portrayed as frustrating that will …
*
The day passed quietly, for the most part. Doug spoke to Gail three or four times; in all she had received several dozen tweets which could be construed as threatening, as had the other MPs pictured on the front page. The police were investigating, and would probably pay Doug a visit later. He thanked her for the warning. Meeting Sarah at the school gates, he did not ask her directly whether there had been any problems today, but took reassurance from the fact that she didn’t mention any. After dinner she went up to her bedroom to do some homework.
At around eight thirty there was a loud knock on the front door. Doug opened it to find two uniformed police officers standing on the step. Invited inside, they explained that this was purely a routine visit; that a number of threatening messages against Gail Ransome had been reported to them that day; that they just wanted to check no one had seen any unusual activity in the vicinity of the house, and that no one had received any unusual phone calls or texts or emails. In the course of this conversation Sarah came down from her room and was now standing at the foot of the stairs, listening. The police officers took her to one side and quizzed her about her day at school. Had any of her friends mentioned the newspaper headline? Had she experienced any bullying as a result?
Their visit lasted about fifteen minutes in all. When it was over, Sarah seemed reluctant to go back upstairs. She was very quiet. She sat on the sofa in the sitting room, her knees apart, looking down at the floor.
‘You OK?’ Doug asked, from the doorway.
She looked up. ‘Do you think I could speak to Mum?’
Doug glanced at his watch. ‘She’s probably still in the Chamber. You could try texting her first.’
He went into the kitchen while Sarah sent a text message. It seemed to have the required effect, because after a few minutes he could hear her talking on the phone. She carried the phone upstairs with her, still talking to her
mother. Doug went back to his laptop at the kitchen table, and the pile of papers from the Imperium Foundation.
A few hours later, shortly after midnight, a taxi pulled up outside the house, and he heard a key turning in the front door. He went into the hallway and saw Gail, overnight bag in hand, looking pale and tired.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’
She put the bag down and seized him in a hug, then kissed him fiercely, passionately on the mouth. The embrace was hungry, almost feral in its intensity. He had never known her like this before.
‘Sarah sounded awful on the phone,’ she said, as they eased apart. ‘Is she all right?’
Doug didn’t like to admit he’d been so preoccupied that he hadn’t checked on her or even said goodnight.
‘Did you take a taxi all the way from London?’ he asked.
‘Had to. The last vote was at ten thirty.’
‘How much did that cost?’
‘A lot. I’ll get the train back first thing in the morning. Only I couldn’t leave her alone tonight. She’s been really shaken up today.’
She went directly upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom. When Doug looked in on them, a couple of minutes later, Gail was sitting on the edge of Sarah’s bed, stroking her hair, murmuring something, the same soothing phrase over and over again.
Then she looked up at Doug and whispered: ‘Down in a minute.’
‘OK. Fancy a drink?’
‘Yes please.’
He poured two glasses of whisky and waited for her to come down. It took longer than expected, so while he was waiting, he carried some rubbish out to the bins at the back of the house. When he came back inside, all was quiet except for a strange noise coming from the sitting room. Doug couldn’t identify it at first. It was high-pitched, with a touch of vibrato. It stopped and started, came and went with an irregular pattern. He thought at first that it might be some sort of electronic alarm. Then he realized: it was Gail, and she was crying. In fact ‘crying’ wasn’t the right word: there was another word for this, a word that described the sound perfectly: she was keening. He stepped into the sitting room and found that she was sitting forward on the sofa, shaking, one hand supporting her forehead, the other twitching open and closed on the cushion beside her. She looked at him and her face was a mask of grief and anger.