But the night they found Eric Semple, the night of the vigil, it was almost eerie. They just gathered, hundreds and hundreds of people. I suppose it’s what they call social media; there had been no mention of anything on the radio—not a word. But the riot police were there too, and they were there in force. They had got a hell of a rap over the knuckles for the last time; they weren’t going to make that mistake again. It looked as if all the side streets were cordoned off; the vigil was contained in one space, right at the city’s heart. But I don’t believe they’d come for violence, that’s the strange thing. I’m sure half of Sudburgh was afraid of a riot and the other half had left already. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. There were no loudspeakers, no chanting—I don’t even remember seeing banners. Perhaps they had said something on the internet, told them what they wanted it to be. I suppose before they had been marching in fury because Eric Semple had been kidnapped; no one had a clue where he was and White Rose felt they had been beaten. Now it was all over. There was no amount of rioting would bring him back. There was actually a bit of trouble much later in the night; what you might call a small pocket of violence. But at that vigil someone just sang and the place was white with candles. I suppose that was deliberate. I remember I had tears in my eyes. I had no great love for Semple, but who would wish a death like that on their worst enemy? And what had his last days been like? There was no need for that. I cried as much for his family. I cried as much for them as for him. But may he rest in peace.
*
“THANK YOU FOR coming here so early in the morning. I decided to speak to the country from Downing Street, and I finally made that decision late last night. I don’t need to tell any of you how ghastly the past weeks have been. Many of you will have watched the news footage and wondered for a moment if you were watching a film. But it has been real, all of it, and devastatingly so.
“I believed that after the Burroway bombing we might be able to recover, slowly but surely, and learn to move on. I see now that the bombing was a spark that ignited a bonfire. I believe the bonfire was set and ready and tinder dry; all that was needed was that one spark. What it unleased has been nothing less than nightmarish, and again and again it has been innocent members of communities on both sides of the divide who have suffered. In fact, it has been the ones in the middle, the ones who have not sought to be part of the conflict at all, who have been ensnared in it time and time again.
“And I have been accused of not caring, of being in some kind of ivory tower here in London. The accusations have come from fellow politicians—some of them in my own party—and from the police and the media and far beyond. It is not because of these accusations that I have made the decision I am announcing today. I am resigning as Prime Minister, and I do so with great regret and after much soul searching. I am resigning because I have come to the conclusion that I have failed. I am a lawyer and an economist, and if I was put at the helm of my party for any reason, then it was to champion the cause of the economy. And I am glad and proud that I resign as Prime Minister with that economy much stronger than when I came to office.
“But I accept that it is going to take strengths and skills I may not possess to put this country back together in a very different manner. One of our most eminent journalists has written that England is broken in the middle, but that no one quite knows where the break is or how to mend it. I think this mending process is going to take teachers and social workers and theologians and community activists, and perhaps the politicians will come at the end of that line. But I say that not as any excuse; I simply acknowledge that there are times when those of us who can mend broken economies have to admit when they can’t mend broken countries.
“I established the Burroway Fund after the bombing, and I’m proud I did so. To date we have raised some four million pounds, not only to help the families who suffered bereavement and injury, but also to support their communities. I want, for the time being at least, to leave the limelight and to work with the fund to develop its activities further. So I am not giving up on the task I have outlined; I am devoting myself to it in a more direct way. I want to thank all of those who have supported me over my years in office, and I want to say sorry to all of those I am letting down now. But I have looked deep into my soul and seen clearly what had to be said and what had to be done. And that is something for which no one should be ashamed. Thank you.”
*
I FOUND THE Prime Minister’s speech quite nauseating, and I was one of his own backbenchers. He didn’t even have the courage to stand and spout all this sanctimonious nonsense in Downing Street: he invited the cameras in and said the whole thing behind closed doors. Why? Because even then he was scared someone from either the Islamic world or from White Rose might take a pop at him. He was a quivering jelly, make no mistake. But the killing of Eric Semple was just a good chance to run out the door marked exit. The truth is he had been looking for his moment for long enough. And the root cause? Nothing to do with White Rose or all his troubles in the North; it was all right at his own back door. He had been having an affair and his wife had found out; she was going to reveal all, and those closest to him in the party knew the whole story. He had been told to fall on his own sword before the party was let into that mess.
But there was another reason, too; the reasons were fighting to form an orderly queue at the door of Number 10. A policeman from the Met, high enough up the ladder, was all set to go to the tabloids with his story of the fourth bomber from Burroway. According to him the fourth man had survived and been kept at some secret location in London, then given the third degree to get as much out of him as possible. The tabloids had got out their chequebooks as they always do and were all set to pay him a small fortune for his story. The PM knew well enough there would be a hell of a rumpus over that. Not only was it likely to set off the extremists in the Islamic camp, it would lead to baying for a public inquiry. To be fair to him on that one, I think it came sailing out of a clear blue sky. I think that must have been the Met’s little secret—until it was too tempting to keep it a secret any longer.
So quite frankly, I think most of us breathed something of a sigh of relief when he announced he was throwing in the towel. I got on fine and well with him in private; he had a good-enough heart. But he was quite right: he didn’t have the stamina. The paradox is that he may not actually have believed all that saccharine stuff about being an economist and not a healer, but it was absolutely true. I just think it was all the cloaks he was hiding behind that sickened us. Had he really meant what he said we might have respected him. No, the person we did respect in the end was Trish Semple. And she stood on her front step and said it. Twenty-four hours after her husband was found decapitated. Now that takes courage. The PM might have got some kind of Oscar for his performance. She got our admiration. And perhaps she did something to bridge that gulf between North and South. She did that night anyway. Without a shadow of a doubt.
*
“BUT FOR ALL that I don’t feel hate. I think I’ve even tried to feel hate and failed. Perhaps hate, even for a time, might make things easier. Right now all I feel is nothingness, like at the end of a long road. I never truly believed that Eric would walk back alive through this front door. I knew he was too much of a prize for that, in the middle of a time of war. His murder was a way of getting revenge.
“Yet despite all the nothingness that I feel tonight, I don’t want there to be any more revenge. I don’t want there to be deaths in the name of Eric Semple, ever. I know Eric wouldn’t have wanted that. He had strong views and he held those views with all his heart, but I don’t ever remember hatred in him. He wanted change and he wanted fairness, and to the end he wanted people to think. But he didn’t want them to hate, and he didn’t want them to pour their hatred into killing. Maybe his biggest failing was not really knowing how much he stirred people up. I think I can say I knew Eric better than anyone, but I don’t truly know if he was always aware of the effect he had on people.
“I’ve got the media here at my door tonight, because my husband was a kind of unelected leader of a movement. I’ve got the media at my door, too, let’s face it, because he died a gruesome death and that makes the story all the more exciting. But all I want to say is that now it needs to be over. There have been enough deaths on both sides, and the deaths have got us nowhere. It’s time to start sorting out the mess, not making the mess worse.
“I’m not going to say much more because I’m tired and I need time to be with my family and grieve. But let’s look at all this brokenness tomorrow and start working out what went wrong. Don’t let’s start looking for more scapegoats; let’s begin to understand where we went wrong ourselves.”
Publisher’s Note
2020 is entirely a work of fiction, and all the characters are products of the author’s imagination. Difficult though it may be to believe, the novel was not directly inspired either by the Brexit referendum or by the more recent events in Europe, the United States, and around the world. It was in fact written largely in 2015 when, although simmering tensions and discontent were very much in the air, such dramatic societal upheavals still seemed to most of us highly unlikely. Thus, 2020 is not a response to Brexit or the results of the 2016 presidential election across the Atlantic. Rather, it is an eerily prescient expression of the mood of a nation divided.
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