Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  “Sorry to bother you again, but did you in fact have business with Partridge on Thursday?”

  “Yes, I saw him briefly in the afternoon. Just a little technicality of phrasing. We talked for ten minutes, no more.”

  “The bill wasn’t coming before the House next day?”

  “Not this week, no. Yesterday there was just the Coastline Protection Bill, which is a great yawn.”

  “The House didn’t sit late on Thursday?”

  “No, it didn’t. It was what we call a Dead Thursday.”

  “Dead Thursday?”

  “The government gets all the week’s business over early, so we can all get off. Not more than a handful would be in Westminster for the Coastline Protection Bill.”

  “I see.”

  “Matter of fact, we hardly ever sit late these days. To the best of my recollection the House rose about eight on Thursday.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  It was all vaguely intriguing. But when Sutcliffe looked down at his desk, putting down the phone, he found the report of the post mortem, as well as reports from various men on the beat who had been drafted on to the case. Sutcliffe stewed for some time over the post mortem. The pathologist was clearly not entirely happy. Deceased had drowned, and the body contained only a small amount of alcohol. He had apparently eaten lunch and afternoon tea, the latter a few hours before he died. There were bruises on the body that could be consonant with violence having been used, but there was nothing that could not have been caused by his hitting a boat, or the pillars of the bridge, when he first fell into the river. All in all, the pathologist had found nothing specific on which to pin his unease. One of the detective-constables had reported that a night watchman in one of the large office blocks on either side of the Tate Gallery end of the Vauxhall Bridge had reported a loud cry around 10:30 on Thursday night, followed by a splash. He had been out on the embankment wall, having a quiet can of beer, the constable thought. He had peered into the water, seen nothing, then gone back inside.

  All in all, there seemed nothing to do but go for an open verdict. But Sutcliffe expressed his unhappiness to the Assistant Deputy Commissioner.

  “I’m going to wait,” he said. “I’ve got a feeling in my bones that things are not quite right. And I’ve also got a feeling that something will turn up.”

  “Micawber,” said the Assistant Deputy Commissioner. “But you’re probably right. In politics, something or other usually does turn up.”

  In this case, it took its time. Christmas, that inconvenient Christmas, intervened, and it was well into January before the little man in Battersea saw the picture in the paper, and came along to see Sutcliffe with his worries.

  Chapter 3

  A Process Of Selection

  The town of Bootham was situated in South Yorkshire, not very far from the Nottinghamshire border, and about as near to Sheffield as anyone would want to be. Its history stretched back to the Middle Ages, when it had been an important market town, but local historians who tried to make their fellow-townsmen aware of this medieval heritage gave every appearance of making bricks without straw, for the Bootham of today was essentially the creation of the Industrial Revolution, and that demanding, devouring movement had swept away all trace of earlier, quieter times. Bootham’s nineteenth-century prosperity was built on steel, and on the coal seams nearby, on the manufacturing industries which sprang up in the form of innumerable small factories and workshops. “Where there’s muck there’s brass,” said the Victorians, convinced they were uttering an eternal verity.

  Nowadays, where there was muck, there was just muck. The prospect seen from the train of decaying suburbs, disused factories, worked-out mines was only an extreme statement of what was to be seen everywhere in the town. As work had become rare, the whole physical structure of the town seemed to have collapsed, and the whole social structure with it. Though the denizens of the South were convinced that the unemployed were living off the fat of the land, in Bootham one saw shoddily clad women wheeling dirty babies in decrepit prams, men standing idly round on street corners, and a general air of a working people coming to terms with a future of idleness, of a hearty people wondering where their next french fry sandwich was coming from. In the commercial centre, small shops were boarded up, slogans disfigured the walls and litter lined the streets, and the air was thick with the smells of cheap take-away foods.

  There were, to be sure, parts of Bootham less overpoweringly dismal. The town was not large, and around it stretched long fields of barley and of rape, which last crop in the spring made a display of bilious brilliance which relieved the eye after all the greys and browns. In James Partridge’s old constituency, Bootham East, there were still some substantial Victorian houses with jungles of heavy green shrubs around them, and more modern detached and semi-detached houses which bespoke a certain prosperity—or an ability to command a fairly considerable mortgage. Here were Tory voters—but how firm was their commitment, as they sensed the tide of decay rising towards their feet? This was a question all the party agents asked themselves, as December shaded into January.

  That view from the train was seen by Antony Craybourne-Fisk as the train neared Bootham on January 9th. Christ, what a dump! What am I doing here? were Antony’s irrepressible thoughts, though as he saw the platform begin to slide slowly by, he set his face into an expression of unquenchable optimism. He need not have troubled. He was not being met, and nor were the three other hopeful candidates who, unknown to him, were on the same train. Central Office had made it clear that he should be treated no differently from any other potential candidate, except in one small respect; they would prefer it if he were chosen. Antony marched down the platform, over the bridge, registering with his trained candidate’s eye that the station gave every appearance of being one that British Rail was intending to close down (“possible future campaign issue”), and then commandeered the one waiting taxi outside the entrance.

  Antony had booked into the best hotel in town, which turned out to be not a glass and concrete monstrosity, part of a chain, but a Victorian monstrosity whose owners had tried desperately hard to be bought out by a chain, to be met only by superior smiles and shakes of the head. Everything about Antony’s room at the Unicorn was large, there was that to be said for it, but what use is a large bath with no plug? Lunch in the dining-room was large too—a collection of the most appalling and over-cooked mush. Antony was sorely tempted to do what he normally would have done in such circumstances—fuss, fume, shout, abuse—but he told himself that among the slovens and incompetents who ran the place there must be possible future constituents, so he contented himself with saying, as he went past Reception on his way to prospect around the town:

  “Could you make sure there’s a plug for my bath by the time I get back?”

  The man behind the desk, cigarette in mouth, barely looked up from the racing page he was studying.

  “They don’t make plugs for them baths any more. But I’ll see what I can do, mate.”

  Gulping down one more spurt of rage, Antony Craybourne-Fisk passed through the swing doors of the Unicorn Hotel and out into the street. In the first five minutes of his prowl around the town that he intended should be the springboard of his brilliant career, Antony found that he loathed the place. Bootham was a town of some eighty thousand souls, but bodies were what you noticed first: the broad, heavy, assertive men; the broad, heavy assertive women; the beer guts, the pub-brawl biceps, the pendulous breasts, the fat bottoms. Flab, said Craybourne-Fisk self-righteously to himself: Bootham symbolized the British flab that this government was trying to slim away. But on thinking it over, he decided it seemed less than hopeful to represent a constituency that deserved to be slimmed out of existence.

  He tried to look around for more hopeful features. In the centre of the town there remained the top halves of some tolerable eighteenth-century houses, but the ground floors were stereo shops, boutiques and carpart dealers which, having eaten
the houses’ lower extremities, seemed to be pausing before gobbling the top halves too. The Anglican church was a neo-Gothic construction, ponderously uninspired, the work of a Victorian architect who had sold virtually identical designs to Catholics in Bolton and Congregationalists in Bristol. Antony’s very legs seemed to grow disheartened, and the drizzle which had begun, mingy but insistent, fell from a sky that seemed no higher than the church spire. Antony looked for the tenth time at his watch. It was not yet three. The pubs would still be open. As soon as he went past one that seemed quiet, he turned and went in.

  He had no sooner got to the bar than a juke-box started up, a wailing, mindless shriek, underpinned by a murderous bass. He turned: the only other person in the bar was a skinny, vacant youth in jeans that were more like tights, and a studded leather jacket. He lounged over the juke-box, and stared back at Antony, evilly incurious. Antony sighed and ordered a double scotch.

  “Stranger here?” asked the landlord, and then had to shout it again over the din.

  “That’s right.”

  “Don’t get many strangers here,” said the man, obviously thinking it a point in Bootham’s favour.

  “No . . . Not really a tourist spot, I suppose . . .” Impelled to honesty by the sense of desolation which even he, an insensitive soul, felt, Antony added: “Bootham looks pretty awful in the rain.”

  “It looks even worse in sunlight,” said the barman complacently. “We don’t go in for the pretty-pretty in Bootham.”

  “No,” said Antony Craybourne-Fisk, “No-o-o. You couldn’t turn that music down, could you?”

  “More than me life’s worth, mate,” said the landlord, nodding towards the skinny youth. Antony downed his whisky and left.

  At three-thirty Antony was scheduled to meet Bootham’s Conservative party agent. He bought a street guide, and found the place without difficulty. He approached the front door with something like furtiveness, but he found he needn’t have bothered.

  “I’m seeing all the would-be candidates,” said Harold Fawcett, cheerfully. “This is no special favour. Of course I know Central Office would be happy if you were chosen. You’re ‘One of Us,’ as the Chairman puts it, and in on the party’s wavelength at the moment. But I tell you, it’s not yet in the bag.”

  “Of course not,” said Antony deprecatingly. “Naturally not.”

  “There’s seven to be interviewed by the selection committee tomorrow. Of these, I’d say three were in with a chance. Four, if you count the lass. We don’t go much on lady members, in Yorkshire. Should be home, caring for the kids—that’s how we see it. Still, you never know. But your main opponents are local men.”

  “You think there might be a feeling for a local man this time?”

  “I’d say—going by my soundings—that they’ll be split down the middle. On the one hand the local man is closer to the constituency. On the other, the man from Central Office is more likely to get the ear of the government—have friends in high places, be able to get things done. And I won’t hide it from you, Bootham needs something doing for it.”

  “Yes,” said Antony.

  “Now, if you’ll take a tip from me, young fellow—”

  “I really would appreciate one,” said Antony, with something approaching sincerity.

  “Well, living in Bootham these days can be depressing. Unemployment, bankruptcies, poverty—we’ve got it all. Not so much in your constituency, mind—but it’s easy to say ‘I’m all right, Jack,’ if you live down South, less easy if Jack lives two or three streets away and his kids are hungry and he’s defaulting on his mortgage. You get my meaning?”

  “I think so.”

  “So what the committee will be looking for is a message of hope.” Antony’s heart sank to his boots. “Just a touch of optimism, a feeling of light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve been told often enough that it’s there, but we never see it, not here in Bootham. What we want is some slogan—zippy, and heart-raising. Some message to make us square our shoulders and put our chins up. You think up something along those lines, and you’re made.”

  “Oh,” said Antony, standing up and buttoning his Burberry. “Yes, I see. Well, you’ve given me plenty to think about. I think I’ll go back to my hotel and try and concoct something of the kind you’ve mentioned. Something—how shall I put it?—uplifting. By the way, is there anywhere tolerable to eat in town?”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “The Unicorn.”

  “Well, you couldn’t do better than the dining-room at t’Unicorn. They do you proud there.”

  “Oh—ah—I’m sure you’re right. Thank you very much.”

  Antony was so depressed by the interview, and by the strain of suppressing his naturally bad temper, that on the way back to the hotel, walking through the still-falling drizzle, he actually bought a book, a thriller, to while away the time before the interview. He read a chapter before dinner, had a bath by dint of stuffing a wad of newspaper down the plughole, and then turned with a groan to the sheaf of papers with facts and figures about Bootham, made available to him by Central Office. Over dinner (rump steak, fillet steak or sirloin steak, all served with french fries and the usual trimmings), he gazed at the heavy bodies at the other tables, hunched over their knives and forks as if they were garden tools, feeding themselves stolidly, regularly, with lethargic insistence, and he wondered what in God’s name he was doing in this place, and wondered what conceivable message of hope he could bring to this constituency beyond redemption.

  But Antony, for all his personal awfulness—or perhaps because of it—was a political animal at heart, and over the fruit salad (with synthetic whipped cream and a glacé cherry) there came to him from the ether, via a political mind trained to tune itself in to every local ethos and ambience, the faint stirrings of an idea, that almost made him smile to himself. It was only a beginning, but it could be worked on, could be polished. And it might go down well. It might be what they were after. Yes. He took from his jacket pocket a little notebook, and scribbled in it.

  Thus it was that, next day, after talking bonhomously with some of the other hopeful candidates, and implying that he, an outsider, clearly had no hope at all of being chosen, and after talking for five minutes to the selection committee of some sixteen souls (decidedly corporeal souls, most of them) and having explained that no, he was not married, but that he was young—well (disarming smile), youngish—and he expected to remedy this deficiency in time, thus it was that Antony perked up imperceptibly as he sensed the approach of a line of questioning that seemed likely to provide him with his opportunity.

  “Mr—er—Fisk, you’re not from this area?”

  “No, that’s true—though there are—er—family links.”

  “We’re not an attractive part of the country . . . We have our problems, with unemployment, businesses closing, and so on . . . I wonder how you react to—well, to the place as a whole. Coming, as you do, from the South.”

  In the earlier questioning, Antony had sensed that split in the committee that Harold Fawcett had mentioned; half of them sceptical, half of them for him, because they’d been told he was a bright boy. Now, if ever, was the time to convert the sceptical. Now he had to swing them. He thrust his whole body forward, blazing with sincerity.

  “I saw all the things you’re talking about. I saw all the closed works, the empty factories. But it didn’t depress me. Shall I tell you how I see it? Industrial decay is industrial opportunity. Those aren’t closed-down factories, they’re factories waiting to be opened up. The microchip revolution—”

  To give more is unnecessary, though in fact it flowed on for some time. As an argument it was asinine, rather on the level of the politician who demanded that newspapers should print not the numbers of the unemployed, but the numbers of people who actually had jobs. Whatever the microchip revolution did for Britain, it was unlikely to do it in the disused kitchen utensil and garden implement factories that once had given work in Bootham. But the phrase had t
he right ring. It breathed hope, it sketched in that elusive light at the end of the tunnel. At the end, after a series of run-off votes, Antony beat one of the local men by ten votes to six. He was the one who would be recommended to the General Meeting of Bootham’s Conservatives. He modestly expressed great surprise, though he was obviously “tremendously pleased” as well.

  Later on, over beer at the Conservative Club, Harold Fawcett chatted over the selection meeting with Sir Richard Rayne, who owned land on the borders of the constituency, and he expressed surprise at the margin of Craybourne-Fisk’s victory.

  “Thought he might get it, but not by so many. Didn’t expect him to get your vote. Was it the hopeful side of his performance?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Did you like the chap better than you expected?”

  “I did not. He’s a horrible little shit.”

  “Why did you vote for him then?”

  “I’ve got a feeling in my bones we’re going to lose this by-election, and it’s best we lose it with a little shit sent down by Central Office. Then we can put a local man in for next time.”

  • • •

  Jerry Snaithe did not arrive in Bootham for the Labour Party selection meeting by train, but by car. Jerry Snaithe was essentially a loner. He talked a lot about collective action, collective decisions, and workers’ collectives, but essentially he was a loner, and the car is the loner’s form of transport. He arrived alone. His wife was working, he said, and in any case he didn’t believe in turning the process of selection into a beauty parade. Once within the town limits of Bootham, he drove round the town three times, partly because the traffic system, dreamed up by a sadist in the Town Hall, made it almost impossible to do other than drive round in circles, partly because he wanted to get the feel of the place. He sniffed; he sensed the poverty and aimlessness; he saw the decay and dereliction. Like Lancelot Brown confronted by ancestral acres, he saw the place had “capabilities.”