by Andrew Marr
Perhaps, in the circles around Alwyn Grimaldi, word had already gone out that she was favoured by the Master. At any rate, neither the leader of the Labour Party nor any prominent shadow cabinet figures ever came to Barker to support her during the campaign. Nor did the Master himself. But his wife came; and a cluster of once-famous New Labour figures; and dozens of bright young things from London, whose work in obscure political consultancies apparently allowed them the time and freedom to help Barker choose its new Member of Parliament. Their old-fashioned canvassing, street by street, house by house, revealed that Caro’s early lead was narrowing. The Muslim areas of the constituency were divided between radicals who supported the newly formed Islamic British Front, and those who remained loyal to the Labour Party. Luckily, the latter tended to be older, and more likely actually to vote.
Caro’s Conservative opponent was a lean, elderly and supercilious grandee called James A. James, who had served as a minister under David Cameron. He had lost two constituencies so far, which only increased his bottomless contempt for the British electorate; but his rasping voice and eye for an opponent’s weak spots made him dangerous. He pecked away at Caroline, portraying her as a cynical, wealthy, metropolitan blow-in who knew nothing about either Barker or the real world of profit and loss. ‘The young girl’, he called her. When they met face to face for debates in the constituency, he seemed completely impervious to her charm. Caro, who’d never experienced rejection like it, found herself spooked.
Then, a fortnight into the campaign, a Scottish journalist called Tony Moretti turned up. He said he was there to discuss a story about some skulduggery or other in the local council, but when they met, he urgently suggested that she ask James A. James whether he had ever visited a certain address in Cricklewood. The next evening, in front of a large audience at a local school, she did. The air seemed to go out of him. He had been two Jameses before; now he was barely a Jim. He didn’t even turn up at the count to observe Caro winning the seat with an increased majority of 10,000. And when it was all over, she got a personal call of congratulations from the new prime minister elect, Alwyn Grimaldi.
In Glaikit, David Petrie had a far easier ride. The Scottish Nationalists had, bafflingly, chosen a former Tory, a baker called Fisher-Donaldson, to fight him. On Murdoch White’s instructions, Davie said nothing about the Forlaw case or Lord Auchinleck; the Master, after consulting with his wife, had decided to pass the information about the sex ring cover-up to Alwyn Grimaldi, as it would have the maximum political impact coming from the party leader. And so it proved: it knocked the stuffing out of the Conservatives, and it also put Grimaldi, warily and uneasily, in the Master’s debt. (Had Tony Moretti and his comrades at the Scottish Socialist newsletter known that all their hard work would result in a substantial boost for the Master, whom they despised from the soles of their boots to the tops of their skulls, they would probably have done away with themselves.)
David Petrie had no need to get in on that act. Compared to the struggle for the nomination, the election itself was almost an anticlimax.
And so, on Friday, 21 September 2018, the Earl of Dimbleby, chairing the BBC’s election coverage, was able to announce that the barely known Alwyn Grimaldi was the country’s new prime minister. ‘It is customary on these occasions,’ said Lord Dimbleby, with the merest hint of a sardonic smile, ‘to describe the result as historic, and to suggest that nothing will ever be the same. But I rather think we’ve gone beyond that, haven’t we?’ And he winked.
At his recently-bought country house on the South Downs, the Master held what he called a kitchen supper, though a more accurate description would have been council of war. Sadie, sober now for more than a year, was an immaculate hostess, far more amusing than she had ever been in the old days of power. Leslie Khan, Margaret Miller, Murdoch White – all the old warriors were there.
‘Well everybody,’ the Master said, ‘stage one is complete. The Tories are out. We do have the tiny, tiny little problem of that fool Grimaldi, but our people are in place, enough of them to give us a real choice when the time comes. We have some spectacularly talented and driven new MPs. Now, as we all know, it’s our job to make sure they don’t put a foot wrong, that they climb the ladder so fast it’s almost impossible to concentrate on their rise. So keep them close. Make them your friends. If they give you any kind of trouble, bring them to me.’
There was a delicious scent of shepherd’s pie, and a couple of bottles of decent Burgundy had been opened, but the Master led his guests outside before eating. To general bemusement, a stocky farmer was waiting for them with no fewer than four shotguns under one vast arm.
‘I’ve taken up clay pigeons, everyone,’ said the Master with boyish glee. ‘You must all have a go. It’s the most relaxing thing. I find it helps me to think.’
Only the former home secretary Margaret Miller and Murdoch White accepted a weapon.
Leslie Khan was laughing. ‘Oh dear me. Oh dear, dear, dear me. Oh dearie, dearie me. This must never get out. Imagine the papers. Imagine the cartoons. Master dearest, this is just too funny for words.’
Murdoch disagreed. ‘It’s not funny. It’s not funny at all. It’s bloody dangerous. What are the rest of us going to say the next time some halfwit jumps up and says, “Oooh, he’s just a Tory”?’
‘Tories shoot birds,’ said the Master. ‘I just shoot imaginary enemies. Pull!’
Like a little pink plate, the clay disc soared across the horizon. The Master failed to bring it down with his first barrel, but shattered it with his second.
Peter Quint
All journalists are bastards. They just are; I don’t know why.
The Master
Caroline was having a lovely time. The Master’s wife had taken a personal interest. An Italian leather-goods company apparently wanted a British politician as a non-executive director – this was completely within parliamentary rules, as long as she declared it. The income allowed her to take a lease on a flat in north London, which Angela helped turn into a cosy nest. Caro found magazines and websites queuing up to interview her, concentrating on her supposedly pious background. Her unabashed use of the term ‘Christian socialism’ intrigued cynical, secular journalists. She charmed her way through media encounters, and was soon a favourite Labour backbench interviewee. Labour women whom she dismissed as ‘the sisterhood’ and the Master himself called ‘the coven’ tended to shun her, but as a lesbian she had a trump card. Her first campaigns were well-chosen: in support of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, and for the setting up of refuges for street children in British cities. The first won her the support of Conservative-minded newspapers. The second involved fundraising in the City. She exploited her connections with St Peter’s Asset Management, and soon had a network of friendly supporters in what remained of plutocratic London.
So life was good. She was that rare thing, a popular politician. The trolls went for her, but as Caroline had learned never to peer under stones, she barely noticed. Angela had promised to move east from Devon. Every day brought a new challenge, an interesting test. At last Caro knew that she was doing something substantial with her life.
Not that everything worked perfectly. She wasn’t much impressed with the actual House of Commons. The Palace of Westminster is an ancient ship beached on a mudbank. In its bowels there are tangles of pipes and metal ladders, old boilers and dank stinks. It has its staterooms, floridly decorated with historical scenes by Victorian painters. It has its galleys and its restaurants, their staffs more or less permanently aboard. Its decks overlooking the Thames, and its world-famous grotesque superstructure, the unlikely towers and the huge funnels from which smoke no longer billows. Its voyages typically last for five years, during which time the huge crew learn the shortcuts through its maze of corridors, and the rhythm of its days. They form firm friendships, and they make lifelong hatreds. They all fall in love, but only a few with other people. What most unites them, however, is their distance from land. From
the Palace, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland seem very far away. Beyond the encrusted hull there can be found whirlpools, jagged rocks and far-off counties inhabited by those dangerous, incomprehensible creatures, the voters.
And on this voyage, Caroline Phillips found herself seasick. It was a real feeling, a non-metaphorical nausea brought on by the bearpit of the Commons chamber, the vile food, the stale air, and above all the affected sympathy of her colleagues. On bad days, she felt she was walking around wearing a T-shirt that read Lezzie Christian Nutter. Was there really a place for her in the modern Labour Party?
When she had taken her troubles to the Master, he’d pointed out that those who fitted in easily also became indistinguishable. That wasn’t exactly Caro’s problem during her first few months, but she still found things harder than she’d expected. She’d prepared a good maiden speech, and it had been listened to respectfully by the couple of dozen MPs who were in the chamber at the time. She’d got herself onto a committee – a small one, but still. She dutifully issued press releases, and the press dutifully ignored them. She’d been invited onto a panel on a Radio 4 women’s programme, but it had clearly been designed to undermine the new prime minister, and in defending him she had come across as prim and humourless. So for all her efforts she still found herself, as she told Angela, ‘big in Barker’, but nowhere else.
As time went on, the Angela problem became a tougher one. Caro’s only options were either to skimp on her constituency work, or to leave London on Thursday evenings, drive down to Pebbleton, spend Friday there, and then head up to Barker for the weekend, getting back to town by mid-morning on Monday. That was what she did, covering thousands of miles every month. But she was soon exhausted. Even maintaining a pretence of interest in Angela’s boys was becoming beyond her. She needed her energy for politics.
Every morning, as she rolled over in bed in her north London den, Caro checked her phone for messages; every morning there’d be some she’d slept through. Once, it was the Master himself. ‘Time to reach a new level, Ms Phillips. I want you to win Peter Quint over. Regard it as a kind of test.’
Peter Quint was a famous figure. Caro set out to woo him. She had been given two tickets to a dinner at the American ambassador’s residence, at which the guests would be serenaded by a great Motown star. Angela wasn’t available, so she invited Quint as her other half.
‘If I were anybody else, Mr Q, this might be thought rather forward of me. But we both understand it’s business; I am no danger to your reputation, nor you to mine. This is just a chance to get acquainted.’
Quint wasn’t stupid. ‘We both know who’s behind this. But it’s a good idea.’
The US ambassador lives in a grand house tucked inside the north-west corner of Regent’s Park, guarded and secluded. And it was indeed an extraordinary evening. There was a full orchestra for the singer, excellent Southern food – the ambassador was from Mississippi – and a sprinkling of the most interesting people in London.
Over dinner, Caroline fixed Peter Quint with her gaze, and tried to project her most intense warmth upon him. To her surprise, he merely blinked and looked back.
‘You’re not interested in me, are you?’ she asked. She wasn’t offended, just intrigued: this had hardly ever happened to her before.
‘Why would I be?’ he asked. ‘You’re being pushed up the tree by a mutual friend. But you don’t seem to stand for much. You’ve got no power. You’re clearly not a gossip. Why would I be interested in you?’
‘Most men are.’
‘Well, you are pretty, I give you that. But you’re not interested in men, are you?’
‘Not in that way. But that’s hardly the point, is it?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Quint, swallowing a yawn, ‘but what other way is there?’
‘Most men aren’t that interested in sex,’ said Caroline. ‘Well, they are a bit, but what they want most of all is to be admired. They want women with big eyes who ask them questions and pretend to listen to the answers, and tell them how fascinating they are. You’re mostly just big babies who want your tummies tickled.’
This was uncomfortably close to the truth. Peter Quint had recently been kicked out by his girlfriend. And her departure had left, he had to concede, a mirror-shaped absence.
His rented flat off the Bayswater Road had been hurriedly reconverted into the office which hid all his professional secrets. Pinned to a large, framed corkboard that covered one wall were the recent columns of his so-called rivals, with every simile or half-interesting fact circled in green ink. Scraps of information were neatly filed on the desk – things that had been said by long-dead politicians, jaw-dropping statistics filched from Wikipedia, biographies and books of political analysis, marked and annotated. And, of course, all his own previous columns, neatly pasted into large black-covered books. For Peter Quint was not averse to quoting himself. Once a year or so had passed, nobody remembered what had been in any newspaper; thinking up new things to write was a waste of effort. These days, Peter Quint’s prodigious output was at least 80 per cent plagiarism. The remaining fifth was based on a remarkable contacts book, and a talent for social occasions.
As Caroline had already noticed, Quint had a thing he did with his eyes. He would put them slightly out of focus while people were talking to him, and then he would look beyond them. His glance would graze his interlocutor’s shoulder, then bounce over it. He’d start with the faces closest to him, then move over their shoulders too, to the rest of the room. Once he’d worked out who was the most important person present, he saw nobody else. Like a blind ball of ambition he’d wobble against the people around him, and keep moving, and keep wobbling, until he’d wobbled up to the important person. Then, suddenly, his eyes would come back into focus, and brim with gleeful interest. And he’d stand there, chubby and immovable, wibbling and agreeing with whatever the important person said. This did not make him popular at parties – and he spent much of his life at parties – but it was, in a way, his job.
Caroline had found Quint mysterious. In truth, his story was fairly straightforward. Quint had risen slickly through a provincial grammar school, York University and the BBC trainee scheme before landing his first political column at the ripe old age of twenty-three with the Mercury. He became the last of the old-school columnists. He had the face for it. A broad brow, lustrous grey hair brushed back over it, an aquiline nose and a strong jaw gave him a vaguely classical look. His byline photograph was magnificent – intimidating, imperial, impossible to fault. ‘Why, you look like a Roman emperor, my dear,’ his adoring mother had told him when it had first appeared in the Observer. ‘Y-e-e-e-s … But Nero, or Caligula?’ his more knowing girlfriend had asked. Quint, however, had armoured himself long ago against the nay-sayers. He was perfectly capable of sitting silently, gazing at his newspaper photograph with a smirk of admiration, for an hour at a time.
The Master had taken Quint under his wing because he was not untalented. He could produce a thousand words of literate, biting and often amusing copy in well under an hour, on any topic, and from almost any viewpoint that was required. He understood the dilemma of the political columnist: how to keep being read.
Interlude
How to be a Political Columnist
There are two gambits, Peter Quint would say. Here’s the problem: if you write what you believe, and stay consistent, your readers will quickly get sick of you. They’ll know what you’re going to say before you’ve said it. Why should they read on? One answer was to keep on saying it, only ever more vividly. But that meant saying it more extremely. Trouble was, you ended up ranting, stuck in fourth gear with your extreme viewpoint, and unable to reverse neatly back into common sense. This he called Liddling.
The alternative was to change your view regularly, and pick subjects the readers didn’t expect. Keep moving. Zigzag. The danger then was becoming a professional, and therefore wearisome, contrarian. Everyone thought the Russian president a dangerous lunatic? Th
en your job was to warmly defend him. Popular opinion was turning against Alwyn Grimaldi? As one of his most long-standing critics, you leapt to his defence. This also had a limited shelf-life, though longer than the alternative. It was more interesting. Quint called it the Jenkins gambit.
During his salad years, Peter Quint had tried both. He had swung back and forth in his defence of Labour and the Tories – never predictable, but never taken quite seriously either. He had snarled, spat and confected anger. He could be quite good. But the truth was that he was too comfortable, too thoroughly pleased with himself, to be convincingly angry. So he learned to oil. Again, the boy was good. He had buttery, palm-oily skin. His hair was oily. He became a sucker, a climbing vine. Extreme left-wingers and staunch conservatives felt his slick attentiveness coil itself around them, and assumed he was a genuine admirer. Sometimes he was. His columns were full of gossip he picked up from hanging around beside people at parties. For that reason, they were worth reading. Anyone on the up, or who held a position of power or influence – a senior civil servant, a flavour-of-the-month broadcaster, all ministers and shadow ministers – would be slobberingly flattered. But everybody else – those who were beginning to fall from favour, those who clearly would never make it right to the top, the averagely intelligent backbenchers – would feel the lash of Quint’s contempt.
For Peter Quint was an admirer of power, not of politics. Increasingly he felt that anybody who had gone to all the tedious trouble of getting him or herself elected was self-evidently a moron. A well-paid journalist, who’d never been elected, who’d never tried to steer anything bigger than a moderately-sized lawnmower, had, he felt, the right – the duty – to look down on MPs from a great height. And looking down was what Peter did second best. He hung on the system like a growth, oiling up … and pissing down.