Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  ‘You want a special … Sharia … area? In the middle of my constituency?’

  ‘Exactly. Where our women don’t have to be frightened because they are dressed modestly. Where our men, Mrs Phillips, don’t have semi-naked flesh rubbed in their noses, and the stink of alcohol from shops and pubs. We have our own ways of dealing with people who misbehave, and flout God’s law. We just want to be left alone to govern ourselves in peace – modesty and peace – without extremists marching through our streets. We cause nobody any harm. And if the government is worried about hot-headed young boys taking up violent jihad, then frankly their best bet is to help us reinforce the authority of our own elders and our mullah.’

  This was not what Caro had expected when she’d taken the short taxi ride to Regent’s Park. She could see the dangers. There was already a campaign in Barker and the neighbouring towns against the building of a third, and larger, mosque. Supporting Mrs Umar’s proposal wouldn’t make her popular with her white constituents. On the other hand, she’d just seen for herself the kind of abuse Muslim women had to put up with; and if something similar had been allowed for the Jews of north London, what really was the case against giving it to Muslims in the Midlands? She needed time to think.

  ‘I need time to think.’

  ‘So you’re not turning us down flat. This is good news. I told them before I came down here that you were a good woman. You see, you are not all the same. That’s what I said.’

  At that moment a figure in a full black burqa waved at them across the pond and whooped in a broad Barker accent, ‘Eeh, Leila! That you, swee’haa?’

  ‘Oh my goodness, Mrs Phillips, there’s Fatima. What a coincidence. She lives just around the corner from me. She’s studying international diplomacy at London University.’

  Fatima bustled over. The two Barker women exchanged kisses and hugs, and Mrs Umar introduced Caro.

  ‘An MP? Well, we aa moving in posh circles. Teck a phoatie?’

  ‘Yes, of course. You don’t mind, do you, Mrs Phillips? And then perhaps one of the three of us, all girls together?’

  And so, as Caro and Mrs Umar grinned bravely in the cold, the picture was taken on Fatima’s mobile phone by a helpful passer-by. Fatima was smiling too, a smile of contempt, but you couldn’t see that under her burqa.

  Once Caro had left, Mrs Umar met the runner around the back of a rhododendron bush, thanked him – ‘That was well done’ – and handed him a slim envelope.

  David Petrie, MP

  In politics, you are never alone; in politics, you are always alone.

  The Master

  The House of Commons chamber was smaller than David Petrie had thought it would be. It was dimly lit, and smelled of leather and dust. The corridors around it were populated mainly by statues of half-forgotten statesmen, a convocation of icy, silent, sneering marble. Attendants drowsed, and the smell of stew rolled up from underground. David’s office, manned by Bunty, was shared with a man from Wales who seemed to be conducting half a dozen different affairs, although he had a wife back in Swansea. He was the first man David had ever met who had his hair ‘done’ rather than cut. He kept photographs of himself on his desk. Davie had taken against him from the start.

  The fat wodge of constituency work that arrived by mail and email every morning he found easy enough to cope with, despite Bunty. Occasionally, when some piece of paper went missing, Bunty would explain, ‘Ah elbow-filed it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ken, like this,’ she’d said, nudging a pile of paper with her elbow straight into the wastepaper bin beside her desk. ‘Ye dinnae really need it.’

  And the strange thing was, she was almost always right.

  The work wasn’t too hard – running the workmen at home, keeping on top of balance sheets and cash flow, had been tougher. But out in the corridors at Westminster, waiting in committee meeting rooms, queuing for his coffee and sandwiches, Petrie felt out of place and lonely. He kept yawning. Nobody seemed to know who he was. Sometimes he imagined his father’s questioning face: ‘Big man, eh?’

  No, he knew himself better than that. He was a medium-sized, uncomfortable man, just pretending to be confident. He became adept at using his tablet and his mobile to make it look as if he was working, when really, most of the time he was just waiting for someone to come and talk to him.

  Davie found, to his surprise, that he was a bit older than the average new MP. They all seemed so bouncy, desperately ambitious and glossy with self-confidence. There was no anger in them. He had anger; the swift defenestration of Lord Auchinleck, after a devastating little column by Peter Quint, had been too fast, almost too painless to stop him feeling angry. He made a couple of friends, Scottish Labour men he’d known back home from conferences and TV discussions. But he didn’t feel he’d joined a club worth joining.

  There were a lot of women around – ‘making eyes’, as Mary would have put it. Researchers, more than MPs. Journalists, too. After a while, there was one girl in particular. He assumed she worked for some regional TV station or other, and she always seemed to be popping up – bumping into him, smiling, catching his eye, smiling. But she had a tight, professional face; hardly any lips.

  One evening he was in the Pugin Room waiting for a guy from The Times who was doing a feature on the bright new MPs to watch. (Why had they chosen him? The Master’s team? Of course.) He liked the Pugin Room – the wallpaper with gold on it and the plush chairs and all the dark wood corresponded better to his idea of what Parliament should be like than the functional cafés over in Portcullis House, or the dreary communality of the Strangers’ Dining Room. The Girl Who Smiled came up to his table and asked if she could join him. She sat down without waiting for an answer, waved at the waiter as if he was a friend, and ordered a round of sandwiches and a gin and tonic. She was pretty, he thought: a shrewdly clever face, dark-brown eyes that held your attention and didn’t let go. A friendly lass and all. Some kind of English accent – not London – which Petrie couldn’t place. He enjoyed telling her about Ayrshire, and the business he’d built up. He found that, without meaning to, he was making the firm sound bigger and grander than it really was. She went on about how great it was to find a Labour MP who’d actually done something in the real world. He showed her the palms of his hands, still slightly callused from proper work. They had a laugh. Enough of a laugh so that when the Times guy arrived he was wearing his eyebrows halfway up his damned forehead. As soon as he came, she upped and left; gave Davie her card. But she was discreet enough not to even peck him on the cheek.

  Not a peck. Not that he was tempted. Lonely; not tempted. He went back each night to a flat in Dolphin Square, rented from an ex-MP who had lost his seat at the last election, and let his mind wander. He didn’t think about Mary, but he thought about sex. Sex, Murdoch White had warned him, was a distraction he couldn’t afford. To feed the anger inside him, the only thing was power. Nothing could get in the way of that. So he would pour himself a drink and call home and talk to Mary for at least half an hour, sometimes longer. The boys were in bed by then, of course, but he’d often call again at breakfast time, and get a few cheerfully garbled sentences back.

  The London flat was posher than he was used to, with deep leather sofas and a huge flat-screen TV, and was walking distance from the Commons. It made things easy. To start with, Davie didn’t have much ambition to see London. He’d never been one for the theatre, or opera, or any of that shite. He went out a few times to the pictures, or as they called them here the ‘fillums’, but it wasn’t much fun sitting by yourself with a bag of popcorn. The London boozers were anonymous and expensive; if he wanted a few pints, the Members’ Bar, or even the Pugin Room, were cheaper and easier. Anyway, in those first few months he was determined to put his shoulder to the wheel and show folk what he was made of. Thanks to the Master, he was the first of his intake to get onto a select committee – the best one by far, the Public Accounts Committee – and he worked hard in the Commons library bonin
g up before its sessions.

  To his surprise, all sorts of invitations arrived within the first few months – offers to meet journalists, invitations to the Irish embassy, suggestions that he might join the cross-party group on pelagic fishing, or coastal defences (Glaikit was hardly a coastal constituency, but one village and a small strand of oily pebbles apparently counted), or the Anglo-Russian group, or the Scotch whisky group … and so on. With all of that, and meetings of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the constituency work, it was perfectly possible to stay in the Commons until ten or eleven at night without ever being at a loss for something to do. So the weeks rolled glibly by.

  As with every new MP, Davie carried an uncomfortable burden inside him – the maiden speech: the first outing, the public dive into the fishbowl. It had to be done, and done well; it had to be seriously received and widely noticed. Only once he’d taken that plunge could he really relax.

  (Taken from Hansard: the maiden speech of the Honourable Member for Glaikit:

  Mr Speaker sir, I am grateful to you for allowing me to catch your eye.

  The people of Glaikit are, like people everywhere, a mixter-maxter sort of folk. Historians tell us they were among the ancient Caledonians, and also the first Scots who arrived on our shores from Ireland, plus of course the odd ravaging Norseman and – I say this with a slightly heavy heart – many English incomers, welcome as they are. We are sophisticated people. We have an Italian café. The Glaikit Temperance Hotel has a Thai curry night. (Laughter) In its long history, Glaikit has been a royal burgh and a manufacturing centre. It was burned by William Wallace, and was a great Covenanting centre in what we still call the bloody times. But, Mr Speaker, and here is the point (cries of ‘Hear, hear’ and ‘At last’) – the people of Glaikit have always been entirely consistent and solid in one respect: they have, ever since the founding of the Scottish Labour Party in 1888, elected Labour Members to represent them in this House. (Interruption) It may offend some of my Scottish Nationalist friends to say so, but the people of Glaikit have always had their heads screwed on. (Interruption) The Honourable Member for Glasgow Deep South is entirely wrong. Yes, there was a Member for Glaikit who represented the Unionist cause in the 1950s, but he was not elected as a Conservative and Unionist Party candidate: he got into money troubles and he left his wife and he left his honour and he left his party behind; and the people of Glaikit duly turfed him out at the next election. The unlamented Tim Walker does not count.

  I was born in the village of Smeddum, just outside Glaikit, the son of a local builder, and I am proud to say that I am a builder too. I have built many decent homes, paid for with public money, and private; and my company has managed a proper provision for our people without losing too many ordinary folks’ homes to Maggie Thatcher’s quite pernicious ‘right to buy’ legislation. I was brought up in a warm, loving, working-class family, a church-going family, and when I am asked what I hope to do in this place, my answer is always the same: I am a builder. I am here to build. I am proud of our new government, under our young, vigorous and determined new leader. (Interruption) I have to say to the Honourable Members opposite that their contempt for him is born of fear, as they know very well. I, however, am here to build – like all of my colleagues on this side of the House – a fairer Britain.

  Perhaps I should say ‘rebuild’, because we find ourselves now amidst the rubble of earlier mistakes. We are cut off from our European markets, and we have lost much of our once-mighty financial power. Well, Mr Speaker, I regard that as in some respects a good thing. For too long, the interests of international capital and of the City of London dominated Britain. For too long, an overvalued pound made it nearly impossible for manufacturers, offering decent jobs for decent wages, to survive. But we are not daunted. We stand on the threshold of a new country and new possibilities, which will enable us to rebuild our industrial base. (Interruption) Yes, yes, that does mean regional subsidies and help from central government. I sit on this side of the House because I believe in the power of government. But it means, more than that, all of us pulling together, using all the talents of our bright, well-educated people, relearning the confidence to build new businesses across Scotland, through the north and the Midlands of England, and yes, even in the soft south too. To do this, we need people in this House who have dirty hands. Once upon a time, this chamber was full of former mineworkers, and sheet-metal workers, and road-menders, who had come up through the trade union movement. On the opposite side, there were businessmen – hard-faced, no doubt – but men who had built real businesses before they went into politics. And then we went through the long years when politics was dominated by spivs and children, by spotty-faced youths who had been parliamentary researchers, or junior officials, before arriving here knowing absolutely nothing.

  Well, Mr Speaker, we have all learned, up and down the country, the consequences of a Parliament of empty heads and soft hands. Here, Mr Speaker, are my hands. They are not pretty hands. They have a fair few scars and calluses on them. My nails are thick, and they have been broken. But they are, Mr Speaker, the hands of a builder, who knows what life is like out there. And they are hands that are ready to keep building, at the service of this new Labour government.)

  Sitting in the shadows high above the chamber were Murdoch White and Alex Brodie, the one-time chancellor of the exchequer; the Master had felt it would draw unnecessary attention if he were to attend in person. White and Brodie could not see, of course, the thin white scars across Petrie’s back and legs, but they could hear an unusual passion in his voice – something unexpected, unexplained and interesting, a raw and angry double bass. From down below in the chamber itself, they heard the rumble of approval. They heard the shout of ‘Gissa job!’ from the Tory benches which meant that Petrie sat down to deflating laughter.

  Brodie scratched his ear. ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Better than not bad,’ said White. ‘Passion. A couple of jokes. A bit of history. No, the boy has made his mark, even though that stuff about his hands was badly judged.’

  ‘Yes, left him open. And it wasn’t a great speech, Murdoch. There wasn’t enough about our place in the world. Where was the fucking politics? There wasn’t the faintest hint of a challenge to that fool Grimaldi. If we’re going to grow him, he needs to be known as a lot more than Bob the Builder from Scotland.’

  ‘There’s time enough.’

  ‘Not that much.’

  A Lesson at a Dinner

  In politics, there is only one safe appetite: the appetite for power.

  The Master

  Gradually, David Petrie got to know his fellow backbenchers better – the good-looking idle dossers, the mediocre but frantically ambitious, the left-wing posers who’d been to public school and owned half a dozen flats for rent, and a few who, he reluctantly admitted to himself, were genuinely decent.

  Murdoch White had called in to his office to find out how things were going. ‘Need to introduce you to some people, Davie. Useful folk …’

  And the great Alex Brodie, now out of Parliament and working full-time for an international consultancy, duly asked him for dinner. Alex Brodie …

  Davie turned up at a tiny, white-stuccoed townhouse, like a dolls’ house made of icing sugar. The one next door was painted pink, and the one beside that mint-green. They didn’t seem to Davie like houses for serious people. Back home, he calculated, they would have been worth a hundred thousand pounds or so, tops. Here, in Mayfair, they must have cost many millions. So that’s what former Labour ministers earned for themselves, he thought, impressed.

  Davie intended to enter the sugarhouse with a sneer, but when the door was opened by Brodie himself, he found his expression had lapsed into an ingratiating gape. ‘Quite a place you’ve got here,’ he blurted out. ‘Cosy, mind. I guess it’s all hedge-fund managers and bankers as neighbours?’

  ‘Well, yes. And consultants, and a few embassies. Technically it’s not mine, of course. It’s leased by the company. We’re
based offshore. Don’t approve, myself. I used to be in charge of taxation, remember. Gave the accountants a piece of my mind. They just laughed; these days, it’s that or go out of business. Come in, Mr Petrie, it’s just a small party. We’ve been hearing great things about you.’

  In the living room there were the smells of real wood-smoke, varnish and candle-wax – prosperous, comforting smells – low lighting, and a man dressed like a doorman carrying a tray of drinks. Standing in clusters here and there, murmuring, were two or three other MPs Davie knew by name: the irritating Welshman who shared his office, that uppity moral-majority Christian dyke from Barker, and a couple of frontbench spokesmen. Holding court in one corner was Sir Leslie Khan, the former party fixer – as close as Davie had been to Labour Party royalty – with his neatly clipped Elizabethan beard, tired, knowing eyes and long, Armani-draped, insect-like limbs. Davie remembered what a former leader had said about Khan: ‘Our indispensable Machiavelli, but not as naïve as the original. Nor as nice.’

  Khan turned and stared at him. It was a very odd feeling. Davie felt ten or eleven years old. His face was flushing. Entirely against his will, his blood temperature was rising. How did the man do that?

  Khan walked over to Davie just as his host was handing him a glass of wine. ‘Mr Petrie. We’ve heard some good things about you. But the question is this: why hasn’t anybody else?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Davie downed his glass, and reached nervously for a top-up.

  Khan wasn’t finished. He pointed a long white finger in Davie’s direction. ‘Working hard. Busy little beaver. Milk monitor before you know it. Wagging your little tail. Wig-wag, wag-wig.’ His finger moved like that of a disapproving Frenchman. ‘But no profile, as such, for all that scurrying about. Not like the delectable Mrs Phillips over there.’