by Andrew Marr
A Table for Three
The good politician is never picky about his allies. Because no ally is permanent.
The Master
The Poule au Pot in Pimlico was as much an outpost of French civilisation in London as the embassy was of British grandeur in Paris. With its crowded tables, predictable menu, professionally surly waiters and fat green two-litre carafes of house wine, it offered the political classes a private and boozy mimicry of French regional hospitality. Ever since it was first discovered by Elinor Goodman, the then political editor of Channel 4 News (though the credit was as bitterly disputed as the discovery of the source of the Nile), the Poule had been the scene of verbal treachery and unlikely alliances straddling politics. A formidable number of partridges, pheasants and poussins had been stuffed in its kitchens; an even greater number of secretaries of state, ministers and senior civil servants had been stuffed across its tables. Its candles gave off a sickly glow and dropped wax on the tables. So did many of its ageing customers.
It was here that Caroline had arranged to meet Angela, after her urgent message from Devon. She was still shaking with shock and anger about the Daily Mail – the sheer treachery of that vile man Petrie – and she was worried about how she would deal with the debate. She had been a fool. She had been taken for a ride by Mrs Umar. That much was clear. But there was nothing that could be done about it now. She needed help. She had called a number given her by the Master, but all that had come back was a text message: ‘You need your friends. Talk to Angela.’
It seemed spectacularly unhelpful. Nevertheless, when Angela called from Devon, sounding odd, Caro had cancelled lunch with a fellow backbencher and booked a table here.
A contemptuous-looking French boy, fingering the crotch of his too-tight jeans, greeted her at the door.
‘Yes? We are full.’
‘I’ve booked a table. Name of Phillips.’
‘Oh, oui. Follow me.’ Shrugging sadly, he led her to a corner table, set for three.
‘No, there are just the two of us.’
‘Non, madame. Sree. You eat for sree. You pay for sree. It is enough. I have not an ars’ole.’ And he looked at her as if she were decaying vegetable matter, and left her.
There was a carafe on the table, two litres of house white. Caro, a little confused, poured herself a glass. She was staring at the menu when she heard an unexpected voice, huskier than Angela’s.
‘Me too, darling.’
She looked up. The Master’s wife, dressed in an expensive tweed jacket, was looking down at her.
‘How are you, Caroline?’
Caroline smiled her best smile. With most people this had the effect of a blast of ultraviolet light. But Sadie merely smiled politely back as she sat down. ‘I’m joining you. That’s why it’s a table for three. It’s all right, Angela knows. And so does my husband. He’s in Paris, rallying the troops like the king over the water.’
When Angela arrived soon afterwards, however, she didn’t seem entirely pleased to see Sadie. Nevertheless, the three of them ordered and began to talk. Caroline outlined the nightmarish position she found herself in – apparently supporting Sharia law for Northamptonshire, apparently a fellow traveller for FGM. She could deny it all, explain that she’d been set up, but that would make her the laughing stock of the House of Commons, and the enemy of all the Muslims in Barker, of whom there were many. Furthermore, if Leila Umar came out against her, who would be believed? Leila Umar was an impressive and plausible woman.
Sadie listened quietly. Finally she said, ‘I’ve spoken to my husband. But I already knew what he’d say. “Think like a politician. For a politician, every threat, every looming disaster, is an opportunity. Embrace risk. It’s the only way forward.” So you’re to apologise, to eat humble pie when you’re attacked by that Scottish man who’s jumped on the bandwagon. You need to surprise them.’
Caroline was unimpressed. ‘How? By turning up in a niqab?’
‘No. Remember why you first softened towards Mrs Umar. These people are being attacked. The rest of us are complacent. You don’t support all aspects of Sharia law. Of course you don’t. You were speaking out against FGM long before David Petrie left his building sites. Today, you’re known for two things. You’re known for your sexual preference, and you’re known as a woman of faith. Accentuate it. Talk about the God of love. Talk about mutual respect and decency. Talk about areas for women who happen to be Muslim, where they can feel safe.’
Angela drained her glass and joined in the conversation for the first time. ‘That’s all very well, but I don’t think it will wash. Not compared to what they’ll be throwing at Caro.’
‘Quite right,’ said Sadie. ‘So we have to go further. Suppose the Muslim community in Springtown are attacked, just as Mrs Umar was in the park? Suppose there’s an angry, extreme Christian leader in the area who picks up Petrie’s comments and leads a mob there?’
‘Well, of course that would change things,’ said Caro. ‘But “suppose, suppose, suppose …”’
Angela, confronted by a small plate of casserole, suddenly looked queasy. ‘Sadie, that isn’t why I’ve just been approached by Titus Croke, is it?’
‘Yes, well, Angela, you know what Titus Croke stands for, I’m sure. Against women priests. Against the Catholic menace. But above all, against Islam in Britain – what he calls the march of the Heathen.’
Caroline stabbed a rabbit. ‘He is foul. Titus Croke represents everything in the Church, in fact everything in religious life, that I most detest. He’s a man who knows only how to hate. God forbid we ever see the likes of Titus Croke stirring things up in Barker.’
Sadie had barely touched the food on her plate, but now she dabbed her lips, picked up her handbag and rose from her chair.
‘God’s a little late, I’m afraid. Titus Croke is already on the march. Someone’s tipped him the wink. He seems to have got some money from somewhere. We know nothing about any of that. But if you want a cudgel with which to hit back at our smug Mr Petrie, here it is.’ She pulled a small piece of crudely printed paper from her handbag. On one side of it was a photocopy of the Mail article, with David Petrie’s words highlighted. On the other was a call to arms. English people, Christian people, were summoned to meet and march in Caroline’s constituency. The stencilled headline read ‘Spires, not Minarets!’
‘I must go,’ said Sadie, ‘and leave you, Angela, to drop your little bombshell in privacy.’
Angela, appearing dumbfounded, made a shrug of incomprehension in Caroline’s direction. Once Sadie had left the restaurant, she took a hefty swig from her wine glass and began to talk, and talk fast. ‘What the hell was all that about? I got a call from someone I’ve never heard of saying that Sadie was going to be joining us here. Did you invite her? I thought not. So how the hell did she know where we were meeting? And all that about Titus Croke – it was as if she knew in advance what your problem was, and had somehow fixed a solution …’
Caroline broke in: ‘Because of course it is a solution. If I can make it seem that David Petrie is somehow connected to an extremist mob, then I can show why some kind of protection for Muslims, even if it isn’t Mrs Umar’s pet scheme, is urgently necessary. He’ll look like a thug, and I’ll be able to speak for moderation – live and let live. I can remind the Commons about my record, our situation. This is my way out. God, but it’s clever.’
‘But don’t you see?’ said Angela. ‘Sadie and her husband must be in collusion with Titus Croke. Just this morning he sent me the most vile email. He said that I was doing Satan’s work, and that you and I were in, and I quote, “an abominable union”. He said lesbians should be excommunicated from the Church, that we were the witches of the modern age.’
‘He said that?’
‘He said that.’
‘Marvellous!’
‘Marvellous?’
‘Yes, marvellous. If I quote that in the Commons, there’s hardly a Member on either side who won’t back me, just to show
their contempt for that kind of medieval bigotry. In the most bizarre way, this is getting better and better.’
By now, however, Angela seemed livid. ‘You really don’t get it, do you? Titus Croke has been put up to this by the very people you seem to be working for. The whole thing’s a cynical game. It might help you tomorrow night, but what about those poor people in Barker? Somebody could well get hurt. If Titus Croke is involved, frankly it’s almost certain.’
‘Well, Angela, I can stop that. If I blow the whistle in time, the police will have to step in. Leila Umar and her community will have no choice but to see me as their protector. After that, I’ll be able to dictate how far and how fast we go in changing the law for Springtown. And as for you, it’s all very well haranguing me about Barker, but it’s a complicated place. It’s not like your little idyll in a valley in Devon.’
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. That’s the “little bombshell” that Sadie knows about somehow. Caro, darling, we may be having an argument, but I love you more than life itself. So I’ve come to a decision. I’m leaving Pebbleton. I’m coming up to Northamptonshire. I’ve already applied for a living there. No more week after week apart. No more of you criss-crossing the country for a few snatched hours. No more of me, angry and lonely by myself, thinking of you. We’re going to be a proper couple from now on. I’m going to be your eyes and ears in Barker. I’m going to work with all the communities there, and you’re going to have the kind of support you need if you’re going to do everything that you can in politics. We are one. We should start behaving that way.’
Angela’s speech had been delivered calmly enough. Nobody looked around from the other tables, near though they were. But by the end of it her cheeks were wet with tears, and Caroline was crying too. They dried one another’s faces, kissed lightly, and held hands under the table.
After they had left, another of the waiters came up behind the one who had ushered Caro to the table. He put his hand on his bottom and squeezed lightly.
‘Funny women.’
‘Oui. All those uteruses around one table.’
And they both shuddered.
The Sports and Social
I’m not a Tory. But they’re more amusing than we are.
The Master
Stale air: the heavy scent of old food left out in black plastic bin bags just beyond the door, and the thicker, sweeter, even more nauseating smell of political disappointment inside. Once, the smell of failure in the Sports and Social Bar of the House of Commons, deep in the hold of the ship, had been masked by cigarette smoke. To still be here at midnight, calling for pints of Courage bitter from Gawain, the green-waistcoated barman, meant one of two things: utterly hopeless alcoholism, perhaps combined with a marriage falling apart; or lowlife backbench fodder, kept back to sit through a late-night debate in the chamber. That was a whips’ punishment for minor infractions. You could work your way back into favour by turning up at unsocial hours to nod at a government minister defending the provision of bus services in Derbyshire, or to ask hostile questions of an opposition MP making an impertinent speech about the chancellor of the exchequer that he had researched among the trolls of the internet.
Tonight, two Labour MPs, Sarah Harris and Eric Baxter, were sharing beer and whisky with a heavily-built veteran Conservative universally known as ‘Quite Concur’. Sarah had written an article for the New Statesman which had been regarded by the prime minister as unhelpful; Eric had returned late from a family holiday, and missed a tight vote. Both were now working their way through the salt mines. Quite Concur had a face as round and knobbly as a Jerusalem artichoke, but less expressive. Nobody was entirely sure whether he was a shrewd observer, ever alert to the shifting fortunes of his more senior colleagues, or a drifting dirigible of flannel and oxygen, a right honourable vegetable. But he was a friendly soul, who always stood his round. All three were abuzz with that rare thing, a late-night vote on a backbench motion which had been bitterly contested and would make the news the following morning.
‘I am frankly disappointed,’ Sarah Harris said. ‘I can’t for the life of me understand why Caroline Phillips, of all people, would spout such politically-correct drivel. I mean, we’ve all got Muslims’ – she made it sound like a social disease. ‘I had her marked down as a possible future leader. Damned if I still do, after that.’
‘Small one?’ asked Eric Baxter.
‘Sharpener,’ said Sarah. Quite Concur raised his eyebrows.
‘Something to refresh,’ said Eric.
‘Tincture,’ said Sarah.
‘Tincturissimo?’
‘Quite concur,’ said Quite Concur.
‘But Sarah, young Mr Petrie fell flat on his face, didn’t he?’
‘Yes. Caroline was saved by that religious nutter and his threat of a pogrom. Doesn’t mean she was right.’
‘But the vote went with her. I’d never have believed that possible a few days ago,’ said Eric, on his way to the bar.
‘Quite concur,’ said Quite Concur.
Eric returned with three triple whiskies. ‘Just cooking whisky, boys and girls. Have to tighten our belts. Gawain doesn’t know how long he’s got a job. Bottoms up.’
‘I don’t really get Petrie,’ continued Sarah. ‘He looks and sounds like a working-class left-winger, but if you listen to him, he’s curiously right-wing. He’s in favour of Trident, NATO and the Americans. But there he was tonight, suddenly championing the cause of mutilated Muslim girls. Why might that be, do you suppose?’
‘Touch of Islamophobia? Give him a few years and a few rungs up the ladder, and he’ll be marching us into some hot and dusty foreign country for another fruitless crusade,’ suggested Eric, who had made his name by voting and speaking eloquently against the Iraq war in the Blair years.
‘But one day you’ll back him for leader, won’t you, Eric?’
‘Well, do you know, Sarah, perhaps I might. He isn’t soppy. Full head of hair on him. And he isn’t a twat, either. He took a terrific belting this evening from your Mrs Phillips. Looked white as a sheet. But he’ll bob up again, mark my words.’
‘There are rumours that he’s close to the Master.’
‘Quite,’ said Quite Concur, who was becoming less voluble as the whiskies took effect.
The two Labour MPs, feeling that they had cracked a mystery, got up and prepared to head, a little unsteadily, towards the Members’ taxi rank. Tomorrow, they wouldn’t recall a single word that had been said.
After they’d gone, Quite Concur sat up a little more confidently, and addressed the by-now completely empty bar. He soliloquised. ‘Alwyn Grimaldi. Knew his father in the squadron. Very clever man, very clever son. Always had a soft spot for young Alwyn. We on our side regard him as a bit of a loon, of course. One of those boys who think the Americans are always in the wrong. The United Fruit Company. Bay of Pigs. Edward Snowden. All that. And now, because our lot are being so beastly, in he comes. Electoral upset. Wham. The king’s first minister, no less. Can’t last. Every Labour Member is asking himself or herself, who next? Keep my ear to the ground. Not a great reputation for brains. Doesn’t matter. In politics, character second to intellect. Gordon Brown. What matters, hmm? What matters is what’s happening. Cabinet discredited, no obvious replacement – but Alwyn’s going to have to go before the election. Rum business. I don’t think Alwyn’s that bad. But nobody listens to me. There are a few dark horses; Caroline Phillips and David Petrie are two of them. Now they’re set against one another. Kind of cage fight, something like that. Mark my words, somebody’s stringing some … strings. Pulling them …’
Quite Concur got to his feet, and found his office without difficulty. There, he pulled off his jacket and braces, delicately unlaced his shoes, clambered onto a small sofa and slept the sleep of the just and the wise.
In the Master’s House
Y’know, it’s not as big as people say.
The Master
Oh yes it was. In the Master’s house t
here were, as the saying goes, many mansions. From the outside, it was an expensive but not extraordinary stuccoed north London home – pillars, railings, a modest flight of steps, the bottom floor picked out in arsenic green. Inside, it plunged down into a huge basement, leapt up four floors to a gigantic roof terrace hidden from prying eyes by frosted glass, and writhed back into what had once been a substantial garden, with a clutter of new rooms.
Sadie ruled the upper areas, where she had two wardrobe rooms, her own bathroom and a study, and where the shared bedroom was situated. The Master reigned in the lower depths, where he had a gymnasium, a library, a home cinema and, right at the back and deepest down, what he called his ‘war room’, and Sadie called the playroom. It wasn’t a study in the normal sense. One wall was given over to an enormous whiteboard, covered with a mind-dazing scatter of words, symbols, arrows, question marks and numbers, often with dollar or Euro signs in front of them, in red, green, black and blue marker pen. If this was the war room, and that was the battlefield, it seemed to be a battle limited to obsessive and greedy mathematical philosophers. The Master understood every square inch of it. He likened it to the plot of an enormously complicated and daring novel, which instead of writing down with the aim of eventual publication, he was choreographing in real time, his characters living, three-dimensional people whose fates he plotted from his basement. The different colours represented different plotlines – the red was about ridding the country and the party of Alwyn Grimaldi; blue and green represented the intertwining trajectories and careers of ‘the children’ through whom he intended to rule again; and the money, mostly in black marker pen, was money.
‘More tripe than Trollope, more dick than Dickens,’ had been Sadie’s mordant observation. Like most marriages, theirs was a complex collusion of self-interest, love, irritation and shared secrets, and the truth was that Sadie admired her husband’s subterranean scriptwriting and plotting. It would only ever harm their enemies, and it kept him away from the corrupt foreign leaders and cynical tycoons who were always trying to inveigle him abroad. Sadie wasn’t even particularly concerned about Ella: she regarded her husband’s needs in that respect as a pathetic, boyish weakness, rather than a threat to her own position. Ever since they’d first met in a publishing house, where she had been working and he had been applying the finishing touches to the first volume of his autobiography (he’d been twenty-three at the time, and not even elected to Parliament), she had enjoyed moulding him from an embarrassingly callow, puppyish enthusiast into the wealthy and powerful man he had become, and who he remained today. Nobody knew his flaws better than Sadie; as to his mistakes, they had mostly made them together. Sometimes, she thought, she regarded him more as a wayward son than a husband, but in that spirit she liked the work he did downstairs.