Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  After a few minutes’ rowing, a gentle eddy carried them further out. In the middle distance, Davie saw their vaporetto chugging gently back towards Venice.

  Davie pulled in the oars and leaned towards Ella. ‘Sodomy. That’s what it was.’

  Ella’s eyes widened.

  ‘No, don’t get me wrong. But you really should read these books. You learn all sorts. You see, Ella, in the Venetian navy there was a real problem with sodomy. Do you know what they did with the buggers? I can see from your eyes that you don’t. Well, what they did was, they got a great big block of Istrian stone – that’s the white stone you see all around you in Venice – and they tied up the offender, and they put a bag over his head, and they tied him to the block of stone, and – yes, you’ve guessed it – they dropped him into the lagoon.

  ‘You were very rude about the seafood here. You said it was gritty, and tiny, and not worth eating. That was unfair. It’s only tiny because it doesn’t have much to eat itself. It’s cold and empty down there. So we’re going to do our bit, aren’t we? Now then, I’m afraid I lied to you, Ella, just like you lied to me. It isn’t a lot of books in my wee bag. It’s just a big lump of stone. Istrian stone. I picked it up in one of the builders’ yards. And here’s the rope. Lucky I’m good at knots, eh? But do we have a bag? Oh yes, of course we do. I’ve been humping it around all day.’

  The rucksack was jammed over Ella’s head – Davie felt that it was hardly his hands doing the jamming – and then he looped the rope tightly around the neat block of stone, before tying the other end around Ella’s neck.

  ‘Death in Venice, Ella. Books are wonderful things …’ And with his hard-skinned builder’s hands, he gently eased her over the side.

  Ella kicked and writhed wildly, and for a few horrible moments Davie thought she’d pulled herself free – or worse, that they were in a part of the lagoon that was only a few feet deep. But it was all right. It was fine. One leather-shod foot pumped frantically, and then she vanished out of sight into the thick green depths. He circled the boat around the stream of bubbles until they disappeared. After a while, he rowed gently back to shore. As he dragged the boat up the shingle he noticed with a start that there was an old woman watching him. But she merely shook her head at him as he walked past her. If anybody on the late vaporetto back to the Fondamente Nova noticed his sodden trousers and ruined shoes, they were too polite to say so.

  From his hotel room, Davie emailed Leslie Khan.

  Thank you for the education. It’s done me a power of good. Ready for that meeting now.

  P.S. Ella’s done a runner. She was with some Americans at the conference. What should I do?

  For an hour or so he just sat in his room. Looking out of the window, he was relieved to find that he was able to get as much pleasure from the glorious buildings, now vanishing into the twilight, as he had before the murder. Perhaps people in books made too much of these things.

  Just as he was getting really worried, he received a message back – not from Khan, but from the Master himself.

  Glad Venice went well. Don’t worry about Ella, she always bobs back up. Come back soon!

  A Moving Speech

  There is nothing as lethal as vision.

  The Master

  Back at the department, the secretary of state had extended his invitation to a number of outsiders. The second meeting included the chancellor’s special adviser and two researchers from Number 10. For no reason that Davie could see, Sir Leslie Khan had managed to get himself there as well.

  So many smiling, unfriendly faces. With the possible exception of Sir Leslie, Davie knew that not one person in that room wanted him to succeed. But as he got to his feet, he felt strong.

  ‘Secretary of State. Fellow ministers. Others. Let me start by saying, quite frankly, that I screwed up a week ago. I wasn’t thinking genuinely creatively, but thanks in part to Sir Leslie, I have since been able to revise my thoughts. And, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve got a new proposal to put before you that I hope you’ll find interesting. Such is the scale of our housing crisis that we need not just a few modestly sized new towns, but a whole new city. You all have the figures. Where could such a city be built? Particularly as we need cheap land, and we need the locals to welcome what we’re planning, not to fight us.

  ‘Over the past years, we’ve all become accustomed to a more extreme weather system – hotter summers and wilder, wetter winters. No part of the country has been more affected by this than the Somerset levels. They’re flooding regularly, year after year. The farmers there are desperate, and house prices are at rock bottom. Villages are emptying as people try to get away. My proposal is that we should build a new city right there.

  ‘It was only a few days ago, when I was in Venice, that I realised what might be done. Like the lagoon there, much of the Somerset levels are below sea level. With excavation and careful planning, there’s no reason why we can’t create a new network of canals. These would allow the surrounding land to dry up, and would provide a perfect drainage system during the winters. They would give us, in effect, new reclaimed islands. Less land, but more useful land. If the Venetians, seven hundred years ago, could build the foundations for large stone churches and palaces, then we, with our industrial technologies, can certainly do the same here for housing, schools and hospitals. Given the low cost of the land, we can even do it as cheaply as building on less waterlogged ground.

  ‘So I propose a new city, a Venice of the West Country. Our critics say we in the Labour Party have no vision, no big picture of the more sustainable, better-built Britain of the future. They will never be able to say that again. I’ve taken the liberty of speaking to architects and engineers – Lord Rogers of Riverside is enthusiastic – and they assure me that this thing can be done. Proposals for feasibility studies, sketches and costings will follow.

  ‘But let me say this. I have a bigger ambition for this new city than that. Why should we not make it beautiful? Why have we put up with so many dreary, utilitarian buildings in our small country for so long? I want to see bright colours, and a certain joy, a wildness even, in the buildings we set up here. Centuries ago, the benighted peasants of the West Country rose up against the British crown, so desperate were their conditions. At the Battle of Sedgemoor they were mown down. Today, many of our fellow citizens are just as desperate as their forefathers. In the new, floating city of Sedgemoor they will have their vindication and their triumph.’

  There was a shocked pause. Then the secretary of state began to bang the table – not in irritation, but as applause. Ragged clapping broke out around the room. Sir Leslie Khan appeared to be dabbing his eyes.

  The Joy of Routine

  In politics, every strength, flexed just a little too much, becomes a weakness.

  The Master

  Alwyn Grimaldi was a man who believed in routine; and routine had always done well by him. Up early, paperwork dispatched at speed, the long list of necessary phone calls ticked off. As a small boy he had been bullied into the routine of writing thank-you letters after Christmas and birthdays. It had stuck. Polite notes and an ability to remember the names of dull people, plus a pleasant smile, had helped him rise silently, first as a journalist, then a Labour Party researcher, then an adviser, then an MP, then a minister, and finally prime minister.

  Routine meant that Alwyn Grimaldi was rarely surprised, and never under-briefed about what to say. He had been expensively educated. For the first two dozen years of his life he had been tutored at home, at school and at university in the long, self-confidently nasal vowels of the English ruling class. Then, as he contemplated public life, he had had almost equally expensive lessons in losing them again. He was taught the glottal stop, and a certain laziness of the tongue which helped him fit in beautifully. He had read the right books at the right time, forgotten them again just as everybody else did, and ditched the ‘wrong’ opinions with faultless precision.

  As early as his late twenties, he looked like a mi
nister, and he sounded like a minister. In opposition and in government, everybody knew he would be promoted, and everybody was right. He accumulated an essential little store of self-deprecating stories, and even his least sincere smile could melt away resistance. He tied his ties in a perfect Windsor knot, and never failed to floss his teeth or to clip his nails.

  Thus, it was a matter of general bafflement, not least to Alwyn Grimaldi himself, that he was failing so badly as a prime minister. This was due to something not just beyond his control, but beyond his imagination – to the fact that he had nothing interesting or novel to say about anything, and never had had. The country was bust and people were angry. The British media talked constantly of a political crisis, or a ‘fundamental malaise’. What they really meant was that the people were in a right strop. Alwyn Grimaldi’s talents for order and politeness, his clothes sense, even his self-deprecation, were failing to calm them down.

  What was to be done? In the first place, he stuck by unflappable, reassuring routine. Routine knew what to do. Routine dictated that Alwyn Grimaldi invited a small number of prominent backbenchers and junior ministers for a drink in the White Drawing Room at 10 Downing Street at 6.30 p.m. on the first Wednesday of the month. The main point of this was to make the invitees feel better, and with any luck, warmer towards him. The secondary point was to discover whether any of them had something useful to say to him. His housekeeper chose the guests and, where possible, tried to introduce a theme.

  His housekeeper did this because Alwyn Grimaldi had no wife or partner to do it. Other than routine, Alwyn’s great political secret had been an almost entire absence of sexual desire. From an early age he had found the concept of bodily intimacy funny, and when not funny, disgusting. For grown men and women to think about one another’s body parts, never mind shoes, stockings, lingerie and innumerable other pathetic perversions, made them, in his view, ridiculous marionettes. Having never felt the slightest stirrings of lust, Alwyn Grimaldi calculated that he had between 20 and 50 per cent more time to get on with politics than did his rivals. His secret nation was Celibacy, that calm, temperate country, without gales, without foolishness and mess, where scandal was never whispered. But this did mean that, perhaps, there was something slightly bloodless about Alwyn Grimaldi. And, of course, that he had to rely on his housekeeper, paid for by the taxpayer, to assemble his invitation lists.

  We may ask: was this entirely wise? Alwyn Grimaldi’s housekeeper was called Eileen Wilkinson. She had looked after the Master and his family during their years in Downing Street and at Chequers, retiring when the Conservatives came back to power. As soon as the Grimaldi government tottered into office, Mrs Wilkinson had presented herself again at Number 10 and offered her services to the new prime minister. Alwyn liked to boast: ‘Mrs Wilkinson moved smoothly from the Master to me. She always says that things were much harder for her back then; I don’t think she got on with the Master’s wife very well. I rely on her absolutely.’ Alwyn Grimaldi’s confidence in Mrs Wilkinson was based on two things – her utterly banal and expressionless exterior, and her occasional bitchy remarks about life with the Master, to whom, he assumed, nobody could remain loyal. But we must ask again: was this entirely wise?

  On this particular MPs’ evening, the theme was Women. The Grimaldi government had done moderately well on the Women Question: about a third of its cabinet ministers, and nearly a third of its ministers generally, were female, as were nearly half of the backbench MPs. But very few of ‘Grimaldi’s girls’ (‘Alwyn’s angels’ hadn’t flown) were much admired by the public. Like the man himself, they were polite, well turned out, said the right thing, and were smoothly forgettable. His press officer complained when broadcasters confused the names of the female ministers; but he did so only dutifully, for form’s sake.

  This evening, Mrs Wilkinson had assembled more than two dozen Labour women of different ages, backgrounds and talents. Even as she completed her list in ballpoint pen, however, she had found it hard to visualise those she was inviting. There was, however, one particular woman …

  Grimaldi had been strongly advised to promote Caroline Phillips by his permanent secretary, who had been a very junior civil servant in the Treasury during the Master’s years. He’d heard rumours that Mrs Phillips was highly ambitious. But if there was one person on the planet unlikely to be susceptible to her famous charm, it would be the prime minister. Everyone in the room understood this, so everyone was watching as she arrived. Would this be ‘a moment’?

  A gentle but unmistakable glow of bronze-coloured light seemed to enter the drawing room a yard before Caro did. Her glance laughed its way among the pillars, armchairs and gathered MPs like a rebel, liberated beam of sunlight. Rival ministers, sour-faced backbenchers and even Alwyn Grimaldi’s housekeeper found delighted smiles playing on their faces without knowing quite why. Napes tingled. Fingers rubbed excitedly on fingers. The room, which had been slightly chilly, warmed up nicely.

  Alwyn Grimaldi, feeling the warmth running down his back, turned around. In front of him he saw an unremarkable-looking woman in a smart cream suit, whose eyes seemed to him to possess the candid gaze of a wild animal – a lioness, perhaps. As she looked at him he seemed to see not her, but himself through her eyes: a neat, light, stooping man with a smile of water. He felt very slightly sick, or excited. He couldn’t tell which. Routine was being disturbed. He extended his damp palm. She smiled.

  ‘Prime Minister, what a pleasure. How kind. I’ve never been upstairs.’

  ‘Mrs Phillips, the pleasure is all mine. We should have had you round long ago. There are so many things I’d like to talk to you about.’

  On their way out, as the drinks party ended an hour and a half later, Doreen Clarkson, the Northern Ireland secretary, said to Phoebe Marks, chair of the public accounts committee, ‘I thought it was bloody rude. The two of them just stood there in the corner of the room yacketing away, as if none of the rest of us were there at all.’

  ‘If it were another man,’ said Phoebe, ‘I’d have said he was a little smitten.’

  ‘Well it’s not that, at least,’ replied Doreen. ‘Though he did flush, I noticed. It’s almost as if there’s some blood in his veins after all. Still, rude.’

  ‘Terribly.’

  Alwyn Grimaldi and Caroline Phillips had not in fact been flirting. After a lifetime of subtle evasions, Alwyn was incapable, while Caro, somewhat awestruck to be chatting to a prime minister – even this prime minister – was unaware of any effect she might have had on him. But they had been talking deeply, even intimately, about politics.

  Alwyn had started his working life as a political journalist, before hopping briskly over the fence. ‘It was all those years of watching so many obvious mistakes, and sordid scandals. There was never any possibility of me joining another party; my late father was a professor of politics, and brought us up to read the Guardian. When I was fifteen I was taken to a party to meet Polly Toynbee, as a treat. She was wonderful, though I’m afraid she regards me as a bit of a disappointment these days.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she doesn’t, Prime Minister. For me, I’m afraid, it was really the New Testament. Do unto others, easier for a camel, and so forth. There has never been a more revolutionary call to arms, nor one so widely ignored. My partner, Angela, actually went into the Church, but I’m too selfish for that. Or I wanted – I don’t know, recognition or something.’

  ‘We all have mixed motives. That’s why there are no good novels about the political trade. They bang on and on about the treachery and the double dealing, the vanity and the greed, but they never explain the other side – the real wish to do good, the decision to take less money and more abuse in return for a chance of helping people in the real world.’ Alwyn feared that he was beginning to whine. ‘Though of course, we’re very privileged to be here.’

  Caro rescued him. ‘Why are we on this planet? We’re only here for a very short time, so how should we conduct ourselves? By being kind, and helping oth
ers. I’ve always felt there were only two jobs that made any kind of moral sense. To be a politician, in order to lead people, however uneasily and awkwardly, to better ways of living; or to be a priest.’

  The last thing Alwyn had expected was a serious conversation here in Downing Street. He felt excited. ‘That’s rather good, Caroline. Would you mind if I …’

  ‘No, Prime Minister, be my guest. Although, to be strictly honest, I was quoting my partner, who took the other path.’

  Alwyn had the retentive memory of a professional politician. ‘Angela, yes of course. And now she has a living – how very Church of England to call it a living, rather than a calling – up in Barker? Well, do you know, I’d love to meet her. I have a feeling, Caroline, that you and I can work rather closely together. I have some really quite worrying things on my mind, and … Why don’t the two of you come and join me one weekend at Chequers, so we can all get to know one another better?’

  ‘Prime Minister. How very kind. But Angela is unbearable on Saturdays. She takes her sermons very seriously. Writes them all out in longhand herself.’

  ‘You could come on your own.’

  ‘Or we could join you for Sunday lunch, after the service. The drive down from Barker can’t be more than an hour.’

  Alwyn found himself feeling slightly disappointed.

  In the Country

  The only time I really felt like a member of the ruling class was during those weekends at Chequers.

  The Master

  Prime minister after prime minister had found the remodelled Tudor country house at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire a place of indispensable solace and retreat. Margaret Thatcher, hardly a sentimentalist, had fallen in love with Chequers. John Major found it essential; his wife loved its rose gardens, lawns and ancient rooms so much that she wrote a book about them. Later, Tony Blair leafed through its extensive library, had quiet conversations with Princess Diana while walking in its grounds, organised football matches on the back lawn – Prince William had had to play – and resolved to go to war against Saddam Hussein in the grandeur of its Long Gallery. Some people confused Blair with the Master; certainly, the Master had enjoyed Chequers every bit as much.