A Serving of Scandal

by Prue Leith

  ‘I don’t think there’s any danger of that. I don’t want to see any business go bust. Radical, unreliable, sometimes unlikable, publications are the price we pay for freedom of the press. We just require that they be honest.’

  ‘So you’re saying that Scandal Sheet was dishonest, in effect telling lies?’

  ‘John,’ said Oliver, amused, ‘you don’t catch me that easily. Everyone knows I denied, and do deny, the charge that I had an affair with Kate McKinnon. But I cannot comment on the recent legal settlement. I’m talking of the press in general, not any specific publication.’ Kate squeezed her eyes shut at the mention of her name in Oliver’s mouth. His voice was beautiful, deep and resonant, and for a moment it produced an image of him talking, his eyes alive. It stopped her listening to what he was saying. She frowned and forced herself to concentrate.

  ‘OK, Minister, I accept that,’ said Humphrys, ‘but what about the Standard? Why did you not go for them?’

  ‘I did not go for anybody. The government took up the case and sued Scandal Sheet, because this sort of coverage is damaging to the government and to the reputation of politicians in general.’

  ‘So why not sue the Evening Standard? They must have been far more damaging to the government, and certainly to you?’

  ‘Well, yes, I had a horrible time at their hands, as I am sure Kate McKinnon did, but, according to the lawyers, because The Standard hedged its allegations around with words like “alleged” and “supposed” and “according to our sources” none of that innuendo and rumour was actually libellous. I’m sure if they’d been less clever – remember big newspapers have very good lawyers checking copy before they print it – the government would have been able to sue them too.’

  ‘So the giant gets off scot-free, while the minnow pays the price?’

  ‘Not quite scot-free. Inevitably, the Standard’s reputation will be damaged by this case. Readers aren’t stupid. They, like you, will draw their own conclusions and I couldn’t possibly comment!’

  Kate found her heart was thudding uncomfortably in her chest. She wrapped the towel tightly round her body and bent towards the radio. She could not help but warm to Oliver. He was just so grown-up. So humourful and confident. She could never have spoken about this thing without getting indignant, or tearful, or tongue-tied.

  But then, she thought, he’s a politician. He knows who matters to his career, so of course he puts on a show for them. The Today programme matters, and the listeners matter. But what about her? She did not matter, so no point in expending energy, or sympathy, or kindness, on her.

  ‘Blah, blah, blah,’ Kate said, as she silenced Oliver Stapler, Foreign Secretary, with a stab of her finger on the Off button.

  The door stepping by the press resumed at lunchtime: the honeycomb of paparazzi lenses pressed to her window, the photographers standing in her flowerbeds, the papers re-raking the story. For two days she was emailed and telephoned constantly, not least by the ever-civil Jarvis Stanley from the Standard. He seemed to see no conflict between his polite wooing of Kate (to talk to them, sell her story, ‘put the record straight’) with his paper’s long pieces of self-serving justification of its actions in breaking the false story in the first place. She refused all his overtures.

  One evening Kate returned from a shift in a French restaurant in Chelsea to find her back door open, the door jamb splintered. Oh my God, Toby, she thought and hurtled upstairs to their bedroom, her heart pounding, fear propelling her. She reached for the light switch and for a second was bewildered by the sight of the room, flooded in light, empty, neat, the big bed with the duvet unruffled and innocent as she’d left it this morning. She leant against the door jamb, her legs too weak to support her, her brain slowly coming to its senses and translating the scene before her from child kidnap to orderly, welcoming bedroom. Of course, Toby was with Talika. What was she thinking? That she’d left him in their bed alone? She’d never left him alone in her life. She sank down to the floor, puzzled that she had come home instead of going as she usually did to collect Toby first.

  Then suddenly she leapt up and ran down the stairs to see if anything had been stolen. Everything was as it had been, but something felt wrong. She sat at her desk and automatically leant down to switch the computer and printer on at the wall. They were already on. She always, always, turned them off at the wall. As she did the TV and DVD player. It saved a lot of energy.

  She pressed the button to boot up the computer and a message immediately came up: ‘Your computer was not closed down properly. It is now being checked for problems. Please wait.’

  But she had closed it properly! Someone had been using it. Or snooping. But why? Surely they must know that the victory over Scandal Sheet meant there was nothing in the story of the Minister and the Cook. Everyone must now know it had been a tissue of lies. So what did they hope to find? Pictures of her in bed with the Foreign Secretary? Emails declaring undying love?

  There was a time when she’d have loved the story to be true. Now she just wanted the whole horrible business to stop. Why were they hounding her like this? There was nothing to gain.

  She knew she should call the police but, she thought wearily, what is the point? They’ll not come for ages and then they’ll not bother to look for the culprits. No one was hurt, nothing stolen. The police had better things to do.

  I’ll ring them tomorrow, she thought. She stood up to go and get Toby, but found her legs were shaking, and now she felt the sting of tears. She went through to the sitting room, her hand to her mouth, trying not to cry. She rang the Taj Amal.

  ‘Amal …’ Her voice was high from the effort to sound normal. ‘I’m so sorry, but …’

  ‘What is it, Kate, what’s happened?’

  And then she’d blubbed in earnest, and Amal brought the sleeping Toby over and they put him into bed. Amal secured the splintered door by nailing a plank down it, made them both tea and then stayed the night on the sofa. To Kate’s protests he replied that Talika was fine. Both her brawny brothers were down from Bradford for the weekend and were camped in the sitting room.

  Kate had never been frightened, living alone or with Toby, and life soon returned to normal, at least on the surface. But the incident had unsettled her. Sometimes now, her neck and shoulders ached with tension and she would find her nails digging into her palms for no reason.

  She kept going, tried not to think of Oliver Stapler. Thinking of him no longer made her tearful. Just angry. She had heard nothing from him of course. He really had proved himself uncaring, selfish, hard as nails. Kate was tough with her thoughts, frog-marching them out of her head, regimenting her mind to remain focused on the essentials: caring for Toby, getting the jobs in, cooking food, paying what bills she absolutely had to. Valium helped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Oliver had a backlog of work that would kill a mule, and was already irritable. Ruth had spent the day in London and was put out that he had cancelled lunch with her. She seemed to have little understanding of just what being the Foreign Secretary entailed. He did the same slog as his colleagues in preparing for cabinet meetings, running a huge department, dealing with day to day crises, and sitting in the House. But in his case, on top of all that, he was constantly abroad. International meetings and conferences, with their attendant dinners, were infinitely more wearing than those at home, conducted exclusively in English.

  And now he and Ruth were on a train to Solihull. On a Tuesday, when he badly needed to prepare for a statement in the Commons about Pakistan.

  But Mattie’s headmistress had been adamant that it could not wait till Friday. The school was worried about her progress and she wished to see both Mattie’s parents. Oliver was not used to being summoned, except perhaps by the PM.

  Suddenly Ruth pushed her Evening Standard under his nose, preventing him seeing his BlackBerry. He looked up, frowning at the interruption. Ruth said ‘Look,’ indicating something he should read. Oliver sighed, turned his BlackBerry off and droppe
d it into his shirt pocket.

  He took the paper from his wife without looking at her. There was a picture of him and Ruth coming out of their Lambeth house. He registered it as one taken the night he’d flown to the Middle East, the evening Ruth had been summoned by Terry to come to London and do her wifely duty. They both looked washed-out by the cameraman’s flash. Underneath the picture he read:

  STAPLER IN MORE HOT WATER

  The Foreign Secretary, after the capitulation of Scandal Sheet over the rag’s allegations of his adultery, its grovelling apology and payment of substantial damages in compensation, must have thought he was home and dry and back on the yellow brick road to the premiership.

  But it seems he’s back in the soup. He has been fined by the Inland Revenue for failing to pay duty on some fancy goods he imported from France. Bad enough. But we are now told he also failed to hand in a priceless antique necklace given to his wife. The museum-quality bauble was given to her on a diplomatic visit to the Yemen by the President of Yemen. It should have gone to the Treasury, if not to the British Museum. The Minister’s wife claims to have ‘lost it’.

  One storm is damaging, three might prove fatal. Have our rulers no morals at all? The Hon Member for Queensmead has some explaining to do.

  Oliver felt his face go lifeless and rigid. He looked at Ruth, and hers was the same. A bloodless mask. ‘God, Ruth. I’m sorry.’

  ‘The bastards.’

  ‘That’s that, then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll have to resign.’

  Ruth eyes widened and she shook her head. ‘No you don’t. You can’t.’

  ‘I must.’

  Ruth’s face was recovering its colour and becoming fierce. ‘You cannot wimp out now. Not after all we’ve been through over that bloody woman. It would be ridiculous for you to fold because of this nonsense.’

  Oliver realised her voice had risen and looked across the compartment to meet the eyes of the couple on the other side of the aisle, sitting opposite Jim the detective. They had the Evening Standard open between them and could make the connection at any second. He stood up. ‘We have to get off this train, I need to get back to the office.’

  ‘Sit down, Oliver.’ Jim, who was about to stand too, sank back in his chair as his boss sat down again.

  Her looked at her. Ruth had not moved and her voice, now controlled and low again, was nonetheless charged, intense and adamant. Suddenly Oliver’s irritation blossomed into hostility. She was hissing, he thought, like a witch in a pantomime. She was a stranger, a merciless stranger.

  ‘We are going to Mattie’s school because her teachers are worried about her,’ she said. ‘That you are in trouble again, and that it looks as if I’m to take the blame for that fucking necklace, is nothing to do with Mattie. It can wait.’

  Her eyes were furious, hard as glass. He looked down and held one hand like a visor across his forehead, shielding him from the sight of her and allowing him a moment to calm down and think. He couldn’t blame Ruth, and he knew she was right. But her lack of sympathy, her reaction of hard fury, shook him. And how could he have an intelligent conversation with his daughter’s teachers when his world was crashing about his ears?

  The meeting with Mattie’s housemother and headmistress went by almost without input from Oliver. He listened in silence as the two teachers and his wife talked in concerned tones about his daughter: perhaps all the unfortunate publicity about her father had unsettled poor Mattie; her grades had slipped, she was unwontedly truculent and rude, she was frequently half asleep.

  Oliver marvelled at how calmly Ruth handled herself. She agreed that Mattie should have a conversation with the school psychiatrist or counsellor or something, and expressed her and Oliver’s gratitude that the school was so supportive and caring. She looked to him for corroboration, willing him to pull himself together and say something. Oliver’s forehead furrowed as he tried to get a grip on the conversation. Then he nodded and said, ‘Yes, indeed, Mattie is lucky to have you. As we are.’ Ruth looked slightly mollified by this, but Oliver felt as though he were in a dream. Thank God for a strong wife, he thought, but he knew he didn’t mean it.

  As soon as they got home, Ruth went up to check on the girls and did not come down again.

  Meanwhile, Oliver sat at his desk and composed a careful letter of resignation to the Prime Minister.

  The morning after the news of his resignation broke, Oliver was again in the BBC’s Today studio, feeling curiously buoyant. He enjoyed his cup of indifferent coffee and slice of bendy cold toast in the glass-walled ante-room to the studio. The huge news room visible through the glass was almost empty; a solitary cleaner worked between the rows of desks, almost all unoccupied.

  He flipped through the morning’s newspapers, gratified to see that even the Tory press gave him credit for doing the decent thing, and the Guardian went so far as to say he’d be sorely missed. Well, he thought, from now on I’ll not have to worry about the press, I’ll be a matter of no interest to them. He felt a tiny tinge of regret, and reflected ruefully that losing power and privilege and a degree of fame would probably be painful, but good for him.

  After ten minutes the young man who had collected him from the reception lobby reappeared. He ushered Oliver through the heavy sound-proofed door into the studio and indicated a chair opposite the two presenters. His half of the big baize-covered table between them was covered with wires, fat headphone sets and the half-drunk water cup of a previous victim of the Today interview. Both presenters were half hidden behind their computer screens and desk lights but John Humphrys said a brief hello before waving to Oliver not to answer: a fat, domed light bulb embedded in a wooden block had turned from green to red and they were on the air.

  ‘Good morning, Minister … Oh, I’m sorry, I should now call you Mr Stapler … Thank you for coming in. I must say, I’m delighted to have you in the studio so soon after your last appearance. Wednesday, wasn’t it? But I’m also surprised. Resigning ministers usually go quietly.’

  Oliver smiled. ‘Well, I’m not trying to go loudly. As you know I made a statement in the House yesterday afternoon, but since the story is all over the airwaves, papers and internet, I thought I should tell the public the truth as quickly as possible so the government can get back to work.’

  ‘We’re eager to hear what you have to say, but before we get to that, when you were in this studio two days ago you were fresh from trouncing your detractors and delighted to have been vindicated on the matter of adultery. It’s rather a different picture now, isn’t it?

  ‘Not as regards the imagined adultery, no. As you know, the terms of the settlement forbid me commenting on that, but it’s true my star was rather higher on Wednesday than it is today.’

  ‘All right, so what is it you want to add to your announcement in the Commons yesterday?’

  ‘Mainly that I accept I needed to go. I resigned, it’s true, but the PM could as easily have asked me to go.’

  ‘So you jumped before you were pushed?’

  ‘Yes. If I had not left the job of my own accord he’d probably have sent me packing. It’s hard enough running a country in the middle of a recession without the distraction of press speculation about one of your team. I hope it will now die down and stop.’

  ‘So, for the few people who have not heard or read about it, what exactly did you do to warrant your sudden departure?’

  Oliver found he was rather enjoying himself. It was strangely liberating to speak openly and frankly, not in the mealy-mouthed fudge that members of government generally had to use.

  ‘I did two very stupid and thoughtless things, one of which turns out to have been criminal.’

  ‘Criminal? Let me understand this. As Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs you committed a criminal act?’

  ‘It happened before I got my present job, but yes, I failed to pay some customs duty on a set of china that my wife and I bought in France. What happened was t
hat the Ambassador’s wife and Ruth—’

  ‘Ruth is your wife?’

  ‘Yes, sorry. They went shopping together, and bought a dinner service, quite an expensive one …’

  ‘Limoges, I believe?’

  ‘Yes. Limoges. And the Ambassador and his wife were coming back to England after six years in the job and they offered to bring our crate of china back with their goods and chattels, on which of course there is no duty.’

  ‘So you were in effect smuggling luxury goods in the diplomatic bag?’

  Oliver sat back, but a gesture from John reminded him about the microphone on the table and he leant forward to his previous position. ‘Well, certainly that’s the shorthand your press colleagues have chosen to use. It’s not strictly true. But we did fail to pay any duty. That is true.’

  ‘And, in effect, the taxpayer was paying your freight?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘When was this, exactly?’

  ‘Ten years ago. I was a junior minister of state in the Home Office.’

  ‘Forgive me, Minister … er, Mr Stapler … but I must ask: how could you have been so careless? I hesitate to use the word dishonest, but how could you, a minister of the Crown, have done such a thing … I see you are nodding?’

  ‘Well, yes. It was certainly careless, even stupid, but it was never intended to be dishonest. I was just pleased not to have to pay the expensive carriage – a twelve-place dinner service is very expensive to pack and post – so I was delighted to put it in with the Ambassador’s things. I was certainly glad to save money, but I’m afraid no thought of import duty or smuggling or the taxpayer paying the transport costs entered either of our heads. Ruth and I went home and a few months later our china turned up.’

  ‘And that’s the truth?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And you’ve paid up?’

  ‘I have, plus a fine for late payment.’

  ‘But that still leaves the matter of the necklace.’