The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  LOOKING BACK, QUITE frankly, it’s difficult to know what to make of it. It’s very hard to recall why things happened the way they happened. The PM always said he’d discuss it in his memoirs, but he never did. They say his mind was going by then, and he certainly didn’t seem to remember any details when I asked him about it. But the PM was a tough old bastard, and I honestly believe it was the Fleet Street hack he got to ghost the memoirs who decided to leave the whole thing out... For the sake of discretion, I’d imagine, or credibility. There are some places even Fleet Street hacks don’t like to go, if you can believe that.

  Anyway, the point is, no one took to Rakely to begin with. No one liked him, or fancied his chances. He had no prospects. I can’t even remember the name of his first seat, but it was as safe as houses, and we’d kept it since William the bloody Conqueror. It would have taken an utter prick to lose it. He was just a warm body.

  People who’d been up at Merton at the same time as Rakely never had much to say about him. He hadn’t made any lasting impression. It seemed so unlikely, one of them told me, that he’d choose to go into what was, essentially, the public service industry. It required charm to do that, because you needed people to like you enough to vote for you. It was a simple enough formula to grasp. You needed, at the very minimum, a decent facsimile of likeability.

  Whatever the case, Rakely was a back bencher at the time. He was on a few subcommittees, nothing of note. Basically, he didn’t matter. What mattered was the moment. This all began during the Henig-Duncans share scandal. That had just broken. Everyone’s attention had been on Europe, and the Health Bill, and no one had seen it coming. God, not even Rosmund, and he was the biggest scalp. They took him to the cleaners. I remember his face on television, at the Grandage Inquiry. He looked as though he’d been violated with a pineapple. I have never seen anyone appear so uncomfortable.

  Suddenly, it was sheer shitstorm on all sides. Rosmund and the share thing was the big one, of course, but there was also Peters, and that idiot Doverson, and then that frankly astonishing business with Parkin and the schoolboy at the swimming baths. I don’t even know where to start with that. I swear to almighty God I never knew he was the sort. We were at Colet Court together, for god’s sake. He was a sound chap. I’d have put money on it.

  Except, of course, it turned out he wasn’t.

  Any one of those things, just Parkin alone, should have taken the Government down. I remember the Foreign Secretary suggesting at a Cabinet lunch that we should fall on our swords, let the Opposition in, and come back in four years when the dust had settled in the hope that the general public would have forgotten, or at least forgiven, our association with liars, cheats, insider traders and perverts.

  Maybe it would have been better that way.

  The first move, if we were going to strategise any kind of survival, was to replace Rosmund. The Party Chairman and the Chief Whip were both absolutely gunning for someone more capable than Rosmund, and Rosmund – hard though it is to admit in the wake of Henig-Duncans – had been damned good. He’d known how to work the Commons, and the party faithful. Not shares, so much, as it turned out.

  So, their list pretty much started and finished with Forster. I mean, he was the only serious contender. We’d known for three or four years he was a party leader or deputy PM in waiting. One of the main reasons we hadn’t rolled him out earlier was simply to keep his nose clean for the succession we all knew was coming. The PM had a term left in his legs, at best. Forster was the coming man. And my godfathers, he was good. TV loved him, the constituency party loved him, and he regularly trumped forty-five or forty-six per cent approvals with working mums and job seekers, which made the PM shit actual blood with envy. None of that mattered really, though. What mattered, what I believed mattered, and what the rest of the Cabinet believed mattered, was that Forster was a real professional. He understood the way the House worked. He understood the process in some kind of uncanny, intuitive way. I’ve never seen horse trading done the way he did it. I’ve never seen cross-party work like it either. God, the Opposition benches adored him too. You know what it was? He was a statesman. He understood parliamentary craft.

  The plan was, we’d bring him in from the Northern Ireland Office, probably swapping him out for Peters initially, get him placed as Special Advisor to Number 10, then do a whole re-shuffle at the start of the next session, which would leave him as Home Secretary by Christmas. He’d be the poster child for our mid-term rebranding. Clean, scandal-free.

  I think I slept well the night we settled on that. Forster was on board. I went home, and tried to ignore the fact that every commentator on every channel was trying to burn us at the stake.

  Then, as I remember, it was Billy Hutchins who rang me about Rakely. He wanted to have a conversation, that’s was what he said. I asked him to be a little more specific, and he said that he thought we, and by we he meant the PM, were being pretty hasty about running with Forster without considering Rakely.

  Well, I can tell you I laughed at him. I think I even checked my calendar to make sure it wasn’t the start of April. Billy could be a bit of a wind-up merchant at times. But he was dead straight serious. I mean, bloody serious. That gave me pause. I’d known him long enough to recognise the tone.

  We had a quiet lunch at Severay’s. It’s not there anymore, but it was a nice place. Quiet. I wanted to sound Billy out on the Q.T. before bringing the PM in. I suspected Billy might have been doing a little horse trading of his own, and I thought I could keep him sweet with a promise or two.

  But he was actually on the up-and-up about Rakely. He said something mysterious about Forster not being the man we thought he was, which I poo-pooed, then he kept on about Rakely. I pointed out that Rakely wasn’t really very able, he wasn’t very senior, and he certainly wasn’t very popular. Billy said to me, “We don’t need someone good, Charles, not to replace Rosmund. We just need someone different. We just need someone who hasn’t got any baggage. Any blood on his hands.”

  Well, I didn’t think Forster had, but he advised me to look into it, and to do a little due diligence on Rakely while I was about it.

  I don’t know. There was something about it that stuck with me. I made an excuse to go and see Rakely at his office. I think I pretended to be sounding him out on the Health Bill. He wasn’t very much more charming than I remembered, but he had a way about him that I hadn’t seen before. It seemed as though he had a sharper political mind than I’d initially given him credit for. From the way he talked, entirely casually, I got the impression that he knew the deeper purpose of my visit. He understood what was at stake and what was on offer. He didn’t push it or anything, but he knew. And he was leaving it up to me to make the call.

  I felt I had underestimated him. I took a look back through Hansard and the party record, and through his official papers, and there was nothing. Nothing good or remarkable, granted, but nothing even remotely controversial, let alone bad. He was as clean as Billy Hutchins said he was. He was a tabula rasa. Then I thought about Forster, and his slight dalliance with the left wing in his student days, and his constant, noble but rather exasperating stance on the nuclear issue. I mean to say, they were minor, minor things, just little sticks that the press could use on a rainy day to beat him, or us, with. Nothing significant in the long run, merely niggles.

  But Rakely had nothing.

  Rather to my surprise, I brought some people in on it: Tom Jeffers, Douglas Barney, Mark Broadbent from Defence, and Hardiman. You didn’t make a play like this without Alex Hardiman. We also talked to a few others, like Kinley and Sobers, to take their temperatures. In the meantime, I went to the Whip’s office through soft channels and got everything on Forster slowed down a little, just to buy us a day or two.

  Jeffers and Barney were pretty easy to convince. I fancy Billy Hutchins might have talked to them along the way. Mark Broadbent was more dubious, but he could easily see how Rakely’s declared interests would make him a desirable asset for
Defence. Mark knew that if he smoothed the path for Rakely, he’d get his reward in due course.

  Only Alex Hardiman was against it. He positively didn’t like Rakely. When I gently pointed out that there was nothing about Rakley to dislike, he insisted that was exactly it. Hardiman was old school, a real veteran, and in the main I think he objected to Rakely’s sheer colourlessness. He liked Forster very much. Forster reminded him of Billings, and our last glorious days in the sunshine.

  We were stymied, to be honest. We had to make the call one way or another. The PM was on the inside now, and he was waiting for our brief. We had to go one way or the other. What we couldn’t afford was a delay, or the impression of dithering.

  We all went up to Chequers for the weekend. On the drive up, I was fully braced to throw in for Forster after all, because the party listened to Hardiman. His opinion would be the clincher. When we arrived, we heard the news. We actually didn’t realise quite how serious the stroke was at first. All we knew was that Hardiman was in hospital and he wouldn’t be joining us.

  It was rash, I suppose, and a little disingenuous to Alex Hardiman not to represent his feelings on the matter, which we all knew full well. But we went in like gunslingers, the four of us, and quite dismantled Brian Templestone’s cheerleading for Forster.

  The PM was swayed. I think we’d taken him by surprise. He needed a deal of convincing, though, because he was reluctant to let Forster go. I called Rakely at home, and told him to be in the Cabinet Office on Monday morning. The PM would drop by for a quiet chat before the afternoon vote on the Freight Tariff Act, which was the next meaty piece of legislation looming in the queue leading to the Health Bill. It was going to be a rough ride, and the meeting would simply look like the PM popping by to glad-hand some of the party faithful and generate a little confidence before the vote.

  Rakely was there, ready for us, on Monday morning. He looked good; rested, serious and attentive. He was wearing, it seemed to me, a better suit than usual. He met with me, Jeffers and the PM, and we chatted about stuff, just this and that. We all knew it was a job interview. It was the PM’s way of doing it. We went back and forth on Health, and Europe, and kept coming back to the Freight Tariff Act.

  Rakely suddenly asked if the PM had fully considered the effect of union support on the vote. The PM was surprised. The unions was not an angle we usually looked at with any real enthusiasm. If nothing else, the composition of our party was not determined by direct union interests the way the opposition’s was.

  It looked like a terrible mis-step. It made Rakely seem a little naive even to bring it up and waste everybody’s time. But he began to stress that we were, as usual perhaps, ignoring the possibility of finding friends where none usually existed. He delicately mentioned the unmentionable, which was that we were in a very dark place, with the polls at an all-time low, and that we really needed a strong result to take the sun out of our eyes. Then he mentioned the union interest in certain aspects of the Health Bill, aspects that, in the grand scheme of things, would be painless sacrifices to make.

  He got the PM’s interest. Damn it, he got my interest. What he was proposing, informally, was that the Transport and General Workers Union, Collatera (which had been the TBFGU), and the Manufacturer’s Union would all come across if we offered them concessions on Health when it came up. They couldn’t directly affect the Commons vote, of course, but they could make it very plain to Her Majesty’s Opposition how much the withdrawal of their support over the Tariff Act would hurt in the months to come.

  I don’t think we really believed it. So he took us into a side office. He had them waiting on Skype: Murray from the Transport and General, Richardson from Collatera, Patanjali from the MDMU, and even Colin Babcock from the IGMT. It was done and done in about five minutes.

  We took the vote, of course. A huge climb down for the Opposition. A rout. The Freight Tariff Act went straight through the House. I have never seen so many stunned and unhappy faces sitting across from me.

  But even before the vote, the PM took me to one side. He said to me, “Charles, it’s Rakely. Do what you need to do.”

  So I did. We switched Forster to Health at the last minute, put McKenzie out to Northern Island, and made room for Rakely by securing for Bob Thomas a very prestigious position with the European Commission. Which, in those days, was as good as saying he was going to spend more time with his family.

  Rakely didn’t disappoint. He led the charge on Health, got it through on the second reading, then took the lead on Fiscal Policy and the fall-out from the Pepper Report. It was a joy to watch, I have to admit. Suddenly, we weren’t so much thinking about Home Secretary by Christmas, we were thinking Deputy Leader by the time the Party Conference came round.

  Forster took it badly, as you might imagine. He’d waited so patiently for his moment to come, and now it had been snatched from him. He was sour. We tried to make something of Health, but the big job there was already done, and besides, his heart wasn’t in it. He made noises about the Treasury, which I suppose might have been a reasonable consolation, but we didn’t want to rock the boat. Things were turning, but it was still choppy. The scandals were still rumbling around the red tops.

  Rakely they liked though. He sort of won them over a little, enough so they could tease him but seem affectionate. I also remember a cartoon appearing in the FT around that time, one by Pax, which showed a triumphant Rakely dressed as Aleister bloody Crowley or something, sacrificing a buxom virgin in Parliament Square in exchange for Faustian advancement. In the background, there was Forster as an alley cat, sniffing around some bins marked ‘Cabinet scraps’.

  I must say I really admired the way Rakely grew into the job. He developed a really deft, light touch with things that I had imagined him incapable of. He just mixed well, and in return, he got results. He played an absolute blinder in support of the PM at the G8 towards the end of that year, and then surpassed himself on both the Amenities Bill and the Public Access Commission. He also proved pretty much indispensable when the Bradbury Report went to committee. Everybody, of course, remembers his speech to the 1922 Committee, which was so hilariously funny, and which left Godbridge spitting feathers, and they still, to this day, replay that segment on Newsnight when he patiently pointed out all the factual errors in that Peston fellow’s analysis of the Banking Regulation Policy. The PM started to refer to him as his ‘spin bowler’.

  It was a little while after Hardiman’s funeral in March the following year that I received the book in the post. It came to my office. It was the paperback of a work called The White Cockerel, published by some American university. It was really rather an ugly thing, with poor typography and an awful cover. I gave it a look, and realised it was an annotated, academic edition of what was, allegedly, an Italian text from about 1625. It was part political treatise, and part grimoire. I mean, it was absurd stuff. The package was unmarked, but it wasn’t hard to work out where it had come from, especially because of the copy of that Pax cartoon tucked inside the cover. It was, all-in-all, a fairly childish exercise.

  I wanted to ignore it, simply leave it alone, but Forster was growing increasingly erratic, and the last thing the party needed was a time bomb like him holing us below the waterline in front of the Interest Rate debate. So I went to see him, for a quiet chat, to set him straight and get him back on-side. The man was clearly so afflicted by bitterness he was making poor choices. I had to calm him down. There were still some prizes for him to win, in time, provided he didn’t make an utter embarrassment of himself.

  He was in a poor mood, positively whiney. I found it all a bit awkward, to be plain about it. He wouldn’t let it go, not at all. He kept on about Rakely. The resentment was palpable. He’d lost that statesman-like gloss entirely. I began to wonder what we’d ever seen in him. He blamed me for his woes. He blamed everyone.

  He blamed Rakely.

  I asked him what he’d been playing at with the stupid book. He looked at me blankly, as though I hadn�
��t understood. He started to tell me about it, in all seriousness.

  “That’s not the real thing, Charles,” he said. “Obviously it isn’t. I couldn’t get my hands on that, not even a copy. That’s just some shitty college edition, entirely bowdlerised and full of fundamental errors. I was just trying to show you what I meant.”

  “And what did you mean, Andrew?” I asked him.

  “Obviously, that’s how he’s doing it. That’s how he’s doing it all.”

  “Doing what?”

  I think he realised that I wasn’t playing ball. He started to tell me about The White Cockerel. He said it had been written by an Italian courtier, called Lucci, at the Dieci Di Liberta e Pace. He’d been the man who pulled Machiavelli’s strings.

  “No one pulled Machiavelli’s strings,” I said to that.

  “That’s the point,” Forster replied. “That’s how good Lucci was. No one ever saw him behind the curtain.”

  “Andrew, I really don’t think you understand who Machiavelli was,” I said.

  He banged on regardless, and then claimed that the book, and Lucci, had also been a guiding influence behind the rise of some of Henry VIII’s key appointments, and had played a significant power-broking role during the Stuart Succession. I finally had to call time on the whole conversation.

  “For God’s sake, Andrew,” I said.

  “It’s all there, in the book,” he declared. “Of course, the commentary in that edition fudges the details a little, especially the specific content and language of the ritual practices. I mean, the rites are the really potent stuff, the stuff that actually influences situations and the course of events. But it’s all the basic facts.”

  “Oh Christ,” I said. “These aren’t facts at all, Andrew. This is some kind of sub-Dan Brown bullshit. This is, what? A spell book for securing political advancement? How to achieve power through magic?”