by Vince Cable
Pulsar worked as a harmonious, flexible unit because of the close, symbiotic relationship – the personal chemistry – between the boss and the Unite chief shop steward, a charismatic, ambitious, thirty-year-old senior technician called Steve Grant. They had a shared experience of the University of Life, having both left school at sixteen to work, and a similar set of political ideals. But physically they were very different. Calum was small, wiry, tense – a chain smoker – and he regarded clothing as a necessary chore, rarely dressing, even in the office, in anything other than torn jeans and a hoodie. Steve was tall, well proportioned, smart, carefully manicured and, outside of work overalls, as expensively dressed as his wages and family commitments would allow. Appearances were so deceptive that a casual visitor might think Steve the boss and Calum the office boy. And cynics at the factory would say that appearances weren’t so deceptive after all.
If Calum’s American shareholders knew quite how much the firm relied on a former militant and, now, aspiring Labour politician to deliver their dividends, they would have run for the exit. But they didn’t. And any questions about the labour force could be answered with an impressive roll call of achievements: a decade without a strike; cooperation over part-time working in the depths of the financial crisis; new shift patterns; Japanese-style quality control led by the workers. All approved by the shop stewards’ committee at their weekly meeting behind the Red Lion.
Steve, the architect of this industrial relations miracle, prepared to leave home, as usual, at 7am. Recently divorced, the quiet of the morning without his kids was something he still hadn’t got used to. Arriving at work, he was summoned from the shop floor to the CEO’s office for an urgent meeting of the management team, which he attended as the workforce representative. To get there he had to pass through the finance and office services department, the only part of the building where women were visible in any numbers; elsewhere, the traditions of British engineering ensured that women were to be found only in advanced stages of undress on the calendars on the walls. The women in finance had launched a feminist counter-offensive in the form of a calendar with a generously endowed black male model whose masculinity was only partly concealed by a hand performing the role of a fig leaf. The ringleaders, Sam, Sharon and Cilla, styled themselves the Three Witches, and enlivened the office with cheerful banter about their exploits with booze and sex on a Saturday night and on the annual pilgrimage to Magaluf. They were not as dumb as they appeared, however. They had respectable accounting qualifications and more than once they had rescued Calum Mackie from the consequences of his rather cavalier approach to company accounts. The fourth member of the finance team, Shaida Khan, differed from her colleagues in her stunning looks and a detachment that may have been aloofness or shyness and was probably both. She differed too in seniority. She had arrived at the company four years earlier as a graduate trainee but had quickly established her exceptional talent, leading to a recent promotion, which meant that she now had an office of her own.
Shaida’s father, Ashgar Khan, was a key member of Pulsar’s engineering team, an important man in both Unite and the borough Labour Party where his ability to mobilise many of the town’s Kashmiri Muslims had been crucial to Steve Grant’s rapid ascent in the local party. Indeed, Steve had made sure that his daughter had got the trainee job. Mr Khan rarely talked about personal matters and had never before asked Steve for a favour but he had felt he had to explain his painful dilemma, torn between his role as a model British citizen – with an OBE for his contribution to community relations in the town – and the demands of his Islamic faith and the traditions of the Kashmiri district from where many of the local community originated. ‘I want my daughter to have an education, to have a career. She is too young for marriage, children. Shaida is becoming a proper accountant. She passes her professional exams and learns here also. Maybe she will be chief finance officer in a company like this. Inshallah!’ A quiet word with Calum Mackie and Steve had delivered. Four years later she was indeed chief finance officer.
Steve’s interest in his protégé had evolved from the professional. The more he saw of her the more he contrasted his messy and unsatisfying domestic life – a bitter divorce from his childhood sweetheart and the mother of his three young children – with the potential offered by this Asian princess of his fantasies. The fantasy was fuelled by her habit of wearing expensive-looking but traditional clothes with a Muslim headscarf, though everything else about her – her speech, her animated eyes, her poise, her walk – suggested a thoroughly confident, modern woman. The antennae of the Three Witches had picked up the vibrations and he had to endure the embarrassment of loud comments whenever he passed through: ‘Your fan club’s arrived, Shaida’, or, ‘Sorry, lover boy, can’t you see she’s busy’. Shaida always worked on in her office and showed no sign of welcoming the attention.
That day the chief finance officer had swept into the car park very early, maintaining her record of being first to work. Her diligence and capacity for hard work were major factors in her promotion. She made her way to her office, a glass room in the middle of an open plan office: sufficiently public to see and be seen; sufficiently private not to be overheard when she had a confidential conversation. It was tidy: methodical, like her life, with clearly defined priorities and no loose ends. Her personal filing system separated out family, then career, then self, in that order.
She adored her father, who worked on a high precision machine tool in the factory workshop and was now approaching retirement. Only one of Shaida’s three brothers was still at home, Mohammed, a troubled young man who had fallen into bad company at school, had never managed to find a proper job after graduating in ‘business studies’ and who hung around with groups of Pakistani and Somali men consuming cannabis and qat. Shaida’s escalating salary had enabled her family to move to a smarter detached house in a largely middle class, white, area of town, which had separated Mohammed from his friends somewhat, but increased her mother’s isolation. Shaida was the emotional, as well as financial, prop that kept the family together.
Regarded as a confirmed spinster by her extended family who expected their womenfolk to produce babies at regular intervals after the age of fifteen, Shaida was sufficiently acclimatised to the British society into which she had been born to see that at twenty-five she had plenty of time to find a settled, loving relationship of her own and the family that might follow it. Meantime, she would enjoy being single.
She noticed that Steve was also in the outer office, for no very obvious reason. She didn’t mind. She found him engaging and attractive; and he talked intelligently and interestingly about the politics in which he was involved, refreshingly different from the speak-your-weight machines she saw on television, trotting out the party line. She wasn’t very political, but curious: voted Lib Dem as a compromise between her father’s tribal loyalty to Labour and her own more business-minded and liberal instincts. She could see, however, that Steve didn’t view her as a political project. He was obviously besotted with her and she enjoyed the sense of power she derived from being an inaccessible, goddess figure. In a different context he would have been a good date. If only he knew.
At 10am Calum convened a meeting of the executive team, who arrived in his office in a state of trepidation. They knew how bad the financial position was and were expecting gallows humour from the boss following a tale of woe from the chief finance officer who, at her first meeting, had chilled them all to the bone with her forensic analysis of the near insolvency of the company.
The problem lay in the inherent riskiness of the business: the need to spend large sums on R&D to keep ahead of the field technologically, based on Calum’s hunches and nods and winks from the MOD. At the same time orders were unpredictable, based on the passing enthusiasms of politicians for fancy new toys, the more or less austere disposition of other politicians who approved controversial arms export licences, and the mood of the Treasury. Calum’s genius, his patient long term investors and
a helping hand from the Red Admiral had kept the company afloat. But the faces that morning anticipated bad news, particularly the recently appointed head of security, Justin Starling. But to their collective relief, Calum was in an expansive mood.
‘Guys, the Indian contract is happening. Could keep us in business for years. Just heard the good news from the Red Admiral who, as you know, has been a valuable friend to us and is close to the action even if no longer in government. But it is a big project. It will stretch us to the limit on both the research and production side. And, of course, this is very hush-hush.’
Starling’s scepticism was clear. ‘I know this is a sensitive issue’, he said, looking directly at Shaida, ‘but I can’t be the only person in this room who is worried about taking on a highly confidential Indian military contract when we have a largely Muslim, and Kashmiri, workforce. I know the workers who need to be involved have been security cleared but… politics…’
He was met by an embarrassed silence and Shaida felt a rising sense of anger that her loyalty was being questioned. This wasn’t the first time Starling had crossed her; she had discovered that he objected to her promotion. She would have been angrier still if she had known that Starling himself was a dubious appointment; there had been unexplained holes in his CV and Calum had accepted him only after receiving a glowing recommendation from the Red Admiral based on his work at the MOD.
Steve came to the rescue. ‘I have absolute confidence in my workmates. They have always been committed to this company. They are good, hard-working British people whatever their origins. They will cheer for Pakistan at the Oval like Irish and Scots sports fans do for their countries when they play England: that doesn’t make them disloyal. Mr Starling – who has only recently joined the company – may not be aware that we have done business with the likes of Israel, Egypt and India before. Politics didn’t come into it.’
‘I hope you are right,’ Starling snapped back. But Calum wanted to press on with other news.
‘You all know how much I love politicians, especially Tories. Well, it seems that as our importance to the country is being recognised – at last – we are getting a ministerial visit.’
‘Who is he?’
‘It’s a she.’
Kate’s early parliamentary career was as anonymous as her arrival in Westminster. She was underwhelmed by parliament and parliament was underwhelmed by her. She got off to a reasonable start with an early, workmanlike speech generously praising Sir Terence’s skeletal contributions to the local community, as custom demanded, and, for the benefit of the local press, promising to die in the last ditch fending off the horrors that disturbed her Conservative voters, notably a long mooted social housing scheme and fracking, which was improbable given the local geology, but aroused deep fears. She was momentarily buoyed by the praise lavished on her speech until it was pointed out that convention demanded it. She settled into the rhythm of parliamentary life, asking questions now and then, speaking very occasionally in debates to an empty chamber late at night, voting with the government on every sub-clause of obscure pieces of legislation, and signing lots of letters to constituents reassuring them that she was on their side fighting human rights abuses in North Korea and Iran, opposing the docking of dogs’ tails and supporting the ban on fox hunting.
One morning she received a request – which amounted to a summons – to visit the chief whip in his office. She was curious, since in her year or so in parliament she had never defied the party whip, had an exemplary attendance record and responded willingly to requests to sit through the excruciating tedium of hours in primary and secondary legislative committees on the off-chance that the depleted and demoralised opposition might call a vote. She had even stooped so low as to ask obsequious questions, handed out by the whip’s office, inviting ministers to acknowledge the government’s brilliant record. She persuaded herself that she was not naturally so craven but merely wanted time to understand the arcane mysteries of parliament, to work out whom to trust and to build up a reputation locally for being ‘loyal, conscientious and competent’: adjectives that Stella was now deploying on her behalf. At some point she was determined to rebel against what she saw as the ghastly, male-dominated, pompous, antiquated, inefficient, ineffectual, dysfunctional club. But not yet.
Her sense of irrelevance and impotence reached its peak during the ‘coup’. A few months earlier the Prime Minister had run into a set of bad polls as the public reacted negatively to economic hardship and the sense of drift during the Brexit negotiations. Her earlier election triumph, crushing the Labour opposition, was quickly forgotten. The new influx of militant Brexiteers had limited patience and little gratitude. The so-called 52 Group of Tory MPs and their friends in the press demanded change. Kate ignored the plotting and was unprepared for the terse announcement that the PM had resigned on ‘health grounds’. Parliament went on much as before. But there was a subtle change: the boys were back in charge.
All these thoughts churned in her brain as she walked across the modern hub of parliament – Portcullis House – with its controlled environment and indoor trees, through into the cold, stone passages that led to Speaker’s Court and then to the corridor behind the Speaker’s Chair and alongside the library. There was a distinctive, and reassuring, aroma of wood polish and dusty books with an occasional whiff of yesterday’s dinner from the kitchens below. At that time in the morning the place was largely empty except for gnome-like figures, the clerks, who scuttled quietly in and out of offices. Then, down to the Members’ Lobby, where a politically balanced selection of busts of twentieth-century giants – Lloyd George, Attlee, Churchill and Thatcher – looked down on the pygmies beneath them.
The whips’ offices led off from the lobby and Kate had previously ventured inside her own only to collect messages. Now she was shown into the inner sanctum: the chief whip’s office. She took in at first glance the walls covered in press cartoons that lampooned the chief whip but also advertised his importance; a capacious drinks cabinet, open and clearly in frequent use; and various pieces of expensive communications equipment that were covered in dust and obviously not used. And then she turned her attention to the large, ruddy, friendly face behind the mahogany desk. His skills in managing political power had become legendary: a survivor; a servant of three Prime Ministers; a totally uncompromising loyalist to the Prime Minister of the day until the time came to switch sides. His power was his knowledge. He knew far more about the strengths and especially the weaknesses of the four hundred-odd MPs in his charge than any of them imagined.
Kate’s political apprenticeship labouring quietly in the parliamentary salt mines had not gone unnoticed. The chief whip had already put a question mark against the name of many of her contemporaries for displaying excessive independence of mind or unseemly haste to climb up the greasy pole or backing the wrong side in the coup. Kate Thompson’s record was unblemished. Tom Appleby was a Devon farmer who understood human nature almost as well as his beloved horses. This Kate Thompson was a goer, a smart filly who would do as she was told, sail over the fences and manage the heavy going. A good-looker too. His political hero, John Major, would have approved. He explained he had called her in for a friendly chat after being asked by the PM to put up a list of promotable talent, with attractive women as a priority.
‘I won’t bullshit you,’ he said. ‘There are a lot more talented, hard-working and worthwhile people in this place than you.’ Tough love was his preferred method of breaking in promising ponies. ‘Some of your colleagues would give their right arm for a chance to be the lowest form of ministerial pond life. I have dozens of them banging on my door every day begging for jobs, even to be an unpaid parliamentary private secretary—’
She butted in: ‘Chief Whip, I don’t know why you have called me in but I am not complaining about lack of promotion. I’m still getting to know how this place works.’
‘Not so fast. That was just my way of introducing you to some good news. You are in favour. D
on’t want it to go to your head. Let me explain. The PM is rattled by constant criticism that there aren’t enough women in serious jobs in the government. The coup, deposing a respected woman Prime Minister, has left us open to the charge that we have a problem with women. To be very frank with you, he wants some photogenic women around him – and you are near the top of the eye candy league table… at least on our side of the House.’
‘Chief Whip, Tom—’
‘Sorry, I am just being straight with you. You probably think I am some kind of Neanderthal man. But that’s the way it is. All those people who read the Mail and the Express, and vote for you, are more interested in how you look than what you say. I am sure I don’t need to tell you that. Where I am concerned you have a spotless record. That is why I put you forward. No more, no less. I also saw that excellent interview you gave on Newsnight; you stuck to the line and didn’t screw up, unlike that birdbrain we put up three months ago, now on her way out.
‘That’s it. Just a friendly word of advice. A lot of MPs will hate your guts for jumping the queue. Be careful. Watch your back. And don’t waste your chance.’
She thanked the chief whip and fought back a powerful urge to puncture his self-importance and his obvious pleasure at dishing out patronage by declining his offer. The chief whip’s head of office told her to go immediately to the Prime Minister’s parliamentary suite where he was waiting.
It all happened very quickly. She was ushered into the gloomy set of rooms behind the Speaker’s Chair by one of the young men in the outer office. The PM looked up from the papers on his desk but clearly did not recognise her and thought she was a civil servant who had come to brief him. The speaking note in front of him put him right. He gestured to her to sit down and she had a few seconds to take in the famous face in front of her, more lined than revealed on television or in Prime Minister’s Questions, but otherwise undistinguished and unmemorable.