Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

‘Just after that. Here …’ He took the pamphlet back from Nigel and rapidly scanned the page. ‘Yes, here we are: “Membership of the European Union depends on the consent of the British people – and in recent years that consent has worn wafer-thin.” ’

  ‘That’s right. It has.’

  ‘So what Cameron’s doing is extremely risky, in other words?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because he’s proposing to hold an in–out referendum and he knows in advance that the majority is going to be wafer-thin.’

  Nigel shook his head and tutted. ‘Honestly, Douglas, you writers! With your ridiculously creative interpretations of things. You take a perfectly clear, perfectly innocent phrase and you twist it, you distort it …’

  ‘I suppose you could always make the result dependent on a supermajority – sixty per cent or something like that.’

  ‘That idea was suggested, but there’s no real need.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the referendum will be purely advisory.’

  ‘Really? But that’s not what it says here. It says, “We will hold that in–out referendum before the end of 2017 and respect the outcome.” That doesn’t sound like an advisory referendum to me.’

  ‘Of course it does. It means the British people will give us their advice, and we’ll take it.’ Doug did not look particularly convinced by this argument, so he added: ‘In any case, would it be so bad if we left the European Union? As a socialist, you must have a lot of problems with it. Look at the way they’ve been treating the poor Greeks, for instance.’

  Finishing his cappuccino, Doug rose to his feet and put the manifesto pamphlet away in his coat pocket. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But I assume that Cameron wants to stay in.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘In which case I think he will be taking an enormous gamble if he offers a fifty–fifty vote on something where he already thinks public opinion is closely divided.’

  ‘It is a gamble,’ Nigel agreed. ‘A huge gamble. The country’s future decided on the roll of a dice. The fact that Dave’s prepared to take it is what makes him such a strong, decisive leader.’

  Impressed as always by Nigel’s logical contortions, Doug shook his hand and asked one final question:

  ‘So Cameron isn’t at all worried about promising this referendum?’

  ‘Well, he would be,’ Nigel answered, buttoning up his coat. ‘But the bottom line is, it’s not going to happen.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Doug.

  ‘Because there’s no way he’s going to win an overall majority. All the opinion polls say so. Don’t you ever look at them, Douglas? You really should.’

  As a parting shot, that would have been baffling enough to keep Doug occupied all the way home. But Nigel had an even better one up his sleeve.

  ‘And by the way,’ he said, leaving an expectant pause which he timed to perfection. ‘Give my regards to Gail, won’t you? Dave does regard her as an absolutely crucial member of the team. I hope she realizes that.’

  21.

  May 2015

  Doug never did discover how Nigel had managed to find out. He had only been seeing Gail Ransome for a few weeks, at this point, and they had both tried to be discreet about it. He supposed that, in the cramped, hothouse atmosphere of the Westminster village, it was impossible to keep a new relationship secret for long, particularly when it involved a left-wing journalist and a Conservative MP. That was a gift for the gossip-mongers, certainly. But whatever the explanation, it made Doug feel distinctly uneasy that David Cameron’s deputy assistant director of communications was privy to the information when his own daughter wasn’t.

  But who was to blame for that? He and Coriander barely spoke to each other these days. In fact, he would not have believed it possible for a father and daughter to share such a confined living space and live in such profound ignorance of each other’s lives.

  Since the night of the Olympic opening ceremony, there had been major upheavals in the Gifford-Anderton household. Doug and Francesca had separated, without too much heartbreak on either side. He had moved into a boxy two-bedroom flat in Lower Holloway, not far from the Caledonian Road. Francesca, he learned (from the Evening Standard Londoner’s Diary) wasted little time before starting to date a recently divorced reality TV producer rumoured to be one of the hundred richest men in the country. Coriander, whose long-standing disdain for her mother’s values and way of life were triumphantly confirmed by this development, waited until the day of her sixteenth birthday and then exercised her legal right to leave the comforts of Chelsea behind and move in with her father. She also quit her West London private school and entered the sixth form of a state school in Camden which was achingly fashionable with the daughters of North London’s liberal intelligentsia.

  Doug quickly found that he did not really miss the trappings of the super-wealthy: the shrinking of his living space was more than offset, in his opinion, by the fact that he no longer had to sit through dinner parties in the company of oligarchs or make polite conversation with hedge fund managers at Speech Day. And he welcomed the arrival of Coriander, envisaging a new relationship based on cosy chats over the breakfast table and late-night sessions working on homework together. But he had not been paying attention. His daughter might have rejected her mother’s values, but she was no more enamoured of Doug’s. In fact she was far to the left of her father these days: her views on racism, inequality and identity politics were utterly uncompromising, and she made no effort at all to hide the fact that she considered him at best a deluded, out-of-touch, middle-of-the-road social democrat, at worst a feeble sell-out whose political compromises actually formed a far greater barrier to social justice than anything the Tory Party could come up with. The current Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband (portrayed by the Conservative media as a Marxist, or at least the son of a Marxist, which amounted to the same thing), she considered a pale, bloodless descendant of Tony Blair’s New Labour, irredeemably tainted by the criminal folly of the Iraq War, with no convincing or radical vision to offer in response to the Tories’ austerity programme. ‘But at least they’re the lesser of two evils,’ her father would say, and in return she scoffed. As for those breakfast chats, on school days she left the house at seven thirty and had breakfast with her friends in local coffee shops. With these same friends she would roam the streets of London in the evenings and weekends, touring pubs, clubs, gigs and parties whose precise nature Doug could only guess at (although he preferred not to think about it at all). On a good day, Coriander and her father, if their paths happened to cross in the kitchen or on the way to the bathroom, would conduct themselves with cool civility. But it was not uncommon for them to cohabit for weeks at a time without speaking a word to each other.

  On 7 May 2015, however – the night of the general election – things between them were to get substantially worse.

  *

  As the BBC’s late-night coverage unfolded, Doug watched the results come in with astonishment. Like everybody else, he had assumed that this election was going to be close, and would probably result in a hung parliament. The ten o’clock exit poll was enough to show that this was not going to happen. After that, it became a question of waiting for the key constituencies to declare. When Nuneaton showed a big swing to the Conservatives, at one fifty in the morning, the presenters affirmed that the election was won and all the pollsters’ expectations had been overturned. Incredible, but true.

  He’d agreed to write 1,200 words by 6 a.m. Not for the print edition, just for the website (at a fraction of the print edition fee). He went into the kitchen to fix himself a coffee before getting started, then sat down in front of the television again, opened a new document on his laptop and began to type:

  Can a bacon sandwich defeat socialism?

  Solid opening sentence. Bit predictable, perhaps. But he would press on.

  After all, how else do we explain the inexplicable? This should surely have been Ed Miliband’s mom
ent. The coalition government has really done nothing in the last five years to make itself popular with voters. Nothing has been done to address the underlying causes of the 2008 financial crisis, apart from conceiving and adhering to a cruel austerity programme whose effects have been felt by everyone in the country except the super-rich. For the young middle class, wages have stagnated and living standards have failed to rise. For the poorest, the impact has been much worse, with an exponential rise in dependence upon food banks which should be the shame of any civilized country.

  At two thirty the front door was unlocked and Coriander came in, looking dishevelled and sleep-deprived. She threw off her coat and flopped down on the sofa beside him.

  ‘Have you heard?’ he asked.

  ‘Yep. Stupid cunts.’

  He gave her a questioning glance, since it wasn’t entirely clear who she was referring to.

  ‘Voters,’ she elaborated.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The idiots who just voted for their lives to get even worse.’

  Doug said: ‘Well, what choice did they have? Since, in your opinion, the Labour Party’s just as bad.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Which way would you have voted?’

  Coriander, who would be eighteen in August, had been spared that particular decision. She shrugged.

  ‘I could do with a coffee,’ she said, getting up.

  ‘Make me another one too, will you?’

  While she was out of the room, two further results were announced on the television: Brecon and Radnorshire, and Yeovil. Both had gone to the Tories, with massive swings against the Liberal Democrats. The Tory campaign had ruthlessly targeted their coalition partners and now it was paying off, apparently. But still Doug was struggling to understand why.

  As for the prime minister himself, he has never been especially well liked by traditional Tories, who regard him as altogether too metropolitan and socially liberal. He may count the introduction of gay marriage as one of his proudest achievements, but it won’t have won him many extra voters in Middle England.

  At four o’clock in the morning, Twickenham fell to the Tories and Doug put his laptop aside, his mind reeling. Twickenham! Vince Cable’s seat! Cable had been the secretary of state for business, president of the Board of Trade and the second-most prominent Lib Dem figure in the government. Now his majority of more than 12,000 had been wiped out. The Tories were massacring their former partners, annihilating them. Even after all that ‘bantz’ between Nick and Dave at the cabinet table … And yet still the result that Doug was most anxiously awaiting had not come through. When were they going to announce Coventry South West? He sent a quick text to Gail –

  How long now?

  – and she texted back:

  Don’t know. Agony here. Xxx.

  Dawn was coming now. Doug considered drawing back the curtains to admit the first of the sunlight, but he didn’t want to disturb Coriander, who was recumbent on the sofa beside him, drifting in and out of sleep.

  So where did Miliband go wrong? At times his campaign was painful to watch. He never looked at ease with the media, and like many Labour leaders before him struggled to get his message across in a hostile environment where sections of the press were ready to pounce on his every mistake. We should not underestimate the effectiveness of the Mail’s campaign to portray his academic father Ralph as a Marxist who ‘hated Britain’, and to imply that the son was guilty by genetic association.

  And then, of course, there was the bacon sandwich episode. Incredibly, it happened almost a year ago now, but that one photograph of poor Ed in a café in New Covent Garden, trying to eat a bacon sandwich and getting into a bit of a mess as it fell apart in his hands, continues to resonate. Two days ago the Sun splashed it all over its front page and wrote: ‘This is the pig’s ear Ed made of a helpless sarnie. In 48 hours, he could be doing the same to Britain.’ Is this what we’ve come to? A genuinely progressive, reforming and inclusive manifesto on one side of the scales, and on the other, a party leader (a Jewish party leader, remember) who struggles to look at ease while eating a pork product and must therefore be portrayed as socially awkward and out of touch with the common people?

  He was still working on that paragraph, which was too verbose and complicated for his liking, when he glanced up at the TV and saw that the cameras had gone over to Coventry South West at last. There was Gail, looking tired but upbeat in her best navy-blue suit. She was flanked by the other candidates: her Labour opponent just next to her, on her left-hand side, and the usual bizarre crowd occupying the rest of the platform, including the traditional representative of the Monster Raving Loony Party, sporting a top hat and an enormous fake daffodil in his buttonhole. It crossed Doug’s mind, fleetingly, that England was, and always had been, a very strange country.

  Then the results were being declared, and suddenly Gail was smiling and thrusting her hand into the air in triumph. Her majority was reduced, but she had won, and the banner at the bottom of the screen announced ‘Con Hold’.

  ‘Yes!’ Doug shouted, involuntarily. ‘She did it.’

  The shout woke Coriander, who struggled into an upright position and squinted at the TV screen. It took a few seconds for the information she read there to reach her sleepy brain and then she turned to him and said, in a puzzled tone: ‘Did you just cheer a Tory win?’

  He couldn’t see any way of denying it.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Who is that woman, anyway?’

  ‘She’s …’ He paused. He was in his mid-fifties. Words had to be chosen carefully. What was the most appropriate way of putting it? ‘She’s someone I’ve been seeing.’

  Coriander greeted this information with a long, long silence. She finally broke it, not by speaking, but by rising to her feet from the creaking sofa and shuffling away in the direction of her bedroom.

  As she disappeared, Doug called after her, in desperation: ‘She’s very much on the left of the party!’ But he had the strong sense, before the words were even out of his mouth, that they were not going to cut much ice.

  *

  In the wake of David Cameron’s unforeseen victory, events began to move fast. By mid-morning no fewer than three of the main party leaders had resigned: Ed Miliband from Labour, Nick Clegg from the Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage from UKIP. The political landscape with which Doug had grown familiar over the last few years had been laid waste in a couple of hours. That afternoon, the nation was treated to the strangely comic spectacle of the three main party leaders, two of them now ex-party leaders, standing together in solemn finery while attending the VE Day seventieth-anniversary commemoration at the Cenotaph. And then, at around five o’clock, when Doug would normally have expected his daughter to return (fleetingly) from school, he received a text message from Francesca:

  Corrie has just appeared. Says she hates you and wants to move back in here for a while. What have you done?

  Doug, who was in the middle of a phone interview with BBC Radio London, texted back:

  Shagged a Tory.

  Which was perhaps not the most diplomatic way of phrasing it, but was at least concise and accurate. There was no reply.

  The rest of the weekend was taken up with intense speculation as to who would succeed to the leadership of Labour and the Lib Dems, with Doug either banging out more think pieces from his desk at home or dashing from TV studio to TV studio. By the time he filed his last article in the early hours of Monday morning – a hefty 2,500 words for the New Statesman – his feelings about the result had changed, and he had a new theory. Yes, the Tories had brilliantly and ferociously targeted every marginal Lib Dem seat in the country, but the real deciding factor in their victory had been Scotland. A strident, relentless message had been beamed out to the effect that Ed Miliband would make a weak leader; that Labour could not win an overall majority and so would end up going into coalition with the Scottish National Party; and that it would therefore be the SNP – those pesky, unfriendly Scots – who would end
up calling the shots at Westminster. In the words of Gordon Brown (whose own defeat, after that disastrous gaffe about the ‘bigoted woman’, seemed five lifetimes, not five years, earlier): ‘Instead of playing the British unity card, the Conservatives decided to play the English nationalism card. All this was designed to give the idea that there was a Scottish menace, a Scottish danger, a Scottish risk.’

  … an undeniably effective strategy, as it turned out [Doug wrote]. But, as our former prime minister observes, one which holds risks for the future: if David Cameron has ‘turned on the tap of English nationalism’, will he be able to turn it off again, or will it continue to flow, with increasing and unstoppable force, during the EU referendum campaign to which he is now committed?

  *

  By midweek, the frenzy of comment was starting to abate. Doug and his colleagues in the media began (with some difficulty) to regain their sense of proportion. It was easy to forget that the general public, once they had cast their votes, would not spend the next five years obsessing over the consequences as the Westminster commentariat were inclined to do. Yes, there had been a political earthquake, but it was a small one, a local one, seen from a global perspective or sub specie aeternitatis. Meanwhile, an English summer beckoned, and the country continued to go about its business. Nothing seismic was to take place in the national life for the next few weeks. The next truly astonishing event would have to wait until 29 July 2015.

  That was the day when it was announced that Benjamin Trotter’s novel, A Rose Without a Thorn, had been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

  22.

  July–August 2015

  Doug did not see his daughter again for two months. He had to hand it to her: when it came to holding grudges, she was at the top of the premier league. Even then, she had not been planning to see him: the encounter was brokered by Francesca, who asked Doug to meet her for a coffee at the Saatchi Gallery on Duke of York Square one morning in mid-July, and brought Coriander along without forewarning either of them.