Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  After two circuits of the town he had located the Great Northern Commercial Hotel (Temperance), and after three he drove into its parking yard. He registered, chucked his hold-all into his poky room (hardly noticing anything beyond its number), and, taking a sheet of paper from his inside pocket, he went out into the street. He had, he told himself, to “get busy.”

  By getting busy, Jerry Snaithe did not mean he was going to meet the people of Bootham and talk over their problems. Nor did he mean that he was going to nobble the selection committee in advance to ensure his selection as candidate. It was not necessary. Workers for Revolutionary Action had occupied twelve of the thirty places on the Bootham General Management Committee since the previous summer and had seven sympathizers in their pockets. When, in December, one week after the death of James Partridge, the committee had decided that the re-selection of their previous candidate was not to be automatic, this was only the public expression of a previous fait accompli. When Sam Quimby, the previous candidate, had told the Bootham Evening Advertiser that he had always been in favour of re-selection, but that he regretted that the local party in Bootham East had been taken over by a tightly organized cell of Marxist activists, it was tantamount to an admission of defeat. The political correspondents of the national press had said that this decision meant that the seat was “up for grabs,” but they were wrong, and Jerry Snaithe had known they were wrong. It was all arranged. He had not come to Bootham for selection, but for coronation.

  So when he told himself to “get busy,” he did not mean organize his own selection, but to plan with his friends his future campaign. He went to the men on his list, and the woman, to Harry, Sid, Arthur, Fred, Quentin, Percy, Sean and Alice, and they planned strategies, speakers, tactics. In the evening he met the rank and file members of the WRA, all nineteen of them, at Alice’s. Alice made some sandwiches, and they all had, as Jerry told her at the end, “a great time.” By the end of the day they’d got together a list of potential speakers and campaigners. They’d got Albert Spadgett, a Trade Union leader who vied with football hooligans for bottom place in the affections of the Great British Public; they’d got militant leaders from the Greater London Council and the Liverpool City Council; they’d got a student activist leader from the North London Polytechnic, where he had been studying since the late ’sixties; they had agreed to a speaking engagement for the Labour Party Leader, and had agreed that they would even accept a visit from the Deputy Leader, if Labour Party HQ insisted. It was all, as Jerry said, “falling into place.”

  So when, next day, the candidates assembled at a Methodist Hall hired by the Bootham East Labour Party, Jerry did not bother to go through the sort of deprecatory disclaimers that Antony Craybourne-Fisk had gone in for. He stood there, tall, broad-shouldered, red-shirted, certain in his certainties, and he made no attempt to hide the fact that he was going to be the Labour candidate. The other six people who (for form’s sake) were to go before the General Management Committee—five men and a woman who didn’t seem to know why she was there—milled around him, resentful, bewildered, and out-manœuvred. Sam Quimby, the soon-to-be-ousted candidate, said to him: “I know it’s just a formality. I know I’m out.” Jerry smiled in a superior way and said: “We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”

  After the inevitable had happened Sam Quimby, who in the sentimental jargon of political commentators had “a lifetime of service to the party” behind him, came up to Jerry again.

  “Well, I don’t like the way it was done. I don’t like it at all. But I’ve been a loyal Labour man all my life, and I’ll not go against my principles now. For what it’s worth, you can have my endorsement as candidate.”

  “Good of you,” said Jerry.

  “I’ll even, if you want me, come and campaign for you.”

  “We’ll see if something can be arranged,” said Jerry, positively lordly.

  “But I’ll tell you this: I would have won this seat; and you, with your brand of politics, haven’t a hope in hell.”

  “I don’t know that politics is necessarily about winning always,” said Jerry, in his “explaining things to infants” voice. “What matters is that at last we’ve got a chance to get real Socialist policies across to the electorate.”

  This was conventional wisdom in the Workers for Revolutionary Action movement. What mattered at this stage was capturing the party machine, and using it to get a Socialist message across. But though Jerry Snaithe subscribed to it with his mouth, he did not do so in his heart. Jerry very much wanted to get elected, and, having used his friends from the WRA, he now intended to do everything in his power to ensure that he was. Including, if necessary, ditching his friends. He was, like Antony Craybourne-Fisk, a real political animal.

  • • •

  That very evening the ad hoc, part-time representative of the Social Democrats in Bootham East was rung up by his party leader from the House of Commons.

  “I was wondering if you’d done any of the soundings you promised to do among the local members. About whether they wanted to keep this local candidate, or whether we should shunt in one of our national figures.”

  “Well, yes, actually, I have,” said the representative. And he had, too. It had not taken him long. The Social Democratic Party had very few paid-up members in Bootham East, though as he had told the Party Leader in an earlier conversation, there were lots and lots of people who said they might well consider voting Social Democrat should the opportunity arise.

  “First of all, though,” the representative went on, “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Labour Party has selected Jerry Snaithe tonight as their candidate.”

  “Great!” said the Leader, with real enthusiasm. “A splendid bogey-man figure for us. ‘Labour Party taken over by extremists,’ and all that. It’ll be true, too.”

  “Quite. I thought you’d be pleased. But with one candidate from Conservative Central Office, the other on the GLC—”

  “Yes,” said the Leader, his voice showing that he knew what was coming.

  “I think the general feeling here will be that we should stick with the local man. It could be a winning card . . .”

  “Yes,” said the Leader again, trying to keep the scepticism out of his voice. “And this Mr—er—”

  “Worthing.”

  “Yes, Worthing, he’s a—what?—schoolmaster?”

  “A lecturer at the local College of Further Education.”

  “Of course. What sort of candidate will he make, do you think?”

  “He’s very engaged, well up in local issues . . . very earnest . . . He has been the candidate before, you remember.”

  “I remember. But without the sort of media exposure he’ll get this time. That’s the vital point. That can make or break a candidate. Is he a good speaker?”

  “Yes—quite good . . . A little dull . . . Inclined to be long-winded, in fact . . . But it’s quite easy to stop him. I just pull at his sleeve. And he’s very hard-working. Bones up on the subjects at issue, has all the facts at his fingertips . . .”

  “Right,” said the Leader, accepting the inevitable. “Well, that’s decided then. Now all we have to do is get the bandwagon rolling and send in the storm-troopers.”

  It was not a very appropriate image for the leader of the Social Democratic Party to use.

  • • •

  Thus were chosen the candidates for the three main parties for the by-election at Bootham East, the campaign for which was not scheduled officially to begin until February 6th, and which was already promising to be a media-event of some magnitude; several national newspapers had begun drying out their political hacks in preparation, and their editors were sharpening the language of their political invective. Two days later, the Daily Grub, in a rare departure from its steady diet of tits, bums and stories about Prince Andrew, printed photographs not only of the three main candidates, but also of the MP whose death (“which has not yet been satisfactorily explained”) had caused the by-election. It wa
s this picture of James Partridge that brought the little man from Battersea in to see Superintendent Sutcliffe, and to start questions about James Partridge’s death buzzing once more around the corridors of power.

  Chapter 4

  Home from Home

  Wilfred Dowson was a retired local government clerk who for many years had laboured in various of the bureaucracies of the London County Council and the Greater London Council (“before they were hijacked by this present gang of comedians,” he used to say, over a half-pint of shandy). He was a local government official of an old but well-known type in his generation: a deeply conservative Labour voter, he had an encyclopædic knowledge of bye-laws, departmental minutes, sub-sections in standing orders—in fact, he was a master-spider in the vast web of local bureaucracy, and very few were the applicants for handouts from their council who got past his cautious and parsimonious temperament. “Never do anything in a hurry” was his motto, and he ran his little Circumlocution Office in such a way that as often as not this meant: “Never do anything at all.”

  Now he was retired, and he spent much of his time in Battersea Public Library, not far from his home. It was warm there, so he saved on heating bills; there were people there (he had buried his wife, gratefully, some two years before he retired), so he never felt lonely; and he could read all the national and local papers at his leisure, and pursue in the Reference Library some arcane by-way of his favourite hobby, moths.

  When Wilfred Dowson saw the picture of James Partridge in the Daily Grub for January 21st, he frowned, puzzled, and thought it over for a day or two. He had been rather “off colour,” as he put it, in early December, and had not got into the library as much as usual. So now he demanded the back files of The Times and the Daily Telegraph, and read what they had had to say—it was a meagre amount, in fact—about the death of James Partridge. Then he decided to go to the nearest local police station. Here there was another hiccup, because the man on the desk there at lunch-time when he went in was a PC of more than usual dimness, a young thug who had only joined the force for a bit of legitimized violence, and who lived for those times when he and a few of his mates in blue could put the boot into blacks, druggies and other weirdos who were what was laughably described as “resisting arrest.” This thick youth sat at the desk, yawning and scratching his crotch, and he told Wilfred Dowson that as far as he knew there wasn’t no case, and it didn’t come within their province anyway, and it didn’t sound as if there was much in it, did there? Oh yeah, if he really felt like it he could go along to Scotland Yard—it wasn’t any skin off his nose, was it?

  Wilfred Dowson was so incensed at the unenthused reception of his information that it was only after two days, and after penning an indignant letter to the Battersea Police peppered with phrases from his local government days (“pursuant to this matter I volunteered information”), that Wilfred put on his raincoat on the morning of the twenty-seventh and trotted over Vauxhall Bridge and down Millbank to New Scotland Yard. Here he mentioned the matter at the desk to a young sergeant who was a very much brighter article; he looked in files, and rang straight up to Superintendent Sutcliffe. Within ten minutes he was sitting in Sutcliffe’s office, with its fine view down the Thames, and a constable was bringing him coffee from the Yard canteen. Mr Dowson blossomed. This was more like. This was giving him the importance that he had always known he deserved.

  “I saw his picture in the Grub,” he explained in his precise, punctilious voice. “Not a paper I would normally read, or not normally buy, but this was in the reading room, you understand. I was surprised at his having been an MP. So I went and looked up the account of him in the Telegraph, and found that he lived with his wife and family in Cardew Walk, Chelsea. That really did take me aback! Because of course he didn’t!”

  “He didn’t?”

  “Indeed he did not. He lived in the house next door to me!”

  “And where is that?”

  “No. 62, Flannagan Road, Battersea. I’m number sixty. Sixty-two is split in half—an upstairs and a downstairs flat. He had the upstairs.”

  “And how long had he lived there?”

  “Not long. Matter of two, perhaps three months.”

  “And you’re quite sure this was James Partridge?”

  “Quite sure. Absolutely and without question. I saw him quite often—leaving or coming home. He was a bit of a walker—didn’t catch the bus if he wasn’t in a hurry, so often I’d be just behind him part of the way, as I went to the shops or the library, and he went—as I now realize—towards Westminster.”

  “You didn’t talk to him?”

  “Not beyond ‘Good Morning’ or ‘Evening.’ ”

  “But you did see him well?”

  “Perfectly well. On countless occasions. And another thing: I used to see him come home at night, very late, and then I’d see his face in the lamplight, as he looked for his key. I keep a good watch on, I do. What with these terrorist cells springing up everywhere—first thing you know you’ve got a bomb factory next door. Oh, I keep an eye on things, don’t you worry!” He leaned forward, to clinch the matter: “And I saw the initials on his briefcase—J.S.P.”

  “James Spenser Partridge.”

  “That’s right. That was in his obituary. Some sort of family connection with a poet. How many J.S.P.s the spitting image of James Spenser Partridge, MP, do you think there are? No, no, no—it was him all right. You can be quite certain of that.”

  “Well, Mr Dowson,” said Sutcliffe ruminantly, stroking down the greying moustache which gave him the look of a pessimistic seal, “I find this information very interesting—puzzling, too . . . Of course, many MPs have a pied-à-terre—”

  “Not if they have flats in Chelsea, they don’t,” said Mr Dowson triumphantly.

  “Not as a rule. And I’ve certainly seen the flat in Chelsea . . . He did live there, you say, in the house next door to you? It wasn’t some sort of business office? He came home every day?”

  “He did indeed, except sometimes at weekends. Constituency business, see. Otherwise he was there every day: I’d be sure to see him, either morning or evening. Erratic times, because they don’t keep regular hours there, but I’d see him.”

  “Do you happen to know the landlord of that house?”

  “Not personally, but I know who it is. Lives down the road at No. 40—Harold Bly, the name is. Inherited the house when his mother-in-law died, and converted it into two flats—very tastefully done, I believe. I’ve known one or two of the gentlemen who lived there. He gets in a very nice little rent, so I’ve heard.”

  “I think I’d better talk to Mr Bly. If you’d put your coat on, Mr Dowson, I’ll drive you home.”

  • • •

  To have saved on his bus fare both ways was pure heaven to Mr Dowson, but to complete his enjoyment the adventure would have had not to have ended there.

  “I could come along with you and introduce you,” he said as they drew up at No. 60. In view of his declared lack of acquaintanceship with the landlord, this seemed a particularly empty offer. Sutcliffe was an experienced officer, experienced with civilian ghouls as well as criminals, but he maintained a tired courtesy with both. He declined Dowson’s offer civilly, and as he drove off towards No. 40 he imagined Wilfred Dowson taking up position behind the best window in his house for observation, hoping for sensational developments.

  James Partridge’s landlord, if that indeed was what he was, turned out to be fiftyish, paunchy, quite possibly lazy, but not unintelligent.

  “I thought it was funny,” he said, when Sutcliffe had explained his business.

  “What was funny?”

  “Well, his just going like that. And his wife explaining that he was dead.”

  “You’ve been in contact with the wife?”

  “Well, I had to,” explained Harold Bly. “See, the rent was paid to December 31st. First day or two after that I didn’t think much to it, it being the festive season, and lots of people away with relatives, and
so on. But he’d always been a regular payer, the short time he’d been there, so about the sixth or seventh I began to get worried. So I took my key and went along to see that there was nothing amiss. Well, there was and there wasn’t. It was all neat and tidy, except for a saucepan which had had boiled milk in it—the remains were all festering. He didn’t look the type to go off for a long period and leave that—not by the look of the rest of the flat. Though it was all perfectly shipshape, it was pretty clear he hadn’t slept there for some time. Well, I found an old bank statement in the waste-paper basket, with a Chelsea address. I waited a day or two, walked along to see if there was ever any lights on there, and when it was clear he hadn’t come back, I wrote to him at this Chelsea address.”

  “And his wife replied that he was dead?”

  “That’s right. Said that he had only rented the flat temporarily, due to alterations at their home—though that certainly wasn’t my understanding—and that unfortunately he had died last month. Didn’t offer to pay the January rent. Of course, if I’d read my newspaper better I might have known he was dead, because he was here under his own name all right, but I’ve never been one for political news, and my paper doesn’t have all that much in anyway.”

  “Are his things still in the flat?”

  “No, they’re not. When I got this letter I rang up Mrs P., to ask whether she’d come round and sort through them herself. She sounded surprised. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her that he had things there. I stepped into the breach and said I could load the things into my car and drive them round to her. She said, ‘Oh, could you be so kind . . . ?’ You know the kind of voice. I said I’d come the next morning, and she said that might be difficult, and could I make it the evening—?”