Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  It wasn’t a bad pub at all, and neither was the beer to be sneezed at. There was brass and red plush, and on the wall were pictures of prize fighters from the early nineteenth century, that still more brutal era of the first monetarists. The pub was no more than half full—little groups of laughing people—families, workmates. Which made the solitary woman over the gin and tonic stand out rather—or perhaps she would have anyway, for solitary elderly ladies are even today more common in pubs than solitary young women. And this one could not be more than—what?—thirty? Thirty-two? A good-looking woman, Sutcliffe decided, though not smart in any way; certainly not chic. But good features . . . familiar features. Sutcliffe remembered a picture, in the Daily Mirror, of a woman, smiling, but edgily, being met by a candidate . . . Of course!

  As he watched he saw coursing down the woman’s cheek a solitary tear. Equally suddenly, he saw her body racked by a violent single sob. They were isolated appearances; if he hadn’t been watching he would not have noticed them. But this was, he decided, a very unhappy woman indeed. He took his drink over to her table.

  “Would it help to talk about it?” he asked, adding as she looked up suspiciously: “I’m not a journalist. I won’t pass anything you say on to the waiting millions. But I am a very good listener. It’s part of my job.”

  “Are you a social worker?” Sue Snaithe asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Seems you can be one and need one, apparently,” Sue said, with a trace of bitterness in her voice. “Do sit down. I’d like your company. But there isn’t anything you can do.”

  “Well, anyway, I will sit down, even if only to be useless.”

  “You recognized me, I suppose. You mentioned journalists.”

  “That’s right. I saw your picture in the Mirror.”

  “Oh, that! Loving wife comes to support battling husband. Jerry staged that, of course. He’s very good at staging things—especially spontaneous happenings, spontaneous demonstrations, spontaneous expressions of outrage. Nobody would believe, from that picture, the sort of moral blackmail he went in for to get me to come up here.”

  “You don’t want him to become an MP?”

  “Oh—it’s not that. Jerry would be an excellent MP—of a certain kind. He’d get things done. No—I didn’t want to be involved with the sort of things that getting oneself elected involves: all the wheeling and dealing, and the arse-licking, and the conspiring. Above all, all the conspiring. It was by conspiring that Jerry got selected for this seat. I didn’t have anything to do with that, of course, but it was pretty underhand stuff. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the campaign either. I’ve got a job to do—a very demanding one, physically and emotionally—and Jerry does always go on about husbands and wives being separate and independent entities, and how disgraceful it is when wives are stuck up for people to look at, as if the whole thing were a beauty parade. All of which I agree with. But I should have noticed that when the WRA meets, it’s always the women who make the coffee and sandwiches. If I had, it would have prepared me for what’s happening now, which is a subtle adaptation of the traditional beauty parade of the wife. This one is designed to prove that our Jerry is a happy family man, and therefore couldn’t—how could he?—be the left-wing bogeyman that the capitalist media depict him as. The fraudulence of it! And the moral blackmail he goes in for to get his way!”

  “You know, I don’t think you’d find your husband very different from other politicians in that respect.”

  “Then he should be! He talks as if he is!”

  “You’ve twice used the expression ‘moral blackmail.’ What has he got to blackmail you with?”

  “Oh—nothing really. It’s a silly phrase, isn’t it? Mostly when people use it, it just means putting emotional pressure on somebody. That’s about what it is in this case. It really goes right back to when we met.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “If you’ll believe—in a cinema queue for The Deer Hunters. It blossomed quickly from there. Jerry seemed somehow all washed up then. He’d just left the army. He’d expected to make it his career, and suddenly, he said, it seemed a wrong direction to take. He didn’t know the right direction, but he knew it wasn’t in the army. I was just finishing my degree and going into social work, and as we got more and more involved, Jerry got more and more taken up with my work, and with my politics. So that as he’s got further and further into Labour community politics, gone up and up in the GLC, he’s always said: ‘Thank God for you, Sue: you got me into this.’ Or even, which is idiotic: ‘I’m doing this for you.’ ”

  “That doesn’t make you happy?”

  “I suppose it did, in a way, at first. Because Jerry became a different man. His life really seemed to have shape, a purpose. But now . . . I don’t altogether like the idea that his politics are my politics. They may have been once, but they’re not any longer. And the more he’s got involved, the less the marriage has really meant to him. Now it’s just something that fills the odd moments of his spare time. Oh—he comes home to me after the meetings. I suppose I should be grateful that he’s not one of those fraternizers who go in for endless pub sessions, or casual affairs. He comes straight home. Rather a pathetic recommendation, really.”

  “You feel—what?—that you’ve been squeezed out?”

  “Well, I feel more like the organ-grinder’s monkey, actually. You know, he goes on about wives being completely independent, having their own views and all that, but what if I went up there tonight and rubbished one of his and his kind’s cherished views? What if I said I thought the nuclear disarmers were a lot of self-satisfied, misty-eyed loonies? Which I rather do, by the way. I think I’d find that I had independence—from here to here!”

  With two fingers she delineated the limits of a very small space.

  “Would you like another drink?” asked Sutcliffe.

  “No. I’ve had two. That’s my limit. If I go up there and wake Jerry up, I don’t want him to be able to say that I was drunk.”

  “Is that what you’re thinking of doing? Be careful: it could break up your marriage.”

  “I know. I know. Of course I will be careful. But sometimes I think I . . . that I don’t even like Jerry any more. And that would be the end, wouldn’t it? Oh Christ! Look over there!”

  She was gazing at a slim, dark, intense young man who had just come in through the door.

  “Who’s that?”

  “One of Jerry’s London henchmen. One of the busiest toilers in the Socialist vineyard—a right little apprentice Machiavelli. Who do you think he’s looking for? God! He’s coming over.”

  “Sue?” the young man said heartily. “Jerry sent me over to fetch you. You’re due on in twenty minutes.”

  “Oh? And how did Jerry know where to find me?”

  “One of the lads saw you come in earlier.”

  “And reported it back to His Master,” said Sue, her voice loud and harsh. “CHRIST! It’s like having a Minder. It’s like living in a police state! I can understand what George Smiley’s wife felt like! Get out of my bloody way!”

  And, grabbing together her things, she marched fuming out of the pub.

  • • •

  “Women!” said the henchman of Jerry conspiratorially to Sutcliffe. He darted to the door of the pub and watched Sue’s departing back as she walked down the street. “That’s all right. She’s gone into the Town Hall. I thought it would be better if I didn’t accompany her.”

  “Tactful of you,” said Sutcliffe.

  “She seems to have got the feeling she’s being watched.”

  “She does rather.”

  “Are you a sympathizer?” asked the infant Machiavelli.

  “That’s right,” said Sutcliffe. (Two lies in one evening, he thought. Still, he had voted Labour at every election until the last.) “I think I’ll go along and listen to your lad. He sounds as if he’s got what it takes.”

  “Oh, he has,” said the beloved disciple, as they strolled in
the direction of the Town Hall (smoke-blackened neo-Byzantine). “He’s a politician to his fingertips. Of course, you might say he’s outside his natural territory here. If this were London, everything would be sewn up, but it being the North—well, you can never tell with these people.”

  “In London he’s got an organization behind him, has he?”

  “All the way! It’s the WRA who put him where he is: they work with him, he works with them. When the Leisure Activities Committee meets, the discussion is just a formality, because what they’re discussing on Thursday has actually been decided at a WRA meeting on Wednesday. He’s brilliant, I tell you. And he’s marvellous at involving the young, and the minorities, and the women: he just drives them into activism.”

  “Really? From something his wife said, I rather thought his attitude to women might be rather . . . traditional.”

  “What an extraordinary thing to say! Sue must be upset—nerves, I suppose. There’s nobody done more to give women preferential status in all the job openings going. And he’s poured money into lesbian groups.”

  “Ah,” said Sutcliffe. “I must have misunderstood.”

  “He’s one of the coming men. If he doesn’t win this seat, the party will just have to find him another. It’ll be criminal if he’s lost to politics when they abolish the Greater London Council.”

  “I rather thought he wouldn’t need help from the party—that he was pretty good at getting himself selected for seats.”

  The young man laughed.

  “Oh yes, that’s true enough. He organized the takeover of the local party here. He knew the nomination was his for the asking. He’s a behind-the-scenes man too, is our Jerry. No doubt what he did in Bootham, he can do somewhere else!”

  “Meanwhile,” said Sutcliffe, as they turned into the Town Hall, “He’ll be doing his damnedest to get elected here.”

  Jerry’s endeavours to get elected, at that moment, consisted of a stirring speech to a nearly full town hall—an unusually large audience, assembled to hear the Leader. The Leader had given a rather good speech—impassioned, if lacking in specifics, and staying well this side of wind-baggery (as his predecessor had invariably strayed to the other side of it). Jerry was talking about democratization—democratizing the levers of power, as he called it. Democracy, to Jerry, meant democracy of the committed, all power to the activists, and it thus had very little indeed to do with real democracy, though since he didn’t spell this out, not everybody noticed. Another of his favourite words was “elitism,” which in his code language was used to stigmatize anything from French food to pedigree dogs. He managed to bring this in several times during his speech as well. Sutcliffe, seeing him for the first time, watched his performance with interest: a tall, healthy man who radiated energy. However dubious the ideas, he was putting them over with his whole body. So much so, in fact, that there was just a suspicion of the ranter in his speechifying—and there is nothing, in these times, more calculated to put people off. There was another odd thing about his speech, if you thought about it: while in international affairs he seemed to be practically a pacifist, in domestic ones he was exceedingly bellicose, and used words like “smash,” “beat,” “crush” all the time. Sutcliffe wondered whether he was the only one in the audience to notice the discrepancy.

  As Snaithe reached the end of his speech, he turned half in the direction of Sue, and his voice became lower, even matey. It also lost its Standard Southern ring and became coloured with a distinctly Yorkshire tinge. Why not, after all? Had he not been brought up in Yorkshire?

  “I’m going to ask my wife to have a few words with you. I haven’t asked her up to see if you like the look of her. This election isn’t about people’s looks, or their wives’ looks, it’s about policies. And I haven’t asked her up here to say what a fine bloke I am, either. Nor is she up here to repeat my views. She has her ideas, I have mine, and Sue’s no glove puppet, I can assure you of that. She’s come up here today because she thinks that her experience—among the poorest and most underprivileged in one of the poorest London boroughs—is pretty relevant to what you can all see around you in Bootham today. And I think it tells you something pretty important about how Tory freedom works . . . and in whose benefit it works.”

  Sue got a sympathetic round of applause. She began speaking of some of her experiences in Hackney, in a low voice, getting attention by the starkness of the distress she had witnessed. Jerry sat back in his hard little seat, his face a mask of intense interest that didn’t quite conceal his satisfaction. He’d rather forgotten her, in the excitement of the Leader’s visit, but he’d done well to get her up here. She was really being very useful.

  But after a few minutes, Sue strayed on to wider issues.

  “I don’t want to talk about these people as cases. They’re not cases, they’re not problems, they’re people. And I sometimes think it would be a better country to live in if we listened now and then to what they said, what they were thinking. Jerry here’s been talking about democracy. Fine. But none of the parties believes in putting the issues directly to the people—by referenda, for example. And yet, in this electronic day and age it would be a perfectly simple thing to do. Why shouldn’t ordinary people have their say about local government reorganization, about schools—yes, about hanging, about nuclear disarmament too?”

  Jerry’s mask of a face had become a good deal more tense. The brothers certainly did not believe in referenda. That wasn’t their idea of democracy, Good heavens no! My God!—think what people would probably vote for! You’d never get any truly radical ideas through their thick skulls! Sutcliffe saw Jerry’s hand on his right leg begin a rhythmic, involuntary tapping on his knee. She had strayed outside that space from here to here that constituted her freedom of opinion.

  “Yes—why shouldn’t ordinary people have their say, directly, about nuclear disarmament, the most important subject of all? My opinion on that, by the way, is a bit different from Jerry’s.” (The drumming of the fingers became heavier, more insistent. Nuclear disarmament was a matter of holy writ.) “Personally I think the only thing that matters is general disarmament. I think it’s daft for Britain to think disarming unilaterally would make a scrap of difference—as daft as those people in Sheffield who’ve declared the town a nuclear free zone.” (“Christ,” said Jerry’s henchman, beside Sutcliffe. “The cow!”) “It’s just silliness to think you can contract out like that. And I strongly suspect that most ordinary people would agree with me. But the point I want to make is that it’s possible to ask ordinary people what they think about things like that. And the more you ask them, the more they will stop thinking of themselves as helpless, as the cast-offs of society, just voting-fodder at election-time, despised in non-election years. They might even feel themselves to be real parts of a living democracy . . .”

  And Sue went on in this vein for some time. And as Sutcliffe slipped out of the hall, his last view of the party on the dais was of those taut, tense, muscular fingers of Jerry’s, tap-tap-tapping on his knees as he hid his irritation at Sue’s perfidy beneath a mask of polite interest in her opinions.

  Chapter 13

  The Alliance Candidate

  The night air was good, after so much hot air. Whatever the streets of Bootham were normally like at nine-thirty on a weekday evening—and Sutcliffe imagined they must be pretty dead apart from the strains of music from some degraded disco or other—tonight there was a fair concourse of people, and a faint hum of talk. Some had come out behind him from the Town Hall, and had dashed for the nearest phone: getting the story of Sue’s declaration of dissent to London for the late editions, Sutcliffe guessed, for the Labour meeting had held a fairly high proportion of media people to a fairly low proportion of real ones. There were other people around too, though, quite a few streaming from the direction of the Corn Exchange: jolly, middle-class people, mostly coming from the Social Democratic jamboree. Did that augur badly for the Conservative vote in Antony Craybourne-Fisk’s natural class
-catchment area?

  Curiosity impelled Sutcliffe to stroll towards the Corn Exchange, and he was just in time to see the two guest speakers saying their farewells to a little knot of supporters, and tearing themselves away and into their taxis as if it was the dearest wish of both of them to return to Bootham at the earliest possible opportunity. Sutcliffe strolled on, but on an impulse he looked back, and saw that the little knot of Social Democrats had evaporated, leaving the tall, lean, rather lost figure of Oliver Worthing looking around him uncertainly on the grey pavement. Sutcliffe turned back.

  “Mr Worthing?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Sutcliffe. You won’t know me, but you may have heard of me: I’m in Bootham looking into the death of James Partridge.”

  “Oh—ah—yes.” Oliver Worthing looked at him with frank interest. “Actually, I had heard. No doubt we all have. You can’t expect something like that not to get talked about, especially during a by-election.”

  “I was wondering—I know this is a lot to ask—if we could have a talk somewhere, some time. I’m willing to fit it in any time that suits your schedule.”

  “I’m afraid that means breakfast-time or late at night. But what about now? I’m just wondering where I left my car. We could go back to my flat and have some coffee.”

  “That would be splendid, if you’re not too exhausted.”

  “I’m like a worn-out dishcloth, but I’ll be this way until polling day. I wonder, did I leave my car down by the swimming pool?”

  In the event, he had. On the way to his flat in a middle-class suburb of Bootham they talked about the meeting, the prospects for the Social Democrats, the feeling on the doorsteps. They didn’t get on to the topic in hand until they were in Oliver Worthing’s kitchen and he was making coffee.