Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  Thanks, no doubt, to the Master, Caro had been put on the national candidates list. She made several stabs by phone and email for various seats whose local parties clearly had no interest in her. One morning, after several months poring over the Guardian for news about sitting MPs dying or retiring, she had jumped into her Saab and headed for Northamptonshire. The constituency of Barker needed a new candidate to replace Leonard Lomax, a former miner who was retiring before the next election, at the age of seventy-eight. She stayed at the only hotel in Barker, a Travelodge, and in the two days she spent there she met enough constituency workers and officials to think that, lesbian or not, she was in with a chance. There were lots of women in the local party who were aching to give the old male establishment a smack in the face, she told Angela.

  But as they walked together up the steep hill that overlooked Pebbleton church, listening to the faint distress of sheep on the other side of the valley, Angela ran through the other candidates.

  ‘Sweetie, they’re a formidable lot, you have to admit it. There’s the guy who used to be the environment minister. Everyone in the party loves him. There’s the one who wrote all the speeches for the two Eds; he’s had a lot of telly exposure, and the media are always gushing about him because he used to be in the army. And there’s that woman who lost her seat at the last election, and who’s supposed to be in the running for mayor of London. Caro, you are sweet and you are pretty and you are clever, but you’re not in their league.’

  They were standing in the lee of a beech coppice, hidden from the rest of the world. Angela leaned over and cupped Caro’s face, and began kissing her gently.

  But Caro pulled back. ‘You haven’t seen me in action, vicar. You haven’t seen me really try. I love you, and I love all of this, I really do; but politics is something I know I can do well. Every week you preach about helping the less fortunate. Every week, more money from the collection than the church can afford goes off to Syria, or Burundi, or wherever. I know you mean what you say. But you have to let me do my bit as well …’

  Angela cut in. ‘Off in the world. Away from this little hidden valley. I thought this was paradise when I first saw it; and when you came here to join me, I knew it was. And now you’re off – Northamptonshire, then London, then who knows where. I do respect what you want, Caro, but with this, little by little, you’re leaving me. I think you only get one chance at happiness in this life. You only get one paradise. And if you walk out of it, you can’t walk back in again. So – I’m sorry, darling Caro, but no, I can’t do this.’

  Caro said no more, but pulled Angela’s face towards hers. She saw again the intense, freckled little face of the girl she had first met all those years ago, and she thrust her tongue into her mouth. They fell onto a carpet of leaf and moss, and made love. Stained with moisture and mud, they were noticed as they walked back through the village. But nobody said anything. They liked their vicar, and in Pebbleton they still believed in the oldest, most sacred law of English life: live and let live.

  There had always been comments, of course. Angela was the first female vicar in the area, and when Caroline started arriving down from London most weekends, the obvious conclusions were drawn. Lady Broderick, the nearest thing Pebbleton had to a squire, had spoken to Angela one night after evensong.

  ‘Now, vicar, you know I’m a traditional soul. I’m thrilled that you’ve brought back the King James and the Book of Common Prayer, and some of the good old hymns – which, trust me, is why fewer of the pews are empty. No incense, yet, and I approve of that as well. So please believe that I’m also speaking for others when I say that, while I’m a modern woman, I regard – er – unnatural practices as a sin. Forgive me for speaking so plainly.’

  Angela, scarlet, replied, ‘Lady Broderick, we are married. You are speaking to a married woman.’

  ‘Not as far as I’m concerned, young lady.’

  ‘The law …’

  Lady Broderick’s jaw tightened: ‘The Church …’

  Angela had stood very still, scarcely breathing. ‘But ours is a God of love, Lady Broderick, and a God of infinite mercy. He made us as we are.’

  ‘He did indeed, vicar, He did indeed. But that doesn’t stop us from trying to live according to His instructions. Unnatural practices trouble me. But what I was going to say – and we’re much less narrow-minded around here than you might think – is that as far as I’m concerned, so long as we don’t have rainbow flags hanging from the rafters and kissing in the pulpit, your life is your own.’

  There were of course gossips in the village. The old men who hung around outside the hairdressers every morning waiting for the daily arrival of the newspapers had a lot to say.

  ‘What is it that lizzies actually do?’

  ‘Hah, that’s the question.’

  ‘Fiddling around, I shouldn’t wonder. Fingers and suchlike.’

  ‘Turns your stomach.’

  ‘All right for you, Mac. Worse for me.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘My own poor dear wife is called Lizzie. Always has been. Can’t look at her in the same way now.’

  ‘Better go and get some advice from the vicar.’

  A noise somewhere between ‘catarrgh’ and a filthy laugh greeted the arrival of the small mobile shop, laden with tabloids, full-fat milk and cigarettes.

  Not long after their walk on the hill above the church, Caroline returned to Northamptonshire for the final selection meeting. In Pebbleton, it was a long, grey wait.

  The following evening, Angela had just fed the boys their supper and packed them off upstairs to do some homework. Still no word. Oddly, nothing on Twitter. She had a meeting with the community policeman ahead of her, and was feeling lonely and scratchy. She was just about to pour herself a fortifying glass of wine when Caro burst in. As usual, she was like a warm wave of sunshine on a February morning. The vicarage immediately seemed to glow a little brighter.

  ‘Well!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Good news and bad news.’

  ‘Bad news first.’

  ‘The bad news is, I’m not going to be around here quite so much, because’ – Caroline imitated blowing a trumpet – ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘You saw them off?’ Angela was excited and pleased despite herself.

  ‘I know. Impossible, but I did it.’

  ‘Stop right there,’ said Angela. ‘This calls for a drink.’ She brought a bottle of Suffolk gin, some tonic water which had lost its fizz, and a small bottle of bitters to the kitchen table. They sat for a moment in silence, drinking and listening to the sound of the wind in the Douglas firs behind the vicarage.

  ‘Anyway,’ began Caro, ‘I had a stroke of luck to start with. You remember that the guy who used to write the Eds’ speeches called me and suggested we travel up by train from London together. When I got to the station the others were there too – the old environment minister, who looks just like he does on the telly, very smart; and the woman who was going to run for mayor of London.

  ‘So we got one of those arrangements with a table and four seats, and we talked all the way up there. It was pretty obvious that they saw me as the innocent. They wanted to know what I was going to say, of course. Well, you know me. All that time in the City, busily researching away. Always prepared. So I had it ready. Lomax, I said.’

  ‘The MP who’s retiring?’

  ‘That’s the one. Lennie Lomax, I told them, was the very model of a good old-fashioned Labour MP. Started life down the mine, strong union man, collected the subs, strong as an ox, and a bastion of good sense in Parliament. Way back, he supported Kinnock against the militants. Didn’t like Blair’s Iraq war, but served as a whip nevertheless. Leonard was a rock. Leonard was everything the constituency needed. I told them I was just going to say how great Leonard was, and promise to do my best to be just the same kind of MP. And they all nodded at me and pretended not to take much notice. When we got there, we were picked up and whisked straight into the selection
meeting. I chose to speak last. And they did it, one by one, the complete idiots. They got up on the stage and picked up the microphone and promised to be exactly like Leonard Lomax. First the clever journalist who wrote the Eds’ speeches said he wanted to be like Leonard Lomax. Then the environment minister said that, as a long-time admirer, he wanted to be like Leonard Lomax. Then the woman who isn’t going to run as mayor of London said she knew Leonard Lomax very well, and she wanted to be just like Leonard Lomax.’

  ‘They stole your speech? The sods.’ Angela was genuinely outraged on Caroline’s behalf.

  ‘Up to a point, dear heart. What was Lennie Lomax? He was a drunk, he was idle and he was an idiot. He treated the general management committee like shit. He was a complete embarrassment for years. Everyone in the local party hated him. So while those three were praising him, I could see the faces in the room getting longer and longer, and I could feel the temperature dropping like a stone.

  ‘When my turn comes, the first thing I say is, “I don’t think we need a microphone in this room, do we? We’re all friends here.” Then I go and sit down at the front of the stage, so I’m almost in the audience, rather than talking at them. And then I say, “Well, poor old Lennie Lomax. I understand a bit of sentiment, but frankly he wasn’t a good representative for this seat. He didn’t work hard enough, and he didn’t treat his constituents with sufficient respect. I’m afraid I’m sitting in front of you today because I don’t want to be Leonard Lomax.” And there was this huge cheer, and they started to clap. And then I made a few jokes, and I said that I was a Christian and a gay woman, and that if they were bothered by either of those things, now was the time to say so. But they were just so pleased I wasn’t drunk, brutish old Lennie Lomax that I won by a mile.’

  Caro was so pleased by her own cleverness that she hadn’t noticed Angela’s return to the early-evening gin and tonic. And Angela was so blown away by Caro’s story that she’d poured herself a second one.

  ‘You … are … quite something. Maybe you were born to be a politician after all. I’m going to miss you horribly. I’m going to miss you so much it hurts me inside, as if I’d swallowed broken glass. But I’m going to be with you every step of the way. After you’re elected I’ll take time off mid-week and train it to London. And you, madam, will find ways to get down here. We will do this together.’

  As the sun went down and the smell of the wood-burning stove began to percolate through the old vicarage, the two women snuggled together on the sofa and talked about the new, very difficult but not impossible, and exciting life ahead.

  Politics Today

  I tell you what, things would be a lot better today if the bastards hadn’t kicked me out.

  The Master (not on top form)

  The first Conservative administration of the post-EU era had proclaimed itself a ‘national government’, on the basis that a handful of Eurosceptic Labour MPs had crossed the floor to support it, as did the eight Ukip Members. But the euphoria of victory had carried it for only a few months before exhaustion set in.

  Political theatre is like actual theatre. It exposes frailties and it accelerates fate. Rivalries which, in civilian life, might have taken eighty years to fully emerge, gape in politics after a few months. Small flaws of character, which in the life of a dentist or a gardener might be merely irritating eccentricities, will tear a cabinet minister to pieces in less than a year. And so it had happened to the Conservatives’ national government. Relatively decent people had been transmuted into gurning gargoyles and grotesque puppets, and set against one another, until the stage was mottled and sticky with blood. There was no brave new world. In parliamentary politics, there never is.

  How, meanwhile, had the country fared? Formerly, Britain had been a divided, frenetic little archipelago, buzzing away thanks to high levels of immigration and the fickle favours of international capital. Freed to be herself, she began to fall back. Immigration almost ceased; the unions reasserted their power. The right-wing agenda proved less popular in practice than it had seemed during the election campaign. The abolition of comprehensive schools, and the introduction of fees for hospitals, had seemed like clarion calls in the manifesto; the reality in the streets of many cities was disgruntled and confused. Scotland’s socialist upsurge became unstoppable.

  A few of the City institutions that had threatened to leave the country in the event of Britain’s departure from the EU, and relocate their headquarters to Paris and Frankfurt, had carried out their threat. Things hadn’t been quite as catastrophic as the Europhiles had predicted, but house prices in London and the south-east tumbled. Bankers, having been the villains of previous decades, were rather missed once so many of them had gone – or rather, their free spending was missed by the smaller businesses that had depended upon it. Britain’s proudly independent Treasury, no longer having to pay vast subventions to Brussels, found that the numbers still didn’t add up. Three cabinet ministers were filmed frolicking happily on a bed by the seven-year-old daughter of one of them; the footage was posted on Facebook, and went viral. In other words, politics continued too much as usual.

  It was in these circumstances that Alwyn Grimaldi rose to become leader of the Labour opposition. He’d been a fixture on the political bores’ circuits for years – a regular speaker at Fabian conferences, always present at political book launches, a reviewer of newspapers on television programmes. His dandified clothing, Mediterranean colouring and exotic name led many people to write him off. But he was not only phenomenally well-organised and a reasonably sharp performer in the House; he had fashioned what the commentators call a ‘narrative’. What this meant was that he spoke well and clearly about the mortal battle going on between global corporate power – mostly still centred in America, but increasingly in China as well – and the power of old-fashioned, elected democracies. Only politics, he argued, could redress the unfairnesses and evils of the relentlessly inventive and ever-young energy of capitalism. ‘We are the civilisers,’ he said, ‘and we live in a country that still badly needs civilising.’

  He had, in short, a story. He sounded like a latter-day Karl Marx, shorn of the simplistic political extremism that had caused so much mayhem during the twentieth century. The fact that he’d worked in corporate PR helped. Other Labour figures were more handsome, or prettier. They had more sensible names. They had better-cut suits. Like him, they had turned their backs on the Master and the legacy of New Labour. But somehow none of them matched the edgy, mildly paranoid mood of the time as well as did Alwyn Grimaldi.

  Meanwhile, one small pebble at a time, the government’s authority slipped away. A jolly, genial law officer who’d thought he’d be promoted to home secretary discovered the hard way that he wouldn’t be. Behind his florid, Falstaffian mask he was a lean and angry man. Rather than accepting his demotion, he attacked the prime minister in highly personal terms and resigned his seat. The Conservatives threw everything at the by-election, and lost it. Under pressure, the PM mustered a cross-party majority to suspend David Cameron’s five-year-Parliament rule. One stone …

  Then the PM’s old enemies in the 1922 Committee put it about that he’d become depressed, and there would have to be a leadership challenge. Foolishly, he denounced the anonymous voices as ‘fruitcakes and no-hopers’, only to discover that a well-spoken and well-regarded female committee chairman was prepared to appear on the Today programme and announce that she would take him on. Two stones …

  Still, no further landslide would have taken place had it not been for an entirely random accident on the slopes of Val d’Isère. The chief whip, pursuing a son skiing too fast down a black run, lost control, hit a pine tree, and was killed. The prime minister lost his closest political friend, and the only man who had a grip on the party. That by-election too was lost, this time to Alwyn Grimaldi’s Labour Party. None of the commentators had expected this. So they were cross. As a result all of them, led by Peter Quint, who had been mocking Grimaldi as Labour’s worst leader since
Michael Foot, promptly reversed their positions and found glints of greatness in him.

  Tory backbenchers, not knowing what to think – because no one was now telling them – grew uneasy. The party was at this time in bad-tempered coalition with the remaining rump of the UK Independence Party, which despite having lost its raison d’être after Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, struggled on in a mood of bloody-minded euphoria. Its fundamental position was that the Tory Party wasn’t grumpy enough. Certainly its own MPs, a colourful collection of chain-smoking, shouty people, seemed furious about absolutely everything, all of the time. One morning, in a spasm of pure fury after reading a Daily Mail diary item about his exuberant bow tie, its leader, Roger de Coverley, announced that he was withdrawing support from the coalition ‘forthwith’.

  In politics, ‘forthwith’ is a satisfying word. Forthwith! The rumble of individual stones quickly became a deafening avalanche, and the prime minister, bowing to what seemed inevitable, went to the king and asked permission to dissolve the House of Commons for a general election. The king, who’d never much liked him in the first place, cheerfully agreed – even though there was no obvious reason for an election.

  If there’s one thing the British people hate, it’s an unnecessary general election. It gets in the way of the television schedules, and greatly increases the number of irritating people knocking on your door. But the die was cast.

  In Barker, Caroline Phillips had Leonard Lomax’s majority of several thousand to defend. The constituency wasn’t entirely ‘safe’ – it had gone Tory during the Thatcher years, and Ukip’s Paul Lambert was still haunting the countryside. Caro, therefore, fought like a tiger. She rose at five, and didn’t return to her room at the Travelodge until after midnight. She drank no alcohol, lived on coffee and fruit, and spoke herself hoarse. She had to begin to shake constituents’ hands with her left hand, because of the bruising on her right one. She was, at least, known. Her sexuality and her beauty had ensured that she was one of the new candidates who was featured in the national media websites.