Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  The Master was Peter’s oldest, and still most influential, source. These days he rarely got to speak to him directly, but the Master had plenty of excellent go-betweens, from former ministers like Murdoch White to sexy, intriguing Ella James. It was absolutely clear to Peter that Ella and the Master were more than colleagues, although it was equally clear that this was in a category of information never to be relayed to his readers. But the Master had been making Peter Quint’s life hard over the past few months.

  For reasons Peter had not yet got to the bottom of, the Master was constantly promoting rising Labour MPs Peter had never heard of, but was now obliged to praise in his columns. Ella would make a call: ‘You might take a look at the new Member for Neath. We’d be ever so grateful.’ The problem was, they rarely lasted long. First there had been Facey Romford, a fresh-faced farming socialist. Interesting: he was handsome, he spoke well; but, it later turned out, he had a penchant for bondage and sadomasochism. Photographs were produced. No more Facey Romford. Then there had been the reformed Islamist Abu al-Britani, a bright and compelling spokesman for community tolerance and moderation. He’d even spoken out against the veil. Al-Britani, however, turned out to have been working for IS all along: he was apprehended at a royal garden party with a bomb inserted in his back passage. He, and it, were removed to a safe part of Green Park and ignited. Some well-bred trees were damaged.

  Then there was Annie Baldwin, a feisty girl – but then came ‘Zebra-gate’, and the animal-rights people made sure that Annie returned to obscurity. Soon the Peter Quint column was being mocked each fortnight by Private Eye for its promotion of brilliant new Labour MPs who then mysteriously imploded (except for those who exploded). Private Eye called it ‘the curse of Quint’ – but ‘Quint’ wasn’t the word the magazine used; it had childishly renamed him.

  Peter hated all this. He hated it so much that he affected to regard it as simply a bit of light-hearted fun, and even went along to a Private Eye lunch to show what a good sport he was. The lunch was held in a former reform school for wayward girls in Greek Street, Soho, where the food was excellent, and only the shifty and dishevelled nature of the diners hinted at what was really going on. Unfortunately, Ian Hislop, the then editor, announced Peter to the assembled gathering as ‘our good friend Peter Cunt’. Shunning a tempting-looking salmon soufflé, Peter stormed out.

  Had he been a bolder soul, he might have cut his connections with the Master there and then. But Ella had been flattering and persuasive, and the Master’s wife had condescended to have lunch with him. It was at around this time that he got the story about Alwyn Grimaldi’s sister.

  Now Peter found himself boosting the career of a young and determined new Scottish MP called David Petrie. And this time, it seemed, the Master was on the money. Petrie had barely put a foot wrong, and was already widely tipped to be heading for better things.

  It occurred to Peter that his column would be stronger if it had a villain as well as a hero. Well before her invitation to the US ambassador, he had wondered whether that uppity lesbian Caroline Phillips was getting much too easy a ride elsewhere in the media. Their evening together strengthened his dislike. She was arrogant, self-assured, and she thought a free evening out would win him, Peter Quint, over. So the next morning he began to go for her, just the odd phrase and sentence to start with. Quint was far too intelligent and astute to attack Caro’s sexuality or her apparently strong religious views, but he did make it clear that he suspected her growing reputation was based on the pathetic susceptibilities of the male politicians around her – a weakness that Mr Peter Quint, for one, did not share. Though he did like his tummy to be tickled, that was true.

  In the Rose Garden

  Beware your constituents. The friendlier they are, the more cautious you should be.

  The Master

  Winter was ending. The government of Alwyn Grimaldi ground on. That talented, exotic and untrustworthy man had scored a few early big hits. Relations with Edinburgh had calmed down. Almost everything had been devolved: Grimaldi now agreed to devolve the Post Office and the weather. His greatest victory had been the transformational security deal with the Middle Eastern caliphate. In late 2018, Caliph Abdülmecid III had been welcomed to London. Almost all the old countries of the European Union had by now banned the veil and imposed a moratorium on the building of new mosques. Grimaldi saw his opportunity.

  The bones of the Westminster Concordat promised that there would be no British interference in the affairs of the caliphate, and guaranteed freedom of worship for Muslims in Britain. In return, the caliph had signed a wide-ranging security pact; since his religious police were now working with the British security services, there had not been a single further attack. From now on, disaffected young Wahhabis and Deobandis from Birmingham or Cardiff were simply encouraged to return to former Iraq or Syria and do good works rebuilding shattered cities, offering aid to the displaced, and protecting the new rulers.

  There had been outrage on the right of politics, and among some disillusioned mullahs, but the overwhelming reaction from British voters was one of relief. Grimaldi, who until then had been regarded as a likeable but ineffectual creature, found himself popular. He seemed to have put on two inches in height. He carried himself differently. The cartoonists, who had focused on his nose and compared him to Pinocchio, laid off a little bit. In the Commons, where his wafer-thin majority depended upon a couple of flaky, borderline-certifiable backbenchers, he began to exude something like authority. The newspapers, with Quint and Rawnsley to the fore, revised their assumption that his government would last no longer than a few months.

  And yet, in his moment of triumph, Grimaldi had made some lethal enemies. Washington was livid – the president included Great Britain in his ‘axis of appeasement’. Closer to home, the Master and his cronies, some of whom had been prepared to give Grimaldi the benefit of their many doubts, now saw him as a traitor – and worse, popular with it.

  The plan remained unchanged. The Master, however, intimated that Grimaldi had to be terminated sooner rather than later. Peter Quint’s paper obediently ran a big investigation into the sources of funding for the large new mosques that were being built along the British coast, from Southwold to Aberdeen. Saudi money had dried up, dampening the London property boom of the early years of the century. But now new gentlemen, bearded and wearing flowing white robes, arrived by plane from Damascus and Aleppo with huge wealth at their fingertips. Pure the caliph himself might be, but the caliphate contained as many traders and middlemen as before.

  Not all the new Muslim money went into the restoration of the sacred sites. Quite a bit of it purchased country houses around Sunningdale, or went to the direction and beautification of mosques. In one of his most pungent columns, Peter Quint asked what had happened to Britain’s money-laundering regulations, and to the planning system, which seemed oddly relaxed where the mosques were concerned. He revealed that Alwyn Grimaldi’s sister was working for a Middle East construction company, and that several key cabinet ministers were living a lifestyle which appeared to be incompatible with their salaries. All of this information – some of which was true – had come via Ella. Alwyn Grimaldi’s reputation took its first serious knock.

  None of this would have mattered very much, except that something strange seemed to have happened to British politics. Westminster was completely losing its grip on the country’s imagination. The newspapers might praise, then chastise, the government – but who read the newspapers? The websites, and the generations that fed on them, were interested only in entertainment and celebrity murders.

  After the intellectual man of ideas, Ed Miliband, and his irate nemesis Michael Gove, hardly any politicians were recognised by the general public at all. It began to look as if the entire democratic system was nothing more than a conjuror’s trick: it depended on the public paying attention, and as soon as they stopped, the colourfully-painted pieces of pasteboard lay inert and useless on the table.The Grimaldi gove
rnment spoke: and was not heard. Schools got on with teaching extreme religious views, or nothing very much at all, just as they liked. The failing privatised rail companies were now failing in public ownership. The collapse of parts of the National Health Service had meant a return to private doctors charging what they could get away with. The cheapest and most popular ran their clinics as wholly-owned subsidiaries of pharma-ceutical companies. Relentlessly, year by year, the number of people who bothered to vote continued to decline.

  Alwyn Grimaldi, who understood that elected power was in a final and desperate struggle to survive against the power of the market, did not merely sit back and do nothing. He struggled to repeat the success of the Westminster Concordat. National work centres were established to provide compulsory literacy training. The mayor of London, Lady Penny, had been allowed to establish a new free-floating currency to be used inside the M25 only, and the so-called ‘red penny’ was now worth almost as much as a regular pound sterling. But the government found itself virtually ignored by what remained of the printed media, and by television and internet bulletins. There is something worse in politics than abuse. The Labour government of Alwyn Grimaldi found itself boasting to a nation of turned backs.

  As Caro enjoyed the early-spring sunshine in Regent’s Park, it did not seem to her that all was lost. Peter Quint’s attacks on her in the press may have been an irritation, but Caroline was a buoyant girl. She was a cork. There was life, and growth, and hope. She passed the rosebeds.

  ‘Remember me’ … ‘Peace’ … ‘Perception’ … she read as she walked. Hardly any of the rose blooms were visible yet – just an occasional splash of yellow or deep blood-red – but the very names seemed colourful and promising. Remember me, who I was. Perception. Light trails of scent. Caro thought: I am changing, this is a time of change for me.

  ‘Sheila’s Perfume’ … ‘Deep Secret’ … ‘Thinking of You’ … ‘Octavia Hill’ … On she walked.

  ‘Queen Mary’s Gardens, Regent’s Park,’ had been the last words the cultured, neatly painted and silk-scarfed woman had said the day before, in the central lobby of the House of Commons. Before their meeting, going on what she’d picked up from the local newspaper, which described Leila Umar as ‘outspoken’, Caro had expected to be confronted by an angry-looking woman in a burqa. Or was it a niqab? She could never remember the difference. But this particular constituent, a dentist from the outlying part of Barker known as Springtown – a tough and down-at-heel suburb despite its name – confounded Caro’s expectations. Mrs Umar was dressed in an M&S suit, and appeared poised and relaxed among the passing MPs and journalists, half-amused and, from the very first, eloquent.

  Leila Umar was observant enough to notice the new MP’s surprise. ‘Not your average Paki?’ she’d teased Caro. ‘You all need to do a lot of rethinking about our community, Mrs Phillips. I know your Mother of Parliaments very well indeed. We are not all village girls. But I want to talk to you properly. Not just as my Member of Parliament, but as, I hope, a friend. So let’s meet somewhere quieter and easier tomorrow. At last, at last, spring is coming.’ And Leila had suggested this fragrant, leaf-green oasis with its beds of roses just to the north of the choked, honking chaos of the Marylebone Road.

  There was a flash of sun, a flush, a fleshy warmth here. And there was colour – not just the apple of the grass and the emerald of the newly budding trees, but the turquoise and scarlet of saris, and the gold and black of an Arab woman in a chador, with an elaborately patterned scarf.

  Caro reflected on the apparent distaste shown by the English for their own public parks. Here there were Chinese and Indian families, Japanese tourists and French voices; but the only white English flesh was that of the occasional passing runner. She found herself wondering if the British, as they grew ever more slovenly and frantic, had lost the habit of simply standing back, sniffing the air and enjoying the moment. She felt she had a talent for the big questions. (Tart Angela had said, ‘Less so for the big answers, dear.’) Or was it simply that in London there was little time for sniffing the roses and noting the changing seasons? This was a frantic city, no longer really part of England, where everyone seemed skittering and scurrying, clawing themselves up invisible walls, teetering on wobbly ladders, buffeted by the high winds of ridiculous ambition.

  The wind was cold, and she hugged her coat tightly to herself. Silly place to meet after all, at this time of year – not even a coffee shop anywhere about. Caro was about to leave when she saw Mrs Umar waving at her from a bench. She seemed very small by comparison with the two green-uniformed gardeners who were noisily spreading muck on a rosebed from the back of a trailer, and who might regard her with contempt. Just my imagination, probably, Caro thought; but she felt herself warming to Leila Umar nonetheless.

  Leila stood, and they shook hands rather formally, then walked together towards the ornate little bridge across a small pond.

  ‘You did not expect to be approached by … our community so early?’

  ‘I’m in Parliament to help everybody in the constituency, of course.’

  ‘Yes, of course you are. And of course I’m here for help. But also to speak to you as a friend, who knows the town of Barker very well. All my life I have lived in Springtown. My papa came over from Pakistan in the 1960s. My husband is also from Barker. He is an electrician and, by-the-grace-of-Allah-the-merciful-the-wise, a good man, a kind man.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Why did you think I wouldn’t expect to be approached by constituents who happen to be Muslim, though?’

  ‘Ah, I thought that like most of your people, you would be bigoted and against us.’

  ‘Well, I’m not. But to be candid, Mrs Umar, I’d been worried that I wouldn’t be very popular with you. There were a group of Muslims in the audience on the evening of my selection as candidate who, if you remember, made much of my private life.’

  ‘Many people are old-fashioned. Even I, perhaps, am a little old-fashioned, Mrs Phillips. And by the way, may I ask, where does the “Mrs” come from?’

  Caroline had long expected the question, though not today: ‘Well, I’m married, and I … I feel more comfortable with it. It’s just my choice.’

  ‘Everything is your choice, sister. That is England.’

  ‘But Muslims are particularly harsh on gay people.’

  ‘Ah, little sister’ – though surely Mrs Umar, with her wrinkle-free skin, huge dark eyes and soft hair tumbling out from below her scarf, was younger than Caroline? – ‘all people of religion, everywhere in the world, believe in limits of that kind. The noble Quran is modest and restrained on these subjects. As compared, for instance, to your own Bible. I have read that you are a Christian.’

  Caroline stiffened. She wanted this conversation to be over. ‘Mine is a God of love, not of prohibitions.’

  Mrs Umar stopped, tightened her green and yellow scarf, and then declaimed like a Victorian actress, waving her gloved hand under Caroline’s nose: ‘Let those who find not the wherewithal for marriage, keep themselves chaste, until Allah gives them means out of his grace.’ That’s chaste, not chased, sister. The noble Quran. 24.33, I think you’ll find. It sounds reasonable to me. Good Muslims have never had to deal with the dirty-minded prying and prohibiting of your own St Paul.’

  ‘Very well, Mrs Umar. I am who I am, and whatever our differences, I’m of course at your service. I want to be the Member of Parliament for everybody in Barker, irrespective of their personal views.’

  ‘That is indeed very liberal of you. What a liberal country this is,’ said Mrs Umar drily. ‘My thanks. Shall we turn to the matter in hand?’

  Ahead on the path, a dishevelled man was running towards them. He didn’t look like a runner kind of runner – he was wearing jeans and a thick jersey. Instinctively, Caroline drew to one side to let him pass. But as he did, he turned and spat at Mrs Umar – a long yellow stream of frothy gob landed on her sleeve. Caroline was briefly paralysed with shock. The man took a few further steps,
then turned and spat again. This time he hit Mrs Umar’s face. The spit dribbled down her cheek. She looked back at him, expressionless. He turned and ran on.

  Caroline half-shouted after him, then stopped and automatically reached up to brush her constituent’s face. But Leila flinched away and used her scarf to clean herself. ‘Well, that was well-timed.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry. How horrible for you. I should have done something. I didn’t know …’

  ‘That’s all right. What could you have done? Brute. But at least now you see. For us, in this liberal country, this kind of thing happens all the time. You never know who will be next, where will be next. Now, we – the community, that is – followed the election campaign, of course. We noticed that defending women’s rights was something you talked about. Rather a lot. You gave that interview to the Mail. So we have discussed this, and we have decided to trust you with our most precious plan and hope.’

  ‘Can I be clear,’ Caroline asked, ‘about just who “the community” are?’

  ‘My dear, nothing sinister, I assure you. We are simply the ordinary, mainstream Muslim people of Springtown. No terrorists, no extremists. Just hard-working British shopkeepers and tradespeople, mothers and grannies and children – all looking to you.’

  ‘You are very eloquent, Mrs Umar. What exactly do you want me to do?’

  Mrs Umar walked in silence for a moment or two before replying. ‘The Jews. The Jews have it. In north London. Hendon, Golders Green, up that way. An eruv, they call it.’

  ‘Yes …’ Caroline vaguely remembered something about Hasidic Jews and the erection of poles and wires.

  ‘Well, in Barker we want much the same thing. If it’s good enough for the Jews, it’s good enough for law-abiding Muslims. We want an area – not a very big area, just a few streets in each direction around the mosque – where we will be allowed to live in peace under God’s laws.’