Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  Grimaldi was standing in front of a mirror, adjusting his smart blue tie; but his customary cream suit, she thought, like the man himself, had no gravitas.

  ‘Thank God you’re here, Caro. I was beginning to think you weren’t going to make it. Now, I hope you don’t think I’m being previous, but an idea like this – well, we have to strike while the iron is hot. It goes nowhere without the enthusiastic support of the king. I’ve taken the liberty of calling his private secretary, and he’s interested enough to have invited us to lunch at Windsor.’

  ‘That’s very encouraging. When?’

  ‘Now. I couldn’t very well tip you off with a text message. The car’s waiting.’

  ‘I’m hot, and I’ve got a ladder, and my shoes are scuffed. Also, apart from the day of my appointment, I’ve never met the man.’

  ‘None of that matters. He doesn’t notice clothes, he likes ideas. And he very much likes my new idea – I’m sorry, Home Secretary: our new idea.’

  ‘I have an uneasy feeling it will soon become his new idea.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with letting the monarch think that. Authorship, as you know, is all in the briefing.’

  As they settled into the back seat of the prime ministerial Daimler, Caroline still felt unsettled, suspicious and prickly. Alwyn was talking about an entirely new start for Labour, and he felt that this idea, this ‘partnership with the real world’, could relaunch his premiership. Would it not be a good idea to announce that no government contracts – ‘and we’re talking billions of pounds every year, Home Secretary’ – would go to any firm that was not a ‘National Chartered Company’? And, pushing further forward, ‘Could we not raise with the king the idea of, over time, completely remodelling the House of Lords so that it was made up, entirely and solely, of leaders of business and industry whose companies had agreed to what I’m going to call the “Five-Point Plan” – fair wages, honestly paid taxes, basic environmental standards and … Caro, help me out here, I can’t remember the last two.’

  ‘Traineeships, and supporting democratic political parties, of whatever stripe, so that we get away from the sordid business of fund-raising. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be petty, Prime Minister, but I do believe that this was my idea.’

  Alwyn didn’t answer. He stared out of the window as the car, preceded by two police motorcycle outriders, turned past Buckingham Palace and headed towards the Embankment, from where the driver would zigzag his way west until he was on the motorway towards Windsor Castle.

  Caro felt oddly upset. This was just politics, after all. And yet, without lovely Angela and her optimistic lateral thinking, which had come out of her commitment to Barker, none of this would be happening. It felt surreal.

  She wasn’t going to let the prime minister remain silent for the rest of the journey. ‘By the way, PM, how are you feeling? In yourself, I mean?’

  That caught Grimaldi’s attention. One of the few things he had in common with the Master was that, although he had always been unusually fit, he was a lifelong hypochondriac. They exchanged notes on polyps, blood pressure and funny turns. And as it happened, he wasn’t feeling quite himself that morning, and hadn’t for a few days. ‘What do you mean, Home Secretary? Have you heard something? If you have, you have a duty to let me know who’s been gossiping.’

  ‘No, nothing at all,’ lied Caroline. ‘I just thought you were looking a little pale.’

  The prime minister tugged at his throat and fell silent again. As they reached the M4, Caroline tried again. ‘I don’t know the king, of course, but I really think his decision to close Buckingham Palace down for royal purposes and retreat to Windsor is the height of selfishness. It simply means we have to spend far more time stuck in cars with each other. I don’t want to sound like a raving lefty, Prime Minister, but whose time is more valuable?’

  A safe topic at last, Alwyn thought. ‘It wasn’t my favourite decision either, though it’s saved the public purse a lot of money and given the government, as well as big business, a wonderful new venue for conferences in London – even the Chinese like the idea of inviting their clients to Buckingham Palace. But there’s a broader point, Caroline. We in Labour are on the same side as the monarchy, and certainly as this king. He’s essentially conservative. He’s uneasy about us being outside the European Union, and he has his family’s natural suspicion of the Americans. The Windsors are the last people in the country who have never entirely forgotten 1776. He wants a Britain that’s cautious, kindly, and where those with money and power do a little bit – not too much, but a little bit – to help those with neither. In all those ways he’s much more a natural supporter of ours than of the other lot. So long as we don’t go mad and republican, Labour is also on the conservative and monarchical side, and at our best we always have been – Clem, Harold, Jim. Even, in their way, Tony and the Master.

  ‘That’s why he loves this idea. It doesn’t work without the crown, and royal patronage. He’ll be standing alongside his ministers in a common project to spread a little more civilisation in our time. That’s how he’ll see it. He’ll like it as much as he likes the idea of building a new Venice in the West Country. People don’t always give him credit for it, but at heart our king is actually something of a man of vision.

  ‘Now, when it comes to authorship … a few home truths, Home Secretary. Although we have a parliamentary system, it’s evolved into an elective prime ministership. That’s why we talk of the Thatcher revolution, the Cameron coalition, and so on. It follows that any big ideas which determine the course of a government are inescapably associated in the public mind with the person of the prime minister. Who happens, as it happens, as it were, to be – me. Historians, I’m sure, will track the origins of this idea down, and pay due credit to yourself. But the first thing we must do together is to ensure that the king doesn’t take all the credit for himself. We have to be shoulder to shoulder as politicians, and ensure that the Labour government – my Labour government – gets that credit. Do you follow?’

  Caroline was almost too irritated to reply. She noticed that the driver’s shoulders were shaking. She suspected he was laughing, and struggling not to show it. ‘I follow, Prime Minister,’ she said. (‘But not you, not for much longer, you little weasel,’ she thought.)

  For all his intellectual monarchism, Alwyn Grimaldi loathed Windsor – a crouching, cringeing little town, tugging its forelock throughout the streets that crept around the castle walls, a town of twinkly tea shops and tatty souvenirs and witless flag-waving, whose only other industry was the peculiar crenellated school that provided the Conservative Party with its leaders, and Hollywood with its villains.

  They passed through the castle gate in a blur of ancient stonework, red uniforms and saluting policemen. They pulled up in the main courtyard, to find that the king had done them the honour of coming out to wait for them at the top of a flight of stone stairs.

  ‘Goodness. He must be really keen. This is going to be fun, Home Secretary,’ said the prime minister.

  The king gazed down at the pair of them – the slightly flushed woman and the thin, smirking man in a white suit whom he was obliged to call his first minister.

  ‘Little weasel,’ he muttered to himself.

  How to Bring Down a Prime Minister

  During my time in Number 10, the person I most missed was a good, reliable poisoner.

  The Master

  At more or less the same time that the home secretary and the prime minister were being ushered into a private dining room for lunch, back in London, Murdoch White’s son, a laboratory technician at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Bloomsbury, was munching a sandwich in the street as he waited for Mrs Wilkinson. All an observer would have noticed was a pale, nervous young man in jeans greeting an elderly lady in a headscarf, before passing her something tightly wrapped in a plastic bag. His mother, or aunt? A little domestic shopping? It was a touching little urban vignette – but the future of the United Kingdom was contained in that pl
astic bag.

  Eileen Wilkinson unwrapped it gingerly back in Downing Street, having first put on a pair of latex gloves. This was wise, because the fluid in the glass bottle inside the bag had been infected by Banquo White with Coxsackie B virus. Mrs Wilkinson got methodically to work. With some careful sluicing and smearing, she transmitted the virus to the china cup Alwyn Grimaldi used for his breakfast milk.

  No serious crime was being committed. Coxsackie B virus is not fatal, or even particularly serious. It causes Bornholm disease, characterised by diarrhoea and a sharp pain on one side of the chest. Known as ‘the Devil’s grip’ or ‘the grasp of the phantom’, its effects generally last no longer than a week.

  Alwyn Grimaldi, a creature of habit and a man of milky decency, had no obvious vices for an enemy to exploit. He could not be blackmailed. He was, in his way, a man of dogged persistence and some courage. To start with, without Eileen Wilkinson’s observant presence, the Master and his circle would never have known that he suffered so acutely from hypochondria.

  Hypochondria? So easy to mock. What the prime minister really suffered from was a terror of early death. It wasn’t a fussy obsession with liver spots or winter coughs; it was a genuine, well-founded awareness of oblivion. Grimaldi’s father had died early, of a stroke; his mother of breast cancer. To the prime minister, Caroline Phillips’s gently probing question in the car on the way to Windsor had been like the sudden extinction of the sun behind a dark cloud. Despite his terrors, Grimaldi had fought on; his determination to stifle his night fears took considerable courage. In recent months, as the American pressure for a new security and defence agreement had weighed ever more heavily upon him, he had become more dogged, not less.

  Alwyn Grimaldi might even have shaken off the Devil’s grip, which would get its fingers into him later that evening; but Mrs Wilkinson was a dogged and well-connected woman. The Master’s wife remained a friend, and was close to Fara Clara Jenkinson, who had unwittingly provided the final solution. For, bizarre though it may seem, what finished off the premiership of Alwyn Grimaldi was a humble but inexplicably fashionable vegetable. As Fara Clara had once mentioned to Sadie in passing, if you eat sufficient beetroot quickly enough, the symptom of what appears to be severe rectal bleeding becomes all too apparent.

  Beetroot had therefore featured heavily in the prime minister’s diet in the days leading up to his meeting with the king, and beyond that, when he was virally infected. The combination of weakness, pain in his chest and apparent haemorrhage exhausted Alwyn’s resources. Lying in bed early one morning, soaked in sweat, the Devil’s grip around his chest and blood on the sheets, he telephoned his private Harley Street doctor. This doctor had once faced a GMC inquiry, which he had survived – he had never forgotten the handwritten note of support that arrived from Downing Street during the Master’s era.

  No physical examination was required that day; what was happening was all too obvious, and the doctor’s tone of voice confirmed everything Alwyn needed to know. He ended the conversation, then dialled again, this time his private secretary, who put him through to Windsor Castle. His Majesty was properly concerned and sympathetic, just as his mother had been when Harold Macmillan had found himself in a similar fix. There was no need for an undignified rush. A full consultation in Harley Street would be required; and then, as soon as it could be arranged, the cabinet would have to be informed. Alwyn Grimaldi would remain as leader of the party until the forthcoming party conference in Stoke. He’d put in place the formal mechanisms for a change of leadership, and would remain as prime minister until his successor emerged from the vote of party members and MPs.

  The prime minister felt intense relief. Mortally ill though he was, he managed to shower, dress, and eat a poached egg on brown toast for breakfast. Mortally ill though he was, he felt curiously vigorous as he planned the day ahead. It was like the flush of energy that often follows a bereavement. There were so many things to do, so many people to tell; but Alwyn felt something akin to gratitude. The great burden was being taken away, and he could at last acknowledge privately to himself that he’d never known what to do with it in the first place. Even his new plan for relaunching the government wasn’t really his plan. It was fraught with difficulties ahead – the jealousy of competing companies, the inevitable accusations of favouritism, and the revelation of scandals involving the favoured, chosen ones. Well, let Mrs Caroline Phillips – he supposed it would be her – deal with all of that. He would watch from his hospital bed.

  The Choice

  We are all Americans now; the only distinction is between those of us who know it and those who haven’t noticed yet.

  The Master

  A metallic clunk. A whine. A thump and a groan. Sir Leslie Khan had tracked down the Master, finally catching him, as so often these days, on the treadmill. The Master was not pleased. Much of him was in rivulets down his chest and legs.

  ‘Can’t stop. Can’t talk. Just increased my speed …’

  ‘Very good. You don’t need to talk. I’ve just heard that Grimaldi’s resigning. Ill-health. Completely out of the blue.’

  ‘Really? Just like Wilson. How extraordinary.’ The last word was panted.

  ‘Indeed. But Master mine, it’s too early. We’re not ready. We don’t even know who it’s to be.’

  ‘I’m ready. Phew! I’m going to turn this thing off. Never mix work and pleasure; not unless you want a stroke.’ The machine whinged and coughed to silence. The Master’s face was puce with effort. As he rubbed himself down with a small towel, Sir Leslie took a pace back; the Master was superhuman, but even he sweated. Sir Leslie discreetly sniffed his own wrist, well doused with a Vetiver scent from Paris.

  ‘So, you’re ready, are you? You know which of them it’s to be? Have you heard about Ella? Have you heard back from our American friends about Petrie?’

  The Master, unembarrassed, pulled off his singlet. A heart-rate monitor was around his chest. His torso was that of a far younger man, although liberally planted with sprightly grey hairs. He picked up a bottle of Evian water and poured it over his head.

  ‘Leslie, there are times when even we have to let fate take its course. Yes, our old friend the ambassador, who was there in Venice with the Americans, tells me he’s made exhaustive enquiries. Nobody, but nobody, had anything to do with Ella. The only person she was seen with there was our Mr Petrie. Hard as I find it to believe, I think he may have got rid of her, perhaps bribed her to disappear. Well, she had her claws into him, and as I know, that is a very … intense … experience.’

  ‘Her father’s been in touch with the Foreign Office. He thinks she may have been killed.’

  ‘Oh, pooh. Pooh. But I bet you one thing. If that’s so, and if it was Petrie, we will never know. Leslie, we picked our candidates well. He was Murdoch White’s, and Murdoch would have spotted a fool long ago.’

  ‘So it’s possible?’

  ‘Anything is possible. Multi-coloured rain is possible. Surrey declaring independence is possible. A readable novel by Justin Can’twrite is possible. It’s all a question of likelihood.’

  ‘So just let’s be clear. You’re telling me that one of our prime candidates for Number 10 might be a murderer? The killer of your former …’

  ‘That’s enough of that, Leslie. As I said, business and pleasure. If Petrie’s desperate, so much the better. Don’t you remember my first and unbreakable law of democratic politics?’

  ‘Bad people doing good things?’

  ‘Bad people doing good things – the best hope left for civilisation. Now, David Petrie is without doubt, in some conventional ways, a bad man. Perhaps it’s something to do with his upbringing. I neither know nor care. But if he’s solid with the Americans and solid with business, and can hold the party together – and I think he probably can – then anything that’s happened in the past shouldn’t stop us from helping him. And frankly, it helps us too. If he thinks we know what may or may not have gone on out there in Venice, we have another h
old on him. Darling Ella helps us in death even more than she helped us in life.’

  Sir Leslie scratched vigorously at his beard. He’d always admired the Master’s clarity. Along with his boyish good looks, it was one of his most attractive features. ‘So we’re going with Petrie?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, although he’s genuinely an option. But we have to think about Caroline Phillips too. She comes up against my rule: we have no evidence that she’s a bad person, by which I mean a truly ruthless person. But in some ways she reminds me of myself. She has charisma. She makes people like her and want to help her, and that’s a rare and precious gift. Politically, she’s a nothing. Her girlfriend’s more interesting. But again, that needn’t be a problem for us. Quite the reverse. She’s popular and suggestible, and I think the public will really go for her. Frankly, Leslie, I rather go for her. We can provide the steel, but I’d be a lot happier if I thought she had at least a certain amount of ruthlessness, as well as political reliability.’

  ‘Master, I’m beginning to suspect you have a plan.’

  ‘Well suspected, Leslie. As you know, there’s a big security conference, OSCE stuff, in Rome next week. All our friends from across the water will be there, the vice president included. Naturally the home secretary will be going, and I suggest we find a reason for sending Mr Petrie too. Then we can let our friends choose between them. Test them, put them under pressure: Gaza and Palestine, Trident, homeland security, Google, Amazon, health services – the lot.’

  ‘You’re saying we should let Washington choose our next prime minister?’

  ‘Certainly not. I am shocked, Sir Leslie – shocked – shocked – that you can even suggest such a thing. No, our American friends will merely give their opinion, as ever. We will choose. I will choose.’