Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  It was inconceivable to Angela, even in the darkest hours of her longest wakeful nights, that Caroline could believe what she had told the House of Commons. Angela had humiliated herself by repeatedly texting. She had called and left countless voice messages, all too conscious that she was unable to avoid a broken, whingeing tone. She was sorry, sorry, sorry. She just wanted to talk, talk, talk. She didn’t want to put any pressure, pressure, pressure on dear, dear, dear Caro. And yet, hour after hour, day after day, not a single message came back. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  Angela shuddered and curled into a ball, feeling as if there was a pulsating tumour inside her. It was so hot in the cell during the daytime that she had to strip to her underwear; and it was so cold at night that she found herself rapping on the door, begging for more blankets. A prison-service psychiatrist visited her, but what she said had made no sense. Her lawyer came, and after Angela had insisted that she would plead guilty, left again. There was no news about the trial date.

  By now, Angela was quite sure that she was going mad. At last she knelt on the floor and prayed. She wanted to know what she had done in the past that had led her to this disaster. Had she always been this way, weak and pathetic, even as she performed like a clown in public? Sometimes she felt that God was answering her – a wrathful God with furrowed brows, a list of her misdemeanours in His hand. Caro had always been a good person. Angela would kill herself if she didn’t hear something soon. Day after day, there was Caro on the television, smiling that same bewitching smile, staring out at her, looking through her, talking, talking, talking.

  A week into her incarceration, Angela had a visit from Lady Broderick. She described Caro as a heartless bitch, and said that she had taken charge of the boys. Angela was helplessly grateful for that, at least. Nothing made any sense at all.

  Nicky, meanwhile, found living in Pebbleton Hall a much easier and more pleasant experience than he’d expected. The old lady turned up for breakfast and supper, but most of the time the house was run by servants who apparently didn’t have names, but job descriptions – Cook, Gardener, Help. It was a cold life, but an easy one, and Nicky discovered, not that he was sly – he’d always known that – but that he enjoyed his slyness. On the surface he remained polite, well scrubbed and hard-working. In his real life, he searched out and found new consolations – ketamine, skunk and legal highs, freely available after school. Once or twice he slipped upstairs after toast and cornflakes for a mug of vodka and milk. There was always enough money lying around in Lady Broderick’s desk for him to keep topped up with vodka. Surfing the web, he discovered a wasteland of sexual cruelty. And so, crookedly, he began to grow up.

  Lady Broderick seemed to think that she’d saved him, taken him to a little green Devonian Eden. Nicky slithered delightedly through it, a snake gorging on forbidden knowledge. He saw very little of Ben, who had been bullied during his first few days back at their old school, but had hit back with his fists and feet, and was already rising through the ranks as a promising young bully himself.

  Only once, during a Newsnight interview, had Caro been challenged about what had happened to the children in her previous relationship. Not missing a beat, she had replied that they were ‘being looked after by good friends, and very happy’. Luckily, she wasn’t asked if she ever saw them. Some journalists tugged away at the story; but nobody had heard of old Lady Broderick, and Angela was of course unavoidably detained elsewhere. So two young lives quietly curdled, further examples of the inevitable collateral damage of parliamentary politics.

  Making Good

  Land. That’s the thing. Everything else drifts away – shares, bonds, bits of paper, digital scoring of all kinds. Even houses go out of fashion, fall down. But land. The old guys understood that.

  The Master (getting above himself)

  Callum Petrie was an outside kind of boy. After football practice he’d head up to the brae, ramble through the plantings – spruce and larch, mostly – and fill his pockets with brambles, and rub dock leaves on his shins for the nettle stings. He’d found a badger sett, and the corpses of birds killed by a hawk, and once the dried-up body of a sheep that had lost its way. The wool was as fluffy and fresh as if it were still alive. Mostly, he let his mind run far away, to impossible places and forgotten stories. He was William Wallace, hiding from the English. He was a wounded clansman, with the redcoats on his tail. He was a ridiculed inventor, with flying tanks and jet-pack soldiers. Following the stories inside his head, he’d break into a run, slipping and panting along old banks of earth on the edge of the forest until his legs ached, then diving behind roots and bushes. Callum was fourteen, old enough, he realised, to know better. Sometimes he felt ashamed of his long ‘jaunts’, as his mother called them, but life without them would be impossible – airless, headachy, dreich.

  So his first reaction when he saw the tall, unfamiliar figure of his father, climbing up the brae, hunched against the wind, with his hands in his pockets, was a feeling of shame. He shouldn’t be wasting his time daydreaming up here. He should be doing something useful. Dad would want to know what was up. His second reaction was annoyance, for beside his father he could see the tall, gawky, figure of his younger brother, Fergus. Fergus was an inside kind of boy. He listened to his music. He had even given up football. He had no right to be here, led by Dad up to Callum’s private domain. It was an intrusion.

  Davie spotted him standing by the side of the woods – his scarlet and black football strip stood out clearly.

  ‘Hey, boy. Out here for the birds?’

  ‘No, Dad. I was just walking about.’

  ‘Well, there’s peewits a’ around. Golden plovers, too. And I swear I could hear some grouse back on the brae.’

  Both of the boys thought Davie sounded different. Normally he didn’t talk to them much; they’d got the idea they were in the way, and Mary didn’t disabuse them. They were fond of their father, in a general, abstract way. But, as Fergus put it, he never made an effort. He didn’t know their friends, or even which subjects they were doing for Highers. To ferret Fergus out of his room, and then drag him up here to find Callum, was unheard of, and made both of them slightly uneasy.

  ‘Sit down, lads. I’ve got some toffees in my pockets. Look out there – grand view, isn’t it?’

  And it was. From the top of the brae you couldn’t see Glaikit at all. There were only undulating blue hills, darkly marked with woodland. The spidery remnants of a couple of Ayrshire’s old pits, closed since the strike, could just be made out. But as the sunlight fell slowly on the bings, they seemed ancient and mysterious, not modern and mundane.

  ‘Do you know your history, boys? Do they teach you in that school what a great land this is? Do you ken that Robbie Burns himself cut land over there, to the right, with his plough, before he daundered off to Edinburgh, leaving lasses in half the farm houses for miles around greeting for him? And see that wee house peeking up beyond the kirk spire? It’s not so wee at all. That’s where Jimmy Boswell, the greatest journalist of all, grew up, scared witless of his father. Hey, lads – you’ve never been scared of me, I hope, have you?’

  The answer was no. You couldn’t be scared of a vacancy. Fergus sat motionless, his knees drawn up to his chin, wondering what the old guy was up to, with nothing to say. But Callum found the words tumbling out.

  ‘Aye, they taught us about Burns. The school took us to Mauchline. We learnt “To a Mouse”. I havenae heard o’ the other fellow. But Da, this was William Wallace country, too. He was burning and killing all over, but only the English. And there were moss troopers.’

  Davie was impressed. ‘You know a bit of your history, then, Callum. Is this your playground, then, this bit wood?’

  His son assented.

  ‘So you know there’s an old track coming round the other side of the hill, up through the woods?’

  Callum pointed. ‘It ends there, just on the other side of the gate.’

  ‘Well, see here – all this flat bit of
ground, the grassy bit, between yon fence and the start of the heather? Well, boys, it’s ours.’

  Callum was mildly offended. ‘Da, it’s mine mostly. Fergus prefers indoors. I’ve been coming here for years.’

  Davie shook his head. ‘No, I don’t mean like that. I mean it really is ours. I’ve bought it.’

  Fergus raised his head. ‘That’s daft. Who’d want a useless bit of lumpy grass? Just the sheep.’

  ‘It’s not useless, Fergus. Come on – you’ve just been admiring the view. Imagine looking out at this every evening, with the rustle of the woods, and the deer and the birds at your back.’

  Callum couldn’t keep a quaver out of his voice. ‘You mean you’re going to build a house up here? Where it’s all quiet, and wild, and unspoiled? There’s going to be cement mixers, and lorries, and pipes, and all that?’

  Davie felt a little disappointed by Callum’s reaction, but also quietly impressed. Once he’d have been angry. No longer. Mostly what he felt these days was tired. He didn’t feel guilty, particularly. Ella had been a bad, bad woman, and she would have come to a bad, bad end sooner or later. When he’d had power he’d done some good things. Good man, bad man? The strength of politics, the Master had once said, was that it got bad people – ambitious people, angry people, damaged people – doing good things. Davie hadn’t understood that at the time. He wasn’t sure he did now. But what he did know was that the best rules were the simple, old ones. You look after the ones you love.

  The first thing he’d done when he came back to the town was to go and see ‘Granny Stalin’. Bunty was with her. The old lady had surprised him by saying she agreed with his decision to stand down from Parliament. ‘You’re a builder. The family were aye builders. You’re no’ enough of a snake for that place down there. Mind, we still need our own folk to keep their eyes peeled for us.’ It was clear who she meant. Over the next few weeks, Davie would put his shoulder to the wheel of Bunty’s campaign.

  He thought she’d probably win, actually. But she was up against a powerful opponent. Tony Moretti had never bothered with the Labour Party – he’d moved directly from the Scottish Socialists to the SNP. He badgered Davie to go for a drink with him, and although he had no intention of deflecting himself, Davie went along out of curiosity. Moretti had grown heavier, and seemed more substantial. He was perfectly friendly, but he hadn’t lost an ounce of his radicalism. ‘See here, Mr Petrie, it’s a’ very simple. We are going to build a better, fairer Scotland. I don’t need to tell you about the corruption of the Westminster elite. You’ve been there, done it, been in it yourself, and had the good sense to get out again.’

  Davie had replied with the best arguments he had – the sheer impossibility of a small country like Scotland standing up to the great forces of international business; the failure of solidarity if working-class Scots turned their backs on their brothers and sisters across the north of England; the decades when the SNP were little more than tartan Tories. But Moretti just smiled, slightly patronisingly. Moretti or Bunty? It would certainly be a fascinating fight.

  There was one final thing to do. With the familiar scent of coal smoke in his nostrils, one evening Davie walked down the hill towards the railway track, in the direction of Walter Smedley’s house. If he found it, he thought, he’d probably kneel in the dirt in front of it and ask for forgiveness. This, after all, was his original sin. But after half an hour of searching, he realised that the Smedley bungalow must have long disappeared. There was a new housing estate covering what had been the southern edge of the town – and built by his firm, too.

  If the boys weren’t ready, he decided, then he was in no hurry. ‘You know me, lads, I need a project. I’m not staying down south any more. Your mother needs me here. Maybe one day you’ll think you do too. No pressure, mind. Let’s get down the brae and see her, shall we?’

  And Davie reached out a hand to Fergus, and hoiked him up. Callum walked down the hill beside them, and just as they reached the hedge that led to the playing fields he leaned into Davie, so his father’s hand rested on his head.

  Final Reckonings

  It’s a dull truism that politics makes good people do bad things; the truth is that it works far better when we get bad people doing good things.

  The Master

  With Buckingham Palace effectively sold off, the king had transferred some of his official duties to St James’s Palace. Even for him, Windsor was sometimes inconvenient. So it was in the gloomy red state rooms there that Caroline Phillips, fresh from her triumph at Stoke, was invited to kiss hands. The ancient ceremony never actually happened; the king was too interested in having a conversation with his new prime minister. He’d been impressed with her policies towards business and the environment – particularly after Alwyn Grimaldi, who he couldn’t stand. He liked the idea of being the first monarch ever to have a lesbian leading his government – let them call him an old fogey after that! On the other hand, there was a certain steeliness about her that he felt uneasy with. That was the thing about democracy: one always had to deal with people one didn’t really know.

  It being mid-afternoon, he had ordered a light repast of organic ginger biscuits, hand-woven on his own estate; honeycakes made with the honey of a rare, almost extinct bee; and a bottle of English hock, produced on the sunlit uplands of Wiltshire.

  Caroline arrived on time, curtsied low, and took a biscuit. She did rather light up the room, the king felt.

  ‘Well, congratulations, Mrs Phillips. You seem to have won almost all of our filthy press round to your side. May I ask, do you think you can form a stable administration?’

  ‘Your Royal Highness, thank you. Yes, we should have a pretty secure majority for at least a year or two. The cabinet is – between us, sir – too tired and too divided to cause any problems, and the greybeards of the party are behind me. So I think we’ll cope …’

  ‘… without the need for a general election. That is excellent news. We’ll get the ceremonial business over in a jiffy, but I really want to talk to you about your plans for the country. Are you determined to return us to the bosom of Brussels?’

  ‘Sir, I am, but it won’t happen for many years. It will take endless negotiations, and the consumption of copious quantities of humble pie, with grovel sauce, to get us there. Of course, that’s what politicians are for, sir, isn’t it? In the meantime, the priority is to repair our relations with the United States. We can get capital from China, but we need American knowhow, freer access to their markets and so on, just to keep our chin above the water. We need to come to some new agreements pretty quickly.’

  ‘So everybody keeps telling me. The ambassador, your old mentor, his friends …’

  ‘Sir, it is absolutely not true that the Master was any kind of guide or mentor to me. The man is frankly a liability – and to you too, sir. But he’s probably right about that.’

  ‘Nothing comes from nothing, Prime Minister. What do the Americans want? What do we bring to the table?’

  ‘The security stuff, obviously. The Guardian will make a stink, and there’ll be trouble from a few crusty old military types in the Lords, but we’ll get it through without too much difficulty. They want access to the NHS. And they’d like some tough action against the BBC, to make it easier for their media companies to make a bit of decent money over here.’

  ‘To be frank, Prime Minister, to be very frank, I’m not at all keen on the sound of this. The BBC can be a pain in the neck, but at least it’s our pain in our neck. And wholesale privatisation of the National Health Service would, I promise you, destroy both your party and your premiership.’

  Caroline flushed, and put down her glass of wine, which was anyway warm and sickly. She was about to interrupt when the king abruptly stood up, jammed his hands into his pockets, walked towards a window and then turned around.

  ‘I remind you, Prime Minister, of my rights – to be consulted, to be sure, and also to encourage, where that is warranted. But also to warn. You must not tak
e this ill, but many of your predecessors have flinched from facing difficult choices of this kind – both in this very room and, before that, across the park.’

  ‘Sir, I understand. But I assure you that I will move cautiously. The BBC has become a problem for all the rest of the media. I propose to throttle it, very gently and very slowly, but to death. As for the NHS, again, we will move very gently. Pilot schemes, efficiency programmes, new rules on tendering. Very few of your subjects, with respect, will concentrate on any of that for very long.’

  King Charles grunted. He had an excellent grunt. He’d been working on it for years. ‘My family has, of course, had its ups and downs with the Americans. For more than a century, however, we have regarded them as our most reliable and trustworthy friends. But, Prime Minister, there’s a big difference between that and being, as it were, a wholly owned subsidiary.’

  ‘If that were even a remote possibility, sir, I wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation. I promise you that I intend to be my own woman.’

  But even as her own woman, Caro would need help. After the Palace she called Peter Quint. He had been as obliging in his article as he’d suggested. But she did not offer him an interview. She offered him the post of prime minister’s press secretary. Quint, who had been a little less self-important since his interview with Angela, accepted.

  Later that day, giving her first round of interviews as prime minister, Caro got Peter to have a word in the ear of the BBC’s political editor. It would be of mutual benefit, suggested Quint, if he asked her about the Master. Good story. So he did, of course. On air, Caroline replied that the Master had done great service to his country, long in the past, and that he retained the affection of many of the British people; but he had no influence over the current Labour Party, and he would have none over her or her government. ‘Let me make it quite plain. There will be no private meetings with, or behind-the-stairs influence from, that source. We will do everything above board. He had elements of greatness, but he has squandered too many years consorting with wealthy private individuals and serving the interests of overseas companies. He’s a spent force who is no longer actively involved in the political life of this country – and he himself is very well aware of that fact.’