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As far as the eye can see

Page 11

by Phil Walden


  “You don’t know how relieved I am to hear that.”

  The attendant liberally applied soap from head to toe before each was doused in warm water.

  “Look Harry, I’m not stupid. I know why Devaney was so keen to bring me back. I’m a necessary diversion, something new for the party to focus upon, give him time to consolidate his position.” They lay back down on the central platform. “I doubt he’s remotely interested in adopting much of what I offer as party policy. But I intend to drive it through and there is only one way to guarantee that happening.”

  Two attendants approached and began to massage them.

  “So you’ll go for it.”

  “No. Not at the moment. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen enough of the Shadow Cabinet to know that we’re heading for disaster under him. But it’s too soon. I’m not ready.”

  “Some in the party may think that. An increasing number don’t. Remember the Italians nearly chose a comedian as Prime Minister?”

  “We’re not in Rome. And I need more time to build support.”

  “Nonsense!”

  They were handed towels and retreated to the cold room. Slumped at one end of the largely deserted space, they sipped hot drinks. Steam from the cups spiralled into the chilled air.

  Spenser lowered a towel over his sweating forehead and leant back. “You know you’re the talk of the tea rooms.”

  “They’re sure to throw lack of experience at me.”

  “Experience is irrelevant as long as they think you’re up to the job. Anyway, ten years in the Californian State executive. You’ve more than most.”

  “But yet to be tested in the political rough and tumble here.”

  “That means you’re not tainted. Not linked with the failures of the past. Don’t you see? That’s precisely your appeal.” He swiped the towel from his face. “You’re a natural leader, Tom. So lead.”

  Catchpole dragged himself up from the bench and pulled on his robe. “You think I can take on the Oxbridge elite?”

  “There’s never been a better time.” A rhythmic beat blurted from Spenser’s mobile.

  Catchpole moved towards the door.

  “At least consider it,” Spenser shouted at the back of his departing friend. He plucked the phone from his dressing gown pocket. “Spenser.”

  His face froze as he heard an urgent and familiar voice from the past. It pleaded, a sense of panic lacing the endless stream of words. Spenser looked up. Catchpole had gone.

  “The paper said what? But that’s impossible. She’s dead.”

  Again the anxious voice assaulted his ears.

  “Are you sure it’s her?” Now Spenser fought hard to control his own sense of unease. This could severely complicate matters. He would have to take charge. “Look, Faversham, calm down. You were right to phone. But there’s nothing to worry about. I’ll deal with it.”

  With that he cut the call before rapidly selecting another number. He waited. This time his voice betrayed nervousness and deference. “Sorry to disturb you, Simon. Spot of bother I’m afraid.”

  *

  Airships were not an uncommon feature of the London skyline, particularly in and around the Thames. Small static blimps were often tethered to buildings as part of advertising promotions and, increasingly, moving dirigibles, lifted by hot air, were being deployed to capture the attention of the burgeoning numbers of tourists who crowded along the Embankment and South Bank for much of the year. Even so, never in her wildest dreams had Trisha Hunt expected to be flying, let alone working, in one.

  The Skyliner was different to any other aircraft seen in the capital’s skies. Much bigger than other airships, it had the capacity to carry upwards of seventy people in luxury conditions. The semi-rigid construction established its eco-sensitive credentials, which were further enhanced by reduced fuel burn and low operating costs. The makers were keen to promote the vehicle as a uniquely attractive tourist experience, able to access important natural sites worldwide in a silent and non-intrusive way. They had been more than happy to host Catchpole’s interview and garner the interest, which special permission to sail along the Thames would inevitably bring.

  Unusually, the passenger accommodation was inside the structure of the airship, rather than housed in a gondola slung beneath. Wide windows afforded views across London and beyond. However, today, the whole compartment had been cleared in order to make way for a full camera crew, their assorted equipment and two leather armchairs occupied by Trisha and Tom Catchpole. Trisha was anxious to nail the first part of the interview where she planned to cover his school days before in the next session moving onto the extensive period he spent studying and then working in America. She was drawing this section to what she felt was a satisfying conclusion.

  “So you had a difficult upbringing, yet won a scholarship to public school. Did you find it difficult to assimilate with what must have been a remarkably different culture?”

  “At first I did. Anyone would struggle with such a dramatic change in their circumstances. But I worked hard in the classroom, on the sports field and further afield. If people didn’t respect me at first, they grew to value me as a person who left nothing behind, who gave everything to the cause.”

  “And your happiest memory?”

  “A World Challenge expedition to Peru, without a shadow of doubt. It was a truly rich and rewarding experience. Opened my eyes to how we could and should manage the environment to the benefit of all.”

  “You were the outstanding student in your year. Oxford beckoned. Yet you chose to go to California. Why?”

  “Unlike the rest of the States, it was a hotbed of green ideas. So much of what I want to do, what I wish to achieve, has its roots in what I learnt there. Sustainability, eco housing, carbon cards, renewable energy.” He raised his arms in an extravagant gesture. “Just look around you. We’re flying in an example of West Coast ingenuity.”

  Trisha held up her hand, fell back in her chair and let out a deep breath. “Phew! Let’s take a break. We’re straying into what I’d planned for the second half of the interview.” She waved a dismissive arm at the crew. “Okay, thanks guys.” She watched them immediately pile towards a trestle table laden with food and drink. She eyed it eagerly. “Lunch?”

  “The crew’s but if you would like to follow me,” Catchpole said.

  He took her hand and guided her towards the rear of the airship. He pulled open a door to reveal a small observation pod, affording panoramic views of the river and London below. He gestured towards a small table decorated by champagne on ice and assorted delicacies.

  “I hope you’re hungry?”

  *

  The supposed beauty of the Tate Modern building was lost on Harry Spenser. It was, when all was said and done, still the outside of a power station, row after row of relentless brick and bland exterior. However, he felt exactly the opposite about the inside space. It was phenomenal, enabling art on an epic scale to be displayed whilst in the galleries, preserving the intimacy more suited to works of a smaller size. Since his accession to Parliament, he had regularly taken to crossing Westminster Bridge, strolling along the South Bank, pressing on past the National Theatre and enjoying a few moments of quiet contemplation within the walls of this monument to London’s industrial past.

  Today he’d chosen Picasso. Just as the artist had never tired of painting her in a number of guises, Spenser never tired of studying The Weeping Woman. He stood before it now, marvelling at the use of colour, the broken face and how the dislocated parts somehow clung together to form that famous sad and tortured visage.

  ‘Women are suffering machines,’ Picasso had said.

  Not only women, Spenser thought. Men also suffered, some of them strongly. And their thirst for revenge could be equally powerful.

  The faintest hint of a familiar scent drifted across his right shoulder. “You’re late,” he complained.

  Lucy Hass did not look at him. Instead her gaze steadily moved across the canvas, explor
ing every crack and line of that fractured expression. “Is it true he loved her more than any other woman in his life.”

  “Apparently so. Picasso fell for her beauty, both within and without. Talking of which, is Devaney still fawning over our imported bit of rough?”

  “Absolutely, Tom’s his blue eyed boy. He sees him as a real vote winner.”

  “Excellent.” They moved past the wall of paintings towards the gallery exit. “You’re keeping an eye on Carlton?”

  She nodded. “At the moment he’s more concerned about McKenzie and Bruce. Nonetheless, he’s sure to brief against our man at the first hint of a threat.”

  “We’ll need to counter instantly. Trisha Hunt. Have she and Tom?” He paused.

  “Slept together?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Social media’s crawling with rumours of an affair but nothing concrete.”

  Spenser stopped by the last painting depicting Adam and Eve. “It’s only a matter of time. Women always were his weakness.”

  The two passed through the gallery exit and strode purposefully away in opposite directions.

  *

  The soft, low whirr of the airship engines purred through the side walls of the pod. Two empty champagne flutes and the remnants of a buffet lay littered across the table. Catchpole and Trisha stood side by side, hands close to each other, looking at the fast flowing river below.

  “You know all this hospitality won’t buy you favourable coverage. I’ll still come at you with all guns blazing.”

  “Knowing you, I would expect nothing less.”

  “But you don’t know me,” said Trisha.

  “On the contrary I followed you closely from afar.”

  She looked quizzical.

  “BBC World Service, News Online.”

  “So now you’re an internet stalker?”

  “I’ll confess to an instant attraction.”

  “I’m flattered. Shame I value my independence so much.”

  “Who’s to say I would threaten that?”

  The airship passed to the right of the Canary Wharf complex. “Why take the chance? Where there’s a boom, there’s always a bust.”

  “Not necessarily.” His hand slid along the rail and enveloped hers. She looked down. Her fingers, little by little, locked around his.

  *

  James Devaney made a habit of arriving early to Shadow Cabinet meetings. He found it gave him time to reflect, gather his thoughts, prepare and plot the path to the outcome he sought. He’d always aimed for Churchill’s famous mantra that all he wanted from his ministers was “agreement with my wishes after reasonable discussion.”

  But Wilson’s untimely death meant that he could guarantee neither. In an instant, the challenge to his leadership had become both more sinister and dangerous. Paddy was working hard behind the scenes in an effort to quell the threat. Nevertheless, strong rumours were circulating that a bid would be launched at the imminent meeting of the powerful 1900 Committee.

  The committee was set up as a forum within which Party MPs could express their opinions and frustrations and hold the leadership to account, without the encumbrance and demands of the movement as a whole and away from the microscopic scrutiny of the media. Increasingly, it had developed into a voice for those who decried the adoption of the Third Way, for others who lamented the failure to deliver genuine socialism and for a younger element who were calling for a new Left agenda, shaped to deliver a fair and just society in a globalised world. Whatever the vision, they all viewed Devaney as the target, the patsy and the sacrificial lamb. He was increasingly seen as the obstacle, the roadblock to the bright future each faction envisaged for the movement.

  To him something was very rotten in the state of the party. It was not the outcome he foresaw when he accepted the leadership, nor how he had envisaged the future of his party, when as a lively young activist, fresh from university, he resolved on a career in politics with a somewhat naïve determination to make a difference.

  University had been the catalyst for his development. His background was best described as upper working class. His parents were moderately left wing, motivated largely by their thirties childhoods and teenage wartime deprivation. They wanted him to enjoy the opportunities they had been denied. He had been the first to gain any worthwhile qualifications and the first to access higher education. He’d always regarded himself as sufficiently bright to hold his own in any argument and liked to think that he held values and beliefs which were impregnable.

  Higher education changed all that. Exposure to attitudes and opinions from across the political spectrum turned his cosy complacency upside down. Out of this fulcrum of heated political debate emerged a radical firebrand, angered by the war in Vietnam, fired up against worldwide inequality and injustice and, closer to home, outrage at the growing betrayal of the post war settlement in its promise to deliver and sustain a fair and more equal society for all. That fury had been tempered by defeat after defeat for the party and a realisation that a degree of political pragmatism and a commitment to slow and steady change rather than rapid and radical reform, were necessary to make the party electable once again. The process, painful and bitterly resented by some, had worked, delivering a huge majority and the prospect of over a decade of power, enough to implement a new programme which would ensure that society would, as the party’s founders had decreed, be built upon equality and justice for all. For the first time the hopes and dreams of the baby boomers, those nascent hippies, feminists and Marxists of the sixties and seventies, the first fully educated generation, had the government they craved.

  And it had failed spectacularly. His predecessor had been lauded as the people’s politician, almost a messiah, such were his fervent beliefs and oratorical skills. His personality had been vital to the galvanising of the movement and of the nation as a whole. But now he had become a pariah, at best seen as someone who had sold out, at worst as someone who never really believed in the philosophy he espoused. So many ministers from that government of hope had gone on to take up lucrative directorships and settle into self-satisfied and self-congratulatory peerages at the other end of the Westminster village.

  It was left to him, James Devaney, to pick up the pieces. His own career had prospered during this long period in government. Previously a member of the Shadow Cabinet, he was given instant ministerial responsibility rising to the rank of Home Secretary three years before the party’s fall from power. He had watched in growing frustration as the aspirations of the movement were gradually dashed. He felt powerless to intervene, excluded as he was from the then Prime Minister’s inner circle, within which key decisions seemed to be taken to the detriment of the Cabinet as a whole.

  The outcome was savage and predictable. A party smashed in the election, with a huge loss of MPs, activists, members and donations, and with the movement as a whole thoroughly disillusioned and desperately in need of leadership and direction. No one else had been keen. The party was not short of talent but the younger candidates chose to bide their time. None of them wished to be associated with what increasingly looked like a run of electoral defeats and an extensive period in opposition. Perversely they had encouraged, almost cajoled Devaney into picking up the reins. He wasn’t fooled. He knew it was tactical. Too old and mired in the failure of the past, he was sure to fail, they thought, and in time the ground would be prepared for their own individual strategies for the party to be realised. It was those very delusions which worried him. A return to indulgent political fantasies would inevitably lead to more electoral reverses, and could offer the other parties a freehand in government for the next generation.

  He liked some more than others. He had nurtured Caroline Bruce and had felt the benefit of her energy and loyalty over many years. But politicians by their very nature competed. They matured, cut loose and built their own base from which to strike out for the political summit. As Shadow Home Secretary Caroline was doing just that. She had still to set out a clear visio
n of what she stood for. She would react to circumstances, move with the popular whim of the grassroots and wider public and in the meantime strive to put into place the necessary machinery to deliver a successful leadership campaign as and when the opportunity arose.

  Alex McKenzie was a different proposition altogether. There was nothing hidden or calculated about his forthright approach. Raised by the docks of Red Clydeside and imbued in its tradition of revolutionary politics, he was direct, unapologetic and confrontational. He believed it was the irrefutable duty of the State to intervene. Only the forces of the elected representatives of the people could deliver a society where all could fulfil their potential and prosper. Private agencies by their very nature worked for private good and private profit. The State in the hands of and in hock to those private agencies only offered more of the same. It was time to smash the status quo once and for all, reclaim the means of production for the people and distribute its profits fairly. Of his many extreme and contentious proposals the abolition of public schools and the wholesale nationalisation of industry attracted most support or opprobrium, depending on one’s political allegiance. A patriotic Scot to his core, nonetheless he viewed the whole nationalist debate as a deliberate distraction, designed to divert attention from the battle for equality and the ongoing class war. He was dynamite copy for the right wing tabloids.

  Devaney’s predecessor had tolerated him in the Cabinet as a necessary link to the northern grassroots, a presence, like Patrick Carlton, who would pay lip service to the old beliefs and thus keep the donations flowing. Anyway, he had parked him in Work and Pensions where he could do little good and no wrong. The Treasury would make sure of that. But the crushing election defeat and the prolonged recession had seen McKenzie emerge as a serious contender. His rousing speeches at conference made him the darling of the Left. He played to the audience, poked derision at the government and sold the party a future based on skewed history, narrow reason and blind emotion. They lapped it up, his three to four minute standing ovation becoming custom and practice in almost Stalinist fashion. He’d proven a persistent and exasperating menace.

 

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