Читать книгу Children of the Master - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 9

First, you know nothing – but they like you. Then, second, you know stuff, but they hate your guts. Between popular uselessness and loathed effectiveness, you have – how long? About a weekend.

The Master

The funeral had been a long one, in a polychromatic Anglican church so high that the streets for half a mile around smelled of incense. It had, apparently, been the ex-lord chancellor’s wish to inflict on all his atheist friends the full rigour of a proper funeral service. A wit and a man of faith, as well as pederast, he had long abhorred services with Beatles music and heart-tugging slide shows of the deceased as a young child. Ritual was the best sedative for sorrow – common wisdom which had been forgotten. So all of those milk-and-water agnostics and politically-correct pew-dodgers had had to sit through endless readings from the penitential Psalms, from Corinthians and Revelation from the St James Bible, to kneel for prayers, shuffle forward for the Eucharist, and sit again for a socking long sermon that made disapproving reference to the All Hallows party.

The ex-prime minister, universally known as the Master, who was in his way a serious believer, had read one of the lessons. After the service, with the coffin taken away for burial, half a dozen members of his former cabinets had stood around stretching their backs and rubbing their buttocks and wondering about lunch. The Master had a brace of limousines waiting, and he took them half a mile away, beyond the reach of the paparazzi, to a quiet public house, The Moon in Her Glory.

A back room, once reserved for ‘the ladies’. A battered round deal table, half a dozen Victorian chairs, and a hatch for the beer.

‘White-wine spritzers, everyone?’ asked the former prime minister, slapping his hands together.

‘A wee spritzer?’ spluttered Murdoch White, the former foreign secretary and defence secretary. ‘Hell’s bells. You always were a degenerate metropolitan ponce. A small whisky and a half of IPA for me.’

‘Murdoch, Murdoch. So predictable. You’re an incorrigible dinosaur. You’re like a bigoted, scaly old sea monster that only comes up once a decade to roll your eyes at us. Anyway, that was what we always drank.’

‘Aye, when you were sodding prime minister it was. We’d have drunk cabbage water if you’d told us to. Now you’re not.’

One by one the others – Margaret Miller, former home secretary; Sally Johnson, former party chair; Alex Brodie, industry and then briefly chancellor; the sly, Machiavellian figure of Leslie Khan, the party fixer and Northern Ireland secretary – ordered their drinks. None of them asked for a spritzer.

The Master recovered quickly. ‘Well, it may not be a proper oak table, but here we are assembled, the Knights of the Grail, together again for the first time since my esteemed former chancellor broke the enchantment and cast us out … Yeah, yeah, I’m joking guys, come on … But it’s kind of good to be together again, isn’t it?’

‘Bloody sad too, though,’ said Murdoch in a gravelly Ayrshire growl.

‘Yes. Poor old Simon. What a way to go. He had many more years in him, I’d have thought,’ said the ex-prime minister.

‘No, no, I didn’t mean that,’ said Murdoch. ‘Though it’s a pity the poor bastard died with the anger on him. No, I meant it’s a bloody pity we’re all here, out in the cold, fuck-all use to anybody. Just – sad.’

Miller and Johnson, the two gatekeeper women who had supported the PM to the last, and beyond, broke in, protesting. Their leader, the Master, was doing good work in the Middle East, and raising large sums for Africa with his speeches. They both spoke at some length, and the Master had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. When they’d finished he shook his head, rapped the table as if calling for silence, and began to talk in that familiar tone of unctuous, confiding seriousness.

‘No, Maggie, no, Sally. Murdoch makes a very good point. Yes, of course, we all do what we can. Public service runs through us; it’s in our DNA. But where it counts most, here at home, we’ve become completely voiceless. New Labour has vanished back into the Labour Party – with, I have to say, entirely predictable results. The Tories have ripped us out of Europe. The Scots are off – partly, I confess, my fault. It’s back to a choice, apparently, between permanent class war or heartless free-market fundamentalism, fairness or efficiency – but never both. Exactly the choice we devoted our lives to eliminating. I’ve never been as depressed about this country as I am now. We have capitalism, but we have no social democracy. It’s a bloody waste …’

‘And the worst of it is,’ Leslie Khan interjected, ‘we’re all actually at the height of our powers. I know things I learned the hard way as a minister, and I’ve learned new things in business since. I know how to make a government department work, and I know how to rally public opinion. But I can’t get a hearing. The newspapers, for what they’re worth, won’t commission articles from any of us. They don’t even pick up on our blogs or tweets. That little shit who made fools of us all at his damned party had a point, perhaps. We are the politically undead. We live in limbo. We’ve always been frank with ourselves, so let’s be frank now. This is a convocation of fucking zombies.’

‘Agreed,’ said the Master. ‘Lurid language, but not so far from the truth. It might be a limbo of air-conditioned offices and first-class flights, with the occasional television studio thrown in, but it’s a limbo nevertheless. Whenever I think I’m going to be let back into the conversation – when there’s the right Newsnight moment, or whatever – I do my bloody best, but it’s all “Yadda-yadda-yadda, Iraq, illegal war, liar, blah, blah, blah.”’

‘Fucking cunts,’ interjected Murdoch. ‘Hypocritical little shits. God, I hate the fucking Guardian.’

That got everybody, even Leslie Khan, who had once worked there, nodding their heads and grunting.

‘It goes back to my old paradox’ – the Master again. ‘When you first arrive in power, you have maximum authority. You are the people’s choice. You have momentum. The wind at your back. But you don’t know how to do anything. By the time you’ve learned the lessons, worked out where the levers are and how to use them, sucked up all the tricks of survival, then ten to one your authority has gone. You’ve become discredited, disgraced, or merely boring. It’s all over. You can have either wisdom or power, but never both at the same time. So my question is this: under such an arrangement, how can a serious democracy ever be properly run?’

There was a silence. The chips and the sandwiches arrived. Even they looked sad.

The former prime minister continued. ‘You end up with the next lot of innocents, perhaps not making exactly the same mistakes, but lots of new mistakes of their own. Miliband. Grimaldi. And by the time they’ve learned from them, again, it’s too late and they’re out. For the past few years I’ve worked on the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about this. Our faces are no longer welcome. Nobody listens to us any more, and they never will. So all that accumulated understanding, from a little wisdom to a lot of gamesmanship, is just going to go to waste. But recently I’ve been wondering – Leslie, Murdoch, girls – need it be so? If our faces are too old, let’s find some new faces. If we can’t use what we know for ourselves, why can’t we use it for others? When the left, the unions, don’t like the way the party’s going, they don’t just sit back. They organise, as we know to our cost, and they try to take the power back. Is there any reason we can’t do the same?’

Khan was brushing his little beard with tapering fingers. A little smile of delight appeared on his face. ‘Oh Master, you’re not suggesting we run moles, are you?’

‘Entryists? Like a bunch of Trots?’ barked White.

‘No, not as such. But if we could identify just a few bright, talented, potential new leaders, and help them up the ladder, we could control the party by proxy. Fresh skins, sleepers – call them what you will. But sleepers for common sense, moles for the American alliance, entryists for a sensible European future – all that.’

‘Manchurian candidates?’

‘Well,’ said the former prime minister, ‘we don’t need to go as far as brainwashing, still less assassination, do we? Just a little help here and there. A team. And we give the party a new leader, a better leader. A leader we have shaped, and who we control. Once we thought the future was ours. Let us dare to think it again.’