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Head of State: The Bestselling Brexit Thriller
Andrew Marr
POWER.CORRUPTION.CONSPIRACY.BUSINESS AS USUAL.Two corpses. A country on the edge of a political precipice. A conspiracy so bold it would make Machiavelli wince.The first novel from Britain’s most celebrated political commentator is a gleefully twisted take on what goes on behind the door of 10 Downing Street.Andrew Marr’s first novel is a darkly comic tale of murder and skulduggery, played out at the very heart of Downing Street against the backdrop of a crucial, once-in-a-generation referendum.Making full use of his unrivalled inside knowledge of the British political scene, Marr has created a sparkling entertainment, a wholly original depiction of Westminster and its denizens, and a fascinating, irreverent glimpse behind the parliamentary curtain.
Copyright (#u61eb7640-faac-5919-abbe-e426e34d64c6)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright В© Andrew Marr and the Chadlington Consultancy Ltd. 2014
The right of Andrew Marr and the Chadlington Consultancy Ltd. to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
The characters, businesses and events portrayed in this book are entirely fictional. Any resemblance between them and real individuals, businesses or events is coincidental and should not be inferred.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007591923
Ebook Edition В© 2014 ISBN: 9780007591930
Version: 2015-06-02
From the reviews of Head of State: (#u61eb7640-faac-5919-abbe-e426e34d64c6)
�In Marr’s novel, full-blown farce and well-salted insider gossip edge into a sharper, if not wholly serious, look around the darker corners of the UK state. The Machiavellian melodrama of House of Cards veers into The Thick of It, and then off into the shadows where fixers out of John Le Carré lurk … [An] energetic romp … bursting with mischief, zest and coded gossip’
Independent
�There are the flowing passages and telling phrases that one would expect from such an accomplished writer … the jokes are excellent and the inner workings of government (and, I’m sure, the media) are described with complete accuracy’
Guardian
�Andrew Marr is a marvel … what makes Head of State worth reading is that it is Marr unbuttoned … witty and wicked’
New Statesman
�A darkly comic Westminster thriller with lashings of corruption, murder and sex’
Daily Mail
�The characterisation is excellent … There are few shrewder observers of Westminster and Fleet Street than Marr, and his deft touch is apparent throughout’
Sunday Telegraph
Dedication (#u61eb7640-faac-5919-abbe-e426e34d64c6)
For Harry Cameron Marr
Author’s Note (#u61eb7640-faac-5919-abbe-e426e34d64c6)
This book came about in an unusual way. I had long wanted to write a political satire that would help to lift the lid on how aspects of government and the media really worked in a way that’s not possible in conventional journalism. Meanwhile Peter Chadlington, a member of the distinguished political Gummer family, had long had a notion for the plot of a novel centred on an explosive secret at the very heart of government. We were introduced through my agent, Ed Victor, and Peter described his idea to me. We subsequently met, and talked through the possibilities and tone of the book. I then wrote the novel, which was expertly edited first by Philippa Harrison, a legend in the trade, and then at Fourth Estate by Robert Lacey, another.
So I owe Lord Chadlington an enormous debt as the originator of the idea on which the whole plot of the novel revolves. He has also been kind in introducing me to certain political and financial figures who have helped ensure that the detail is as accurate as it’s possible to be. However, it’s fair to say that, left to himself, Peter would certainly have written a very different book. He may not approve of or agree with everything which has emerged; and he cannot be held in any way responsible for my private feuds, jokes and idiosyncrasies. Some of the characters and stories in the novel are derived directly from my thirty years as a political reporter, though of course almost everything here is fictional.
Andrew Marr
April 2014
Foreword (#u61eb7640-faac-5919-abbe-e426e34d64c6)
For the last fifty years, two of my abiding passions have been politics and the art of political persuasion. The basic idea behind this novel has been in my mind for much of that time. Andrew Marr has singlehandedly turned it into a political entertainment with verve and satire. Without him it would still just be swirling about in my head.
Some may read the following pages and declare the story too fanciful – �It could never happen.’ But we should remember that much of what we take today as �normal’ political behaviour would have been considered unthinkable fifty – or even twenty – years ago. Today, almost anything seems politically possible.
As Andrew has mentioned, the writing of this novel has been greatly helped by the advice of politicians and financiers, and also by access to several institutions – including Number 10 Downing Street – to ensure that the settings are as accurate as possible.
Peter Chadlington
April 2014
Contents
Cover (#u27387495-0884-5ed7-92e2-0e64650d86fc)
Title Page (#u1553ca65-2351-5ab8-b3b8-606605d8c986)
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Author’s Note
Foreword
1. Monday, 18 September: Referendum Day Minus Three
Cock of the Walk
Ken Cooper, Upset
Ken Cooper’s World
How History is Made
Under a Rebel Flag
2. Saturday, 16 September: Referendum Day Minus Five
Fathers and Sons
Mothers and Daughters
Sex and Marriage
Library Game
3. Monday, 18 September: Referendum Day Minus Three
Who is Alois Haydn?
The Dither Fund
Professional Logistical Services
The Romance of Fleet Street
Conversation Piece
Constitutional Monarchy
In the Little Brick Terrace
A Club Lunch
4. Friday, 15 September: Referendum Day Minus Six
A Queer Turn of Events
�He Can’t Do This’
The Gamble
Dirty Work
The Decapitation Strategy
An Awfully Big Adventure
The Great Escape
5. Saturday, 16 September: Referendum Day Minus Five
The Saturday Delivery
A Little Politics
6. Sunday, 17 September: Referendum Day Minus Four
Rosy-Fingered Dawn
7. Monday, 18 September: Referendum Day Minus Three
The Voice of the Nation
8. Tuesday, 19 September: Referendum Day Minus Two
The Campaign
A Coffee Break
Syntax and Sincerity
Double-Cross
Alois Haydn Can Fly
The Quarry
The Chase is On
Scrambled Eggs at the Wolseley
On the Road
The Tea Game
9. Saturday, 16 September: Referendum Day Minus Five
Rewind …
10. Sunday, 17 September: Referendum Day Minus Four
Boys’ Stories
11. Tuesday, 19 September: Referendum Day Minus Two
Virtual Reality
Reptiles
Old Flames, Flickering
On the Verge
Over to Olivia
Enter, a Bear
Jen Blows It
Speaking Plainly
12. Wednesday, 20 September: Referendum Day Minus One
Phoebus Awakes: A Pageant
Death in the Morning?
Turbulence
The Second Message
A DГ©nouement
Female Wrestling
But Where is Ned?
Marshmalice
It Isn’t Over
13. Thursday, 21 September: Referendum Day
The Rise of Lord Croaker
The Nation Decides
14. Friday, 22 September: Referendum Day Plus One
The Birth of a Free Nation?
Epilogue: Monday, 9 October
About the Author
Also by Andrew Marr
About the Publisher
The people of Britain will vote on a definitive �in or out’ question on the country’s membership of the European Union in a referendum to be held on Thursday, 21 September, the prime minister told the House of Commons yesterday.
�This will settle the question for a generation to come, and fix the course of this great nation for our children and our grandchildren,’ he told the cheering backbenches of the �grand coalition’.
The announcement follows many delays and disappointments for those campaigning for such a referendum, a matter which the PM said could not be delayed �for more than a few months, for all our sakes’.
The prime minister, who was in Hanover last week to put the final touches to his agreement with the German chancellor for a looser, more market-friendly EU, assured the Commons that he would be campaigning unequivocally for a �Yes’ vote.
Leading the �No’ campaign from the opposition benches, Mrs Olivia Kite, who was until recently serving under the PM as home secretary, promised a �no holds barred, passionate, honest and patriotic campaign’ to persuade Britain finally to sever its ties with what she called the �soft, corrupting dictatorship’ of Brussels.
Polling for this newspaper suggests a close vote in three months’ time, with the character and leadership abilities of the prime minister a major factor for swing voters.
National Courier, London, Thursday, 22 June 2017
1 (#u61eb7640-faac-5919-abbe-e426e34d64c6)
Cock of the Walk (#ulink_69b7eba6-cce4-54f7-bc4a-f475e7ad0aa5)
A dirty wind gusted. There were just three days to go before the referendum that would settle Britain’s destiny. The Golden Cockerel swung proudly from the balcony on the top floor of one of the City of London’s most repellent buildings. Even among the swollen glass spikes, cheese graters and vegetables crowding the capital’s horizon in 2017, this pastrami-and-lemon-coloured confection from the boom of the 1980s stood out – vile colours, ill-judged proportions, cheap materials. Architecture is one of the most certain measures of cultural and social decline. Inside the abomination, the Cockerel restaurant offered a cold-eyed English catering executive’s idea of French peasant cooking. In recent years the �Cock’ had gained a certain notoriety, because its outside smoking terrace had become popular with City suicides.
A South Asian accountant, bullied at work, had thrown herself to her death after dinner. A City trader whose losses were about to be exposed had leapt the eight floors after a couple of Cock of the Walk martinis. The almost famous and thoroughly cuckolded president of the Society of Costermongers had made a witty speech to a gathering of his best friends, then vaulted over the guardrail into the traffic below, bouncing off the top of a passing bus before experiencing his last convulsions under the wheels of a kitchen-delivery lorry.
This Monday morning there lay, foetally curled in the grey half-light on the pavement below the Cockerel, the young constable’s first corpse. She took in a dark-blue jacket of a Portuguese cut, a pair of German designer jeans pulled down around his ankles, scuffed but new-looking English brogues, arranged at unlikely angles; and finally a mop of dark, curling hair nestling in a half-dried archipelago of blood. This was a youngish, once-handsome man. There’d be a worried girl somewhere this morning. Or maybe a boy. As the wailing police cars screeched to a halt and disgorged more officers, who pushed aside the ghouls and surrounded the body with tape, and then a plastic tent, the constable stared up at the jutting metal balcony and the gaudy metal bird, squeaking nastily in the wind.
Odd, she thought.
Inside the tent, green-uniformed ambulancemen were bending over the body. But you only needed to glance at the twisted figure to know that there was nothing to be done. In the dark, the body could have been a rough sleeper, ignored for hours.
She walked over and rattled the door of the Golden Cockerel, which led to the lobby, which led to the lift. It was locked. Everything was locked. Too early. Even the cleaners wouldn’t be in for an hour. So how had this happened? It was one thing for a drunken, despairing person to jump late at night, or even in the middle of a meal; but who would find their way into the Cockerel early on a Monday morning, and then jump? There were easier places – the bridges over the Thames, for one thing – all around.
It didn’t make sense.
Three hours later, as the body was swaying slightly, tightly tied down on a gurney in a fast-moving van, a mobile phone began ringing in the dead man’s pocket.
Ken Cooper, Upset (#ulink_0e9a8aa9-d037-5ac7-a911-d266af0da76c)
At the other end of the line was a heavily-built man sitting in the back of a chauffeured Mercedes which was stuck in traffic in central London. He was on his way to the offices of one of Britain’s once-great newspapers, the National Courier.
Ken Cooper hated being in the back seat. He hated the taste in his mouth of a wolfed breakfast and the smell of warm leather. He hated the nauseous feeling caused by reading all those newspapers while the driver listened to some funny-moronic DJ doing a funny-moronic phone-in with his – Ken’s – own readers. He hated the thought of the ill-tempered meeting with the marketing department weasels and circulation ferrets that would begin his office day.
How would it go?
�Kevin’s done some more focus-group research, boss. There are too many older faces in the paper. We need good-looking young people. We need less politics. I’ve done some work, and you know our ideal story? Tasty rich kids being mugged for their Rolexes outside Annabel’s. We need more muggings and more tasty rich kids.’
Reptiles. Water rats. But you could hardly blame them. All the papers were the same these days, run by scuttling, nervous children. Ken was coming to hate the trade he’d always loved.
He hated the clever rat-run route his driver had chosen, which had led straight into this hunched chaos, a clogged artery of barely moving German engineering. He hated the prospect of lunch with the proprietor’s son, an Eton-educated stoat who affected purple tweeds and whose girlfriend was on the cover of half the colour supplements most weekends. He didn’t mind the proprietor himself, a rough, cynical man who had made his money in property in the sixties. But he hated the son.
And he hated his Mercedes. He’d have been faster on a bike. He’d have been faster hopping on one foot, probably. Never in human history had so much engineering been expended to transport so few people such short distances so slowly. But try getting that in the paper.
Yet a car and driver was one of the last perks left for national newspaper editors, as their circulations shrivelled and their once-mighty legions of reporters were reduced to hysterical little platoons of underpaid dimwits. So he used the journey every morning to read his own paper, savagely underlining mistakes and striking through bad headlines, then scanning the opposition and drawing up lists of stories missed, or angles his guys had failed to see. Then he’d check Witter, jot down a few ideas for the morning news conference, and make some calls to cheer himself up.
At least in the office there was order and hierarchy and clear lines of command – Ken often reflected that had domestic life been as well-run as office life, the world generally would be a lot happier and better-ordered. At work, people knew their place, and could be rude or amusing to one another without offence being taken. Behind the front door of his house, the rules had been mysteriously different. His now ex-wife’s flaming temper had matched his own, and on the few occasions when things had come to blows, she was faster with her fists too.
This morning his first call was to the news editor. Some good news, or at least real news. Yesterday afternoon a body had washed up on the embankment of the Thames, on a sliver of mud just below Battersea Park. The local nick, which was in the pay of his crime reporters, had tipped the Courier off. Christmas envelopes were the gifts that kept on giving.
As described by the police, the body was that of a heavily-built, naked white male in his late fifties or early sixties. The head and hands had been cut off. A Russian mafia killing? But the police had said that the only clue to the deceased’s identity was a single Royal Navy tattoo. So whoever he was, he had been English.
The news editor had given the job to the paper’s last proper investigative reporter, Lucien McBryde. But now Ken Cooper couldn’t get the arrogant little sod to pick up his bloody phone.
McBryde, he reflected, had been behaving oddly in the last couple of days. He claimed to be closing in on a sensational political story. And certainly, these were sensational political times. The referendum was slicing the country down the middle. The British had always been a people slow to feel political enthusiasm – one of the great secrets of their national survival. But now, families were dividing over supper tables, and offices were riven by arguments about a subject bigger than football or waxing. Ken’s car had already passed a dozen hoardings featuring the wrinkled, boxer’s face of the prime minister – �Your choice, your future. Vote Clever’ – and as many, if not more, from the anti-Europe campaign, now led by the former home secretary Olivia Kite, who with her red hair, pale face and vivid crimson lips looked increasingly like Elizabeth I, or at least Cate Blanchett – �Your country, your choice. Give your children the gift of freedom.’
But if Lucien McBryde had something to add to the earsplitting arguments over Britain’s future, he hadn’t shared it with the paper’s political editor, or with Ken himself. He’d just said he was on to something that would �change everything’. He had seemed even nervier and more excitable than usual, though that was probably down to the marching powder. He had also recently broken up with his girlfriend.
Whatever McBryde was up to, he wasn’t answering his phone. Ken groaned, decided not to leave a voicemail message, and turned his phone to silent. Perhaps there wasn’t really a story at all, and the whole thing was just an excuse. It wouldn’t be the first time. Ken was glad that McBryde had been given the headless Battersea corpse. It would settle him down. Calm him. Give him something solid to get his teeth into.
But still, it was bloody rude of him not to answer his phone. It was past 9 o’clock. How dare the little badger not pick up?
Ken Cooper’s World (#ulink_836587f8-6d9d-5d3e-bf3b-6513fe6e8f97)
The trainee was an experiment. The managing editor of the National Courier considered the trainee perhaps the crowning achievement of his career.
This morning, the trainee’s job was to sit by the window that looked onto the street outside the National Courier and watch until he saw the silver Mercedes containing the editor. At that point he had to go – �quickly, but not running’ – to the managing editor’s office and tell him. In the roughly one hundred seconds between the car being spotted and Ken Cooper shouldering his way through the revolving doors, the managing editor was able to summon the foreign editor, the business editor, the features editor and the sports editor. They would be waiting in the foyer with pointlessly ingratiating smiles as Cooper made his way to the lift.
�Just under the million. Eight per cent down on last year, and ten per cent since the spring promotion,’ said the managing editor.
�Fuck off. We’ve cut the price in the Midlands, and we’re still going down the toilet? The Telegraph’s only seven per cent down; Guardian, seven per cent down. Thought about hiring some journalists?’
The managing editor did not need to hire any journalists. But he did not tell Ken Cooper that.
The foreign editor was next in line. �We’ve completely ignored the Malaysian typhoon, boss. Twenty thousand dead, and not even a line on the front.’
�Fuck off. That twenty thousand included a rich couple from Chelsea and their son who’d just started at Harrow. The Daily Mail had it. We didn’t. Your fault. Not mine.’
Then the business editor: �A cracking story from Sir Solomon Dundas, boss. They’re going to split up that Scottish bank after all.’
�Fuck off. Dundas is a self-promoting wanker. His last tip was crap. I don’t want another story with his sticky fingers on it in this newspaper, ever.’
The features editor was offering six of the best chocolate recipes, an article about why Bloody Marys were back in vogue, and an interview with Mia Farrow’s son. Ken told him to fuck off and come back with something fucking interesting.
The sports editor, a lean, gnarled man with a bald head and rimless glasses, got him just before the lift doors opened. �Boss?’
�Yes?’ said Ken.
�Nothing really … Just – fuck off, boss.’
Ken laughed. He was beginning to feel better.
Exactly the same performance took place every morning. These days there was less tension than usual, because there was only one story in town. Everybody at the National Courier knew that the front page would be referendum, referendum, referendum. The cartoon would be referendum. The comment pages would contain referendum yes and referendum no. The editorial would be referendum maybe.
There were still twenty-five minutes before the morning editorial conference. Time enough for the foreign editor to tell his key staff to fuck off and bring him something interesting; for the business editor to tell his banking correspondent to fuck off and stop depending on the same old sources; for the features editor to tell everyone who worked for him that they were fucking useless; and for the sports editor to smoke three cigarettes. In this way, a great newspaper was coming together.
Nobody told the trainee to fuck off. Nobody even knew the trainee’s name. He was a well-dressed young man in his early twenties, with beautifully cut hair, neat nails and a degree in journalism studies. He possessed, as all journalists must, a plausible manner, a little literary ability and a good deal of rat-like cunning. Despite these advantages, he was known only as �oi’. When he protested about this to the managing editor, the managing editor quite truthfully explained that his name did not matter, since nobody would ever need to know it. Like him, most of the younger journalists at the Courier were work-experience trainees who lived at home with their parents in Ealing, Primrose Hill or Highgate. Because the paper was prestigious and jobs in journalism were almost impossible to find, none of them was actually being paid. Everybody benefited from this arrangement. Their parents could boast to their friends about their children’s prestigious jobs. The paper got a steady supply of free labour. And the trainees quite enjoyed themselves. Occasionally the managing editor allowed himself to think of the many thousands of bright young people from poorer families who would never get the chance to work in journalism – but not for too long, because he knew that the current system made perfect economic sense.
One day as he was sitting at his desk, the managing editor had found himself wondering whether, as wealthy parents were clearly willing to subsidise their offspring, some of them might be prepared to go further, and actually pay the Courier to employ them. So the trainee’s banker father was currently paying £30,000 in return for his son working at the paper. He regarded it as money well spent: if he paid £100,000 for a painting so he could boast about it at dinner parties, and many times that on dull holidays so he could boast about them, £30,000 was a small price to pay to allow him to boast about his dim but well-meaning son’s journalistic career. Half of the money was going into the newspaper’s coffers; the other half was going to the managing editor. The managing editor feared that one day Ken Cooper would discover what was going on; and that would be an unpleasant day. So the trainee could not stay forever. He was just an experiment. In the meantime, everybody called him �oi’. The trainee, who dreamed of being a gossip columnist, was not put off, however. He had sticking power. He passionately believed that one day, somehow, someone would tell him too to fuck off.
How History is Made (#ulink_cc974de8-cda6-50f4-b7ab-76d53cfcbeb4)
At the moment that Ken Cooper stepped into the lift, Lord Trevor Briskett and his research assistant Ned Parminter were squashed together in a commuter train from Oxford. They were both scanning that morning’s Courier. Lord Briskett read the paper from the middle outwards, starting with the editorial and the commentators, then checking the business and political news, before idly skimming the home pages, which were mostly filled with things he’d heard already on last night’s news or the 7 a.m. bulletin on the Today programme. One celebrity was in favour of decluttering. Another was less sure. The girlfriend of somebody on a television show had drunk too much in a club. The age of newspapers, he reflected, was coming, whimpering, to an end.
Ned Parminter was brushing through the iPad edition of the paper with his forefinger, flicking the screen at great speed. The Courier at least still covered politics with some vigour, although the news pages seemed to be in favour of Britain leaving the EU, while the comment pages were aggressively the other way.
Neither of them paused to read the short report on the headless Battersea corpse. Corpses, particularly headless ones, were clearly something to do with the criminal underworld, and were therefore politically unimportant. Briskett and Parminter were following a bigger story than that. �Vote clever.’ �Vote for freedom.’ A nation torn in two.
Dressed in his trademark coarse green tweeds, with his halo of frizzy white hair and heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, part A.J.P. Taylor, part Bamber Gascoigne, Trevor Briskett was famous enough from his TV performances to attract second glances from his fellow commuters. On the streets of Oxford – that crowded, clucking duckpond of vanity and ruffled feathers – he was stopped-in-the-street famous.
And rightly so. For Briskett was the finest political historian of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His early biographies – Blair, Thatcher, Johnson – were still in print, while the memoirs of scores of almost-forgotten politicians had long since vanished to charity shops and recycling dumps after selling only a few score copies. Briskett’s account of the modern constitution had been compared to the works of that Victorian master-journalist Walter Bagehot. His history of British intelligence during the Cold War had been praised by all the right people. Emeritus professor at Wadham, winner of numerous literary prizes, elevated five years ago to the Lords as a crossbencher after chairing a royal commission on security lapses at the Ministry of Defence, Briskett was regularly tipped to be the next member of the Order of Merit.
Yet somehow these decorative embellishments, which might have weighed him down and made him soft, slow and comfortable, had had little apparent effect on Trevor Briskett. At seventy he was as sharp, as boyishly enthusiastic, as wicked a gossip with as rasping a laugh, as he had been at thirty. The exact nature of the pornography discovered on the minister’s lost laptop. The attempt to blackmail a senior minister over his wife’s cocaine habit. Just who Olivia Kite was taking to her bed these days … If you really wanted to know, you went to Briskett, and he would tap his nose, lean towards you, give a wolfish smile and a �dear boy’, and spill all the beans.
Thus, it had generally been admired as a rather brave decision when the prime minister announced that he had appointed Briskett as the official historian of the great European referendum. The PM, himself an amateur political historian, had argued that such was the momentous nature of the choice now before the British people that they were owed – the nation was owed – a proper, in-depth account by a proper writer. Briskett, he had promised, would be given unparalleled access to the members of his inner team for the duration of the campaign. He would be welcomed at Downing Street, he would be given copies of the emails, the strategy documents – everything. And after it was all over, people might actually read his book.
No sooner had the PM announced this than Olivia Kite, on behalf of the get-outers, issued a press release declaring that she too admired Lord Briskett, whom she regarded as an authoritative and independent voice, and that she would give him the same level of access to her team.
The political commentators said that the PM’s decision to give contemporary history what Briskett had called �the ultimate ringside seat’ was evidence of his great confidence about the outcome of the referendum. His evident conviction that he would win, and that victory would be the ultimate vindication of his premiership, was itself damaging to his opponents. Olivia Kite had had little option but to make Briskett as welcome in Prince Rupert’s tent as in Cromwell’s.
Basking in this hot limelight, Briskett moved lightly. He wanted to do all the work himself, so far as he could. He had brought in only his protГ©gГ© Ned Parminter, a shy but brilliant PhD student who, Briskett thought, might one day be a significant contemporary historian himself.
Parminter, with his wiry black beard and intense dark eyes, looked like an Orthodox priest in civilian clothes. Although he shared Briskett’s urbane sense of humour, his romantic English patriotism had a fanatical streak.
Together, the two of them made up a balanced ticket: Briskett’s delight in Westminster gamesmanship inclined him towards the larger-than-life, principled yet unscrupulous figure of the prime minister. Parminter, a specialist in the seventeenth-century development of Parliament, was a natural Olivia Kite supporter. They had, of course, never discussed their allegiances on this matter between themselves.
Now the two of them were on their way to meet the prime minister himself. As the train wriggled through West London towards Paddington, Briskett leaned forward in his seat.
�You’re seeing that … girl, Ned, after our rendezvous?’
Parminter scratched his beard under his chin, a sign of anxiety, before slowly replying. �She’s invaluable. She’s across everything in the Kite campaign. She reads all the emails, all Kite’s texts, on her official BlackBerry and her personal one. She’s copying us into every piece of traffic.’
�And does the ever-lovely Mrs Kite know this?’
�Apparently. I think she must. Jen’s nothing if not loyal, so I guess Kite’s fine with it.’
�Good girl. Good for you, too.’
�There is one other thing. It’s a bit odd. She also seems to know rather a lot about what’s happening on the other side. Far more than she ought to. Hidden channels in Number 10, perhaps.’
Briskett rubbed his hands with pleasure.
�Really? Sleeping with the enemy, is she? Delicious. At a moment like this, what is happening in each HQ is our primary concern. Let us wallow, Ned, in the panics, the little feuds, the unwarranted pessimism and the foolish overconfidence. But in a sense, what matters most is what is harder to discover. I mean, what is happening between the camps. It’s there that the deepest secrets lie. And what is this fascinating creature’s full name, Ned?’
�Jennifer Lewis. But she prefers Jen. I’ve known her since uni.’
Briskett exhaled an irritated hiss.
�You mean you’ve known her since you were up at Oxford, Ned. I really cannot understand this squirming self-abasement about “uni”. It would be a different matter if it were Keele, but I assume – given her youth and prominence – that she was at Oxford too. Or, poor girl, Cambridge?’
�Somerville.’
�Hmm. PPE?’
�PPE.’
�Well …’
The two men lapsed into silence until the train was almost at Paddington.
Under a Rebel Flag (#ulink_d2a4076a-ae02-5628-a267-a57087ef12d2)
But Jennifer Lewis was not going to make her appointment with Ned Parminter that afternoon. Some fascinating new polling results had come in overnight which called for a few late changes to the campaign, so she was more than sixty miles to the east of London, crunching numbers in the gorgeous surroundings of Danskin House. Olivia Kite, meanwhile, dressed only in a short, almost see-through kimono, walked between the rows of campaign volunteers checking the messages on her mobile phone. Nobody even thought about taking a picture. They were a tight, loyal team.
After breakfast Olivia changed the kimono for a vibrantly-coloured Issey Miyake suit; she made a point of dressing up for every day at work in her own home as if she were being presented to the king at Buckingham Palace. He had, after all, called her half a dozen times in the course of the campaign. Some of their conversations had run on late into the night.
Danskin House was the beating heart of the nationalist movement. It was rebel camp headquarters, as much a symbol of defiance of Westminster as Oxford had been when King Charles I had raised his standard there almost four centuries previously. Yet it was an odd place for British patriotism to take its stand. The house was vaguely Renaissance in shape, and was hung with Dutch tiles. Its roofs and turrets glittered pale blue and orange. It boasted an Italian garden, complete with eighteenth-century reproduction Roman statuary, and a Greek temple overlooking a lake. Inside, a long hallway was decorated with suits of German armour and some quite good paintings, not least by the Dutchman Pieter de Hooch and the Spanish papist Murillo. What had once been an insanitary Tudor patchwork had been extensively rebuilt in Northern European style after the Glorious Revolution – the glazed tiles, the statues, the limewashed inside walls.
The house’s current master, Olivia Kite’s husband Reeder, was half American and half Egyptian. Yet, because it happened to nestle alongside a tiny Essex river, Danskin had long since become an emblem of Englishness, featuring in Jane Austen television documentaries and Christ Almighty, a recent Hollywood adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox.
On this particular morning, a dim boy leaned on his rake in the grounds and watched a procession of cars crunch along the gravel drive, then disgorge their passengers between the pillars and into the main entrance of the house. He spat on the ground. He may have been a fool, but he was not so stupid that he didn’t know what was going on.
In the formal garden to the rear of the house, Reeder Kite strolled past the chipped and forlorn Venus and the amputee Adonis and arched his back against the late-summer heat. Already-blown roses oozed a sensuous, sickly scent, intensifying when it met the livelier stench of a trellis of sweet peas around the sundial. Butterflies and bees drifted over borders of rich, moist soil, thickly strewn with astrantia, allium and abelia, mildly invaded by vetch and willowherb. Fertility was everywhere.
Reeder scratched his inner thigh, probed himself, and wondered how soon after lunch he could escape back to London, where his mistress would be idling in her mews flat. He admired his new Nike trainers, his still-strong legs, then tensed his gut – there were still a few muscles there – thrust his arms out in front of him and squatted down. At that moment Olivia happened to glance through the window, and saw her near-naked husband performing his strength and balance training. He looked, she thought, like a walrus attempting ballet.
There was a curious mismatch between the temperatures inside and outside the house. Within its walls, Danskin felt as cold as death. Over the past few months the woman in the mews house in London had destroyed whatever human warmth had once been found there. The effect of Reeder’s adultery had spread like an icy mist, floating down corridors and lurking under beds. Olivia no longer ransacked his email inbox or stabbed her way through his mobile phones, but had instead redirected her fury into a last spasm of energy in the referendum campaign. Each morning the family exchanged chilly platitudes over the breakfast table. Protracted silences and accusatory glances had replaced the former veneer of civility.
As if to echo the dismantling of the family, the main downstairs rooms had been cleared of pictures, books and domestic clutter. Boxes of old photographs, football boots, scented candles, CDs and unloved Christmas presents had been crammed into cupboards and forgotten. The ghostly outlines of Turkish rugs lingered on the bare wooden floors. Where once there had been elegant reproduction antique chairs and polished occasional tables, there were now rows of hurriedly-assembled flatpack desks and plastic chairs. Cables coiled in every direction from computers and printers set up throughout what had been the dining room, the sitting room and the second kitchen. Piles of cardboard boxes filled with files and labelled with thick ink marker teetered in the corners.
Maps of parliamentary constituencies, graffitied with numbers and names, had been pinned onto the walls, and flatscreen televisions were in every room, permanently broadcasting the BBC and Sky news channels. During working hours the rooms were full of smartly dressed young people crouching over their desks with serious expressions, their heads pressed to phones, their necks eternally cricked even as their fingers danced on keyboards. Outside, the background noise was hum and whoosh, living rural England; inside, it was tap and mutter.
At first Olivia Kite’s decision to move the headquarters of the No to Europe, Democracy First campaign away from Westminster and into the expensive country house where her marriage was ending had seemed inexplicable. In fact it was a stroke of genius, distancing the campaign from the political establishment in London, and fusing together its couple of hundred dedicated staff out in the sticks. Their sequestered camaraderie meant that their movement had come to feel like a popular insurgency – and so, in a way, it was. Greece had exploded, Spain was dividing, France was on the march; and now it was Britain’s turn. Far away from elderly, cynical Whitehall, this was a Spitfire summer. For the men and women serving under Olivia Kite, Danskin House was Fighter Command.
The house was not in fact quite as remote as it might have seemed. Just beyond the forest of oak and Scots pine that surrounded its formal gardens and strip of parkland was a busy coastal town, with a good road link to the M11, along which an endless stream of lorries trundled, bringing cars from Germany and containers full of almost everything else from China. Its railway station required only one change from Liverpool Street, and the local taxi drivers had become accustomed to cabinet ministers and minority party leaders, never mind television journalists and other hangers-on, arriving off the morning and evening trains with a self-important air and asking for �Mrs Kite’s place’.
Despite the container ships that arrived in the port every few hours, the European Union was deeply unpopular in this northern corner of Essex. Union flags flew from pubs and public buildings, and Mrs Kite, partly because her husband’s reckless infidelity was a rich source of local gossip, was hugely popular here.
As for Olivia herself, she had recovered her domestic territory and stamped it with her own political identity; her skulking, pirouetting husband was beginning to feel like a stranger in his own home. Lionel, their eldest son, who was going through an REM phase, referred to his father simply as the Oaf. �Living Well is the Best Revenge’ echoed along the upstairs hallway as Olivia stared at her husband’s froggy face flushing in the garden and thought, �No, it bloody isn’t. Stamping on his face with stiletto heels, before burning all his dreams in front of his staring eyes, ripping his fingernails off one by one and humiliating him in the newspapers … that would be the best revenge. But if that’s not an option, I suppose living well is an acceptable second choice.’
Olivia was the Cavalier commander. But she had no intention of losing her head. She had more of Oliver Cromwell about her than any languid Stuart. Jennifer Lewis, by contrast, definitely had the looks of a Cavalier lady: a long, serpentine body, delicate, pale features and hair for whose colour there was no adequate description – corngold and copper, silver birch with licks of flame. With her green eyes and large, capable hands, however, she was a fighter too, and an eager footsoldier in Olivia Kite’s parliamentary insurgency. Olivia treated her almost as a daughter, and relied very heavily on the younger woman’s uncanny grasp of numbers and down-to-earth political sense.
Through the frantic weeks of the referendum campaign Jen was at her boss’s side most of the time, expressionless, taking calls and giving orders. But today her provocative eyes seemed lost in thought. She couldn’t get her mind off her last meeting with her former lover, the newspaper reporter Lucien McBryde. A man with a considerable talent for self-destruction, he now seemed to be falling apart at a spectacular rate. Texts she had received over the weekend told her he had been leaving her messages, even now, through their very private system.
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