Head of State, page 14
Another light on the phone, another caller on the line.
‘Polly from Chalk Farm, prime minister. I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest numbers on university admissions from state schools, but I’m outraged, and I think the time has come to look again at tuition fees. I know it would be expensive, but –’
Bremner broke in. ‘But it’s an investment in the future isn’t it, Polly? I have to say that I too am shocked at the drop-off in admissions. So yes, you have a point. We are going to look at this again, and at the very least we will prune back current charges. The universities will simply have to cope.’
Another note from Latimer: ‘Have you any idea how much money you have spent in the last ten seconds?’ Bremner smiled and shrugged. He was trying to calculate how far he could go. He could hardly change nuclear-defence policy, or move the seat of government to Stoke-on-Trent, but he might, he felt, be able to exert a modest benign influence. So when Reg Dwight from Pinner pleaded for an increase in arts funding he found the prime minister surprisingly receptive; and when Sarah Harris from Oxford demanded a ban on plastic bags she got a clear pledge that it would be enacted by the end of the year.
All around the country junior ministers were gaping at their radios in disbelief. But then Bremner wrapped up the phone-in with a long prime ministerial lecture on the importance of staying inside the European Union that was so larded with literary quotations and obscure historical allusions that any suspicions faded away. Even so, it had been the most expensive phone-in in British political history, and Bremner had enjoyed himself hugely.
His thoughts were interrupted by a tinny rattle as a little green light began to flash on the phone. Amanda picked up the receiver then turned, ashen-faced, to Bremner.
‘Your wife wants to speak to you.’
‘My wife? Or his?’
‘His.’
‘Oh fuck.’
It turned out to be a close shave. Bremner teased the prime minister’s estranged wife about her taste in shoes, and invited her to join him for his final speech of the referendum campaign. She retorted that she was going to be away on holiday. This was followed by an uncomfortably long silence, at the end of which she said that he didn’t sound quite himself. Was he all right?
‘All right? I’d be a lot all righter, my darling, if you were alongside me in the biggest crisis of my life instead of chucking bottles from the street.’
‘You were the one, sweetie, who put me out on the street, remember?’
‘Let’s not go over all that bloody ancient history again …’
‘Do you think I have the slightest intention of humiliating myself by slinking back into that building and seeing tart-face, with her skirt up to her knickers?’
‘Of all the stupid, paranoid accusations you’ve made over the years, sweetheart, that’s about the lowest.’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, everybody knows. The fact that she looks like a boy only leads people to speculate about your real urges. God, you disgust me.’
‘Not half as much as you disgust me, darling. I hope I never see you again. Just keep out of my way. Go and give yourself a melanoma on some celebrity-crawling strip of grit. I’ll make my own arrangements once this is all over. Goodbye.’
‘Ta ta, you pathetic plonker.’
Although this was a private call, Professional Logistical Services were listening in from their headquarters next door in Number 11. It was decided that it would be going too far actually to leak a recording of the conversation to the press, but calls to a couple of spectacularly untrustworthy bloggers meant that yet more stories were running within the hour about the prime minister being distracted by a blazing row with his wife.
That was just a minor bit of opportunism. Thanks to PLS, nobody was now going to accuse the prime minister of not being active enough. The minister for further education, who had long been worried about tuition fees, was contacted by his former permanent secretary – now working for PLS – who told him that it was vital, to fend off an irate Treasury, that he immediately tell the media that the change of policy on the issue had been agreed at a meeting between himself and the prime minister the previous day. No, strictly speaking it hadn’t happened, but that was merely a technical matter, as a result of the PM’s overloaded diary. In strategic terms it had happened, and the minister would be well advised to make that clear. He would have the full backing of Number 10, and the chancellor would be unable to reverse the change. PLS then brought in the chief whip, to phone the angry chancellor in Wales and persuade him that in order for him not to appear humiliated or overruled, it would be advisable for him to say that he had prior knowledge of the change, and had discussed it in cordial terms with the prime minister that morning.
Working closely with Nelson Fraser, PLS issued a series of remarkably eloquent short addresses – ‘stump speeches’ that the prime minister was giving during a series of brief, impromptu ‘regional tours’ in places just a little too out-of-the-way for the television crews to reach in time. Constituency chairmen were tipped off: the PM is coming to your area, and it would be good publicity if he spoke locally. Sadly, his diary’s completely manic, so would you mind if we just issued a press release saying that he said the following in Marbury Magna, or Dimbleby Parva? The local party officials, delighted to be able to drop into the lunchtime conversation that Number 10 had been on the line again, were uniformly obliging. So the prime minister’s interventions – witty, waspish about Olivia Kite, warning against complacency – were faithfully reported on radio bulletins and in local papers. Inert and dismembered though he may have been, the man was a whirlwind.
In this he was only following a long-established, if rarely admitted, tradition in British politics. Every Friday when the House is sitting the long, polished wooden table where hacks gather in the lower press gallery at Westminster is littered with speeches. Journalists on the weekend rota browse through them like shoppers at a market stall of dodgy fruit before selecting some from the dozen or so strewn before them to carry away and ‘write up’.
Each speech carries a self-important rubric at the top of its opening page explaining that it is to be delivered by the leader of the opposition, or the minister of state for defence procurement, or an ambitious backbencher ‘at a meeting in his constituency’, or in some obscure school hall or industrial unit. And each one comes with a health warning: ‘Check against delivery.’ Nobody ever bothers to do this, or ever will. No newspaper has the staff any longer to actually send somebody to trek off to hear these speeches being given. Audience-less, they may nevertheless generate plenty of comment, criticism, applause and editorial reaction over the days to come.
The team in Downing Street understood this very well, and had been exploiting the laziness of British journalism quite ruthlessly. In fact, thanks to Nelson Fraser’s industry, in the twenty-four hours after his death the prime minister gave more speeches than he had done in an average fortnight when he was alive. His attacks on what he called Olivia Kite’s jingoistic scaremongering became ever more pungent, personal and borderline offensive. His warnings about the terrible impact on the City and on British exports if the country voted to leave the EU were familiar, but were now delivered with an added urgency.
8
Tuesday, 19 September
Referendum Day Minus Two
The Campaign
What a man. What a leader. Over the weekend, as Whitehall insiders knew, the prime minister had been working flat out in Number 10, talking to bankers across Europe about the possible consequences of a ‘No’ vote. Yet now, exhausted as he must be, he was finding time for a succession of media broadcasts and flying visits to far-flung regions.
And on it went, the scattering of chaff. On Tuesday morning the PM trounced the cantankerous Welsh presenter of the Today programme, being perhaps a little funnier than usual in the process, but also entirely in command of the arguments in the final run-up to the vote. Some listeners, concentrating unusually hard, thought they detected a literary exuberance in his use of words like ‘sapient’, ‘pharisaical’ and ‘prelapsarian’ that they hadn’t noticed before, although hardly anyone thought it worth mentioning, even across a kitchen table or on Witter.
Back in Downing Street, however, there remained the huge problem of visibility. Digitally, it turned out that there was a surprising amount that could be done. A couple of computer wizards in a windowless basement studio in Old Compton Street – if wizards can look too young to shave – had subjected the PM’s head to an advanced scanning process, and the resulting computerised images had been stored on a USB drive and were being digitally manipulated by an aged goth who had been installed in the by-now rank and airless Treasury dining room.
Dame Cecily was padding impatiently around this genius of computer animation, seemingly oblivious to his numerous tattoos and piercings. She made him feel nervous, but he got on with his work, playing about with an increasingly realistic simulation of the prime minister’s face. Using 3D digital mapping the PM’s head was spliced into footage from old press conferences and election hustings. The resulting images gave a convincing impression that he had been out and about at a succession of events in the Birmingham area. He was glimpsed only in flashes, never in close-up, but no one looking at the footage would doubt that the PM had been present.
Dame Cecily’s team used old video clips, stored in the private office archives, of the prime minister seen at a distance or from behind, and overdubbed them with Rory Bremner’s vocal mimicry. The PM appeared to be haranguing a crowd, just out of vision, about that morning’s headlines (PM ‘DISTRACTED’ BY WIFE’S ANGER). They had a stroke of luck when a burst of heavy rain lashed Downing Street, meaning that Bremner, wearing a wig and one of the prime minister’s trademark pinstripe suits, could carry a big umbrella which hid him from the single TV camera stationed there as he climbed into the back of his official car before being driven off at high speed.
For added security, on Sunday afternoon some of the PLS personnel had been relocated to the COBRA emergency room – the secure committee room used for major government crises. From there a small convoy of limousines with motorcycle outriders was easy enough to fix. Sir Dickie Greene, rubbing his long hairy ears and snorting with impatience, cornered the Met commissioner to demand extra security for reasons he couldn’t go into. ‘Lots of the boys on bikes, chief, if you don’t mind.’ The commissioner, who remembered Sir Dickie from tense COBRA meetings in the old days, didn’t even think of saying no; and so, wherever Bremner went he was accompanied by more sirens and BMW R1200s than the flashiest third-world dictator could hope for. ‘It’s the noisiest bloody undercover operation in history,’ said Sir Dickie, clapping his hands.
The plotters quickly came to understand just how thin these confected photo-opportunity visits really are. When the politician arrives, almost nobody actually sees him in the flesh. People rely for their impression of the event on glimpses provided by the television cameras, which combine to produce a common false memory. News bulletins and press photographs reassure the public that the events they see on television or read about have actually happened; a willing suspension of disbelief spreads like mist. With or without a living prime minister, the odder, sharper, slightly more inexplicable three-dimensional world of reality is pumiced and reshaped every hour of every day.
Prime ministers exist partially as background reassurance that the world is not entirely disorderly, that someone somewhere is taking responsibility. Laziness and habit, a weary assumption by the public that they know the news before they see or hear about it, made the job of hiding the prime minister’s death easier than the cabal had believed would be possible.
Hiding it from the general public, at least. Lord Briskett was sniffing about, and if he somehow stumbled upon the truth he could become the single biggest problem of all. When Amanda had rung, full of apologies, to tell him that unfortunately the PM would not now be able to make their rearranged meeting, he had seemed entirely unsurprised – in fact even a little pleased, as if priding himself on his famous nose being thoroughly vindicated. The ruse about the king’s Europhobia had bought the plotters a bit of time, but Briskett was clever, determined and gossipy. PLS had managed to smear him just a little, with a few words dropped into editorial ears about his fondness for a drink, for getting above himself, exaggerating his contacts. But Briskett was too respected, just too damn good, for this dirty work to neutralise him completely. PLS were listening in to his phone messages, and were following him too, as he buzzed around London like a hiveless bee between various bookshops, his club and his flat.
Alois Haydn confronted Dame Cecily. ‘I brought you people in because you can do anything – at least that’s what I told Number 10. Now we have a hairy-suited, polished-brogued, nasal-voiced potential fuck-up, and you have no plan?’
‘What do you suggest, little man? Bribery? Blackmail?’
‘Well, some sort of … inducement might be worth considering, Dame Cecily.’
‘If you think that Trevor Briskett, a man I have known and not entirely liked for more than twenty years, can be bought off, then you are not the judge of human character your reputation suggests.’
‘You mean he’s rich enough and famous enough already?’
‘No, I’m afraid it’s much worse than that. He may have his ridiculous side, but at heart he’s honourable.’
Haydn felt himself beginning to sulk. ‘People drop dead every day. Why can’t it be the right people, at the right time?’
That afternoon, drawing all the wizards’ tricks together, the plotters succeeded in carrying off their greatest achievement. The prime minister, it was announced, would be visiting the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent. Bremner, protesting hotly, had been persuaded to get back into his wig and the prime minister’s suit. By means of some brief glimpses of his back and a ‘security alert’ which allowed the release to the media of a blurred CCTV image, plus the insertion of a month-old clip which had not been used by the main bulletins, a thoroughly busy and plausible prime ministerial day was confected.
To all intents and purposes this was a visit to meet a group of shopworkers who were worried about the effect leaving Europe would have on their jobs. It had heft, movement and colour. Everyone knew the PM had been there in person – although nobody, if pressed, would have been able to say quite how they knew. He was always just around the corner, just leaving, or just a little delayed. There was a real cheer of triumph in Downing Street when two teenage assistants from the Gap store spoke on camera to Sir Nick Robinson about what the prime minister had told them. It was another unexpected bonus when an elderly shopper popped up to tell the cameras that she had given ‘the old fraud’ a blast of English common sense. He had looked, she said with considerable self-satisfaction, ‘like I’d whacked him across the face with a wet fish’. This gave rise to a second delighted cheer in Downing Street.
As so often, the British public was playing an active, even enthusiastic, role in its own deception.
A Coffee Break
After the cancellation of the previous day’s interview with the prime minister, Ned Parminter had stayed on in London. All night he had tossed and turned in an overheated and clammy Paddington hotel room thinking about Jennifer Lewis. He had an ideal Jen firmly stuck in his head, a lissom, prancing faun with jade eyes that cut through his dreams.
At exactly the appointed hour he arrived at the branch of Caffè Nero near Piccadilly Circus which she had suggested for their rearranged meeting. Looking around, he felt a stab of disappointment that he could see no sign of her.
He joined the queue at the counter. In front of him was a honey-skinned, voluptuous Italian girl with cascades of glossy black hair. Ned barely noticed her. Jen, he was thinking, would want a skinny medium cappuccino, extra shot, and no pastry. Feeling a spasm of tiredness even though it was only mid-morning, he ordered for both of them, choosing a latte for himself and a muffin, making a mental promise that he’d only eat half of it. When, he wondered, did we start thinking that a lump of cake and a polystyrene cup of hot milk constituted a wholesome breakfast?
He’d paid and was waiting for the coffees when he saw Jen, more street urchin than faun, rapping on the window and pointing at a table outside, just under the horse statue. She didn’t smoke, but she knew that he did, and he gave her a little nod of thanks. He had forgotten how she always took charge of things. There was just enough sun to make an outdoor seat possible.
After a bit of small talk Jen confirmed that Olivia Kite was still on board with Lord Briskett’s book, and would be happy to fill in the ‘No’ campaign’s side of the story of the last days of the campaign. She mentioned that the latest polling was mouth-watering, but Parminter couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t seem her usual bright self. Her long, pale hands were shaking a little, and she kept brushing her hair out of her tired green eyes. After she’d finished her coffee she cleared her throat, reached into her bag and drew out a thick plastic folder.
‘This is the stuff I mentioned. I’ll also email it to you as usual, but it’s easier to read this way. It tells you exactly what we make of the latest polls. I’ve stuck in the minutes of yesterday’s steering-committee meeting; you’ll get one of those every day from now on. And printouts of Olivia’s emails from the leader of the opposition, UKIP and the Scottish Nationalists, and hers to them. She’s on fire.’ But Jen’s tone was curiously listless.
‘That’s fantastic.’ Parminter paused for a moment, wondering if he should say something. This didn’t feel the way it had in his early-morning dreams. Could he perhaps rest a hand on her arm? Brush his fingers down her pale cheek? He so badly wanted to kiss her, to tell her that he would protect her forever. But Ned Parminter prized his dignity. He trembled, but he did not make a move, and kept the conversation briskly facetious.
