Andrew Marr
Children of the Master

FOURTH ESTATE·London

Copyright

Fourth Estate

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Copyright © Andrew Marr 2015

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The right of Andrew Marr to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Extract from ‘Canto XIII’, from THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND, copyright ©1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007596454

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Version: 2016-04-26

Dedication

For Isabel Claire

Kung walked

by the dynastic temple

and into the cedar grove,

and then out by the lower river,

And with him Khieu, Tchi,

And Tian the low speaking

And, ‘we are unknown,’ said Kung,

‘You will take up charioteering?

‘Then you will become known,

‘Or perhaps I should take up charioteering, or archery?

‘Or the practice of public speaking?’

And Tseu-lou said, ‘I would put the defences in order,’

And Khieu said, ‘if I were lord of a province

I would put it in better order than this is.’

And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:

If a man have not order within him

He can not spread order about him;

And if a man have not order within him

His family will not act with due order;

And if the prince have not order within him

he cannot put order in his dominions.

And he said

‘Anyone can run to excesses,

It is easy to shoot past the mark,

‘It is hard to stand firm in the middle.’

And they said: If a man commit murder

Should his father protect him, and hide him?

And Kung said:

He should hide him.

From Ezra Pound, ‘Canto XIII’

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: Photographs

Absolutely No Partners

After the Funeral

The Early Life of David Petrie

A Perfect Girl

A Terrible Story

On an Island

David the Ruthless

Funny Farm

Caro Gets Selected

Politics Today

Peter Quint

Interlude: How to be a Political Columnist

In the Rose Garden

David Petrie, MP

A Lesson at a Dinner

Pebbleton

A Warning from Bunty

Public Servants

A Table for Three

The Sports and Social

In the Master’s House

Family Life

Barker

Health and Efficiency

Cleanliness

How to Cure a Columnist

Bathtime Talk

Immorality

Whitehall Life

The Education of David Petrie

A Moving Speech

The Joy of Routine

In the Country

A Sermon in Barker

What Happened to the Idea?

How to Bring Down a Prime Minister

The Choice

A Flying Pot

Building a Better World

To Glaikit – and Back

Back in Barker

In the Hotel

The Happy Accident

A Frank Talk

In the Gallery

A Clever Plan

Showtime

A Stranger in Barker

The Triumph of the Fourth Estate

A Minor Failure of Empathy

Making Good

Final Reckonings

Postscript

Also by Andrew Marr

About the Publisher

Prologue
Photographs

A good politician seizes the moment; and if the moment resists, she knocks the bugger against a hard surface until it gives up.

The Master

There are special days. Not so many. Far more often come the amiable days when we dress, shower, eat and work, when we laugh at one another and we pass on secrets, and we eat moist chicken and drink cold beer … and none of it really touches our inner selves. Most days we slip through, the snow creaking, barely touching the sides. As in a symphony, not every moment – not every day – can be intense. And there are also the days whose smells, music and colours burn themselves into us so that we are changed for good. On such days, speckles of dirt on a kettle lid can be beautiful, and a song whistled in the street can sit inside our skulls forevermore.

Caro Phillips, who was a good person, believed that today would be a special day. She pulled open the curtains and a cold, pre-dawn light filled her bedroom.

She had acted ruthlessly. Because she had acted, everything had changed. She saw the orange and green rug under her bare feet properly, for the first time. She’d bought it years before. Beautiful, just beautiful. She saw her dressing gown flopping from its hook on the door, a dollop of shadow beside it, and felt love for its soft familiarity. She saw her own shadow, quivering, and reached out to touch it. She didn’t glance in the direction of the bedroom mirror, saving that until she reached the bathroom.

The face, as she’d hoped, was both familiar and, this morning, strange. It was a good face. Laughter lines; there had been a lot of laughter. A slight caramel tan, the residue of life-changing days in Rome. She smiled at herself: teeth tamed in adolescence by train tracks, a slightly overlong top lip, summer-sky-blue eyes. Ever since she could remember, she’d been able to knock people backwards, almost literally, with her smile – men and, yes, absolutely, women too.

And because she was a good person, all her life strangers had brought her good things. She looked harder into the mirror. No, not a sign of dangerous redness or a broken vein. Self-control, an early renunciation of delicious tobacco, and caution with alcohol. And then she looked at herself properly: the eyes were looking at the eyes, complete self-consciousness. This was the face of the king’s first minister of the treasury, the most powerful face in the United Kingdom, the face of Nefertiti or Gloriana.

Now Caroline noticed its coldness. This was the face of a woman who had done something terrible – not murder, but something like murder. She felt she could smell her own electricity. She thought of poor Angela, poor sweet Angela, who smelled not of that, but of the coast, and of honeysuckle, and who was at this very moment in a cramped prison cell, perhaps bereft, feeling that her life was over. Caro washed, peed, showered, towelled and began to dress.

She could imagine the prison cell vividly. The walls would be painted to a height of about four feet in a medicinal green; and above that in white. They would be covered with little raised bumps, which would break and flake if you pressed them. There would be small messages, not many, scratched into the paint or written in pencil, not all misspelled.

Back in Caro’s bedroom there was a large black-and-white photograph of Angela in a silver frame, given to her on a previous anniversary. Under the Master’s direction, she had allowed a journalist from The Times to take that picture away with him after an interview; the paper had used it on the front page. It had done Caro a lot of good. Angela was staring with her dark, intense look, her wiry black hair blowing across her face like seaweed, her collar shining like a bone. The picture had been taken down at Pebbleton in Devon in the good days. Caro remembered taking it, and she noted that it was well composed: the stubby tower of the church, beside which they lived, was clearly visible over Angela’s black-shirted left shoulder.

Behind Angela’s picture, but larger than it, was a more recent photograph: the unmistakable, world-famous face of the Master. Caro had a lot to confess to him. He would talk as he always did about keeping it simple, about honesty and clarity and her brand. ‘One lover, heaven; two lovers, hell.’ That was one of his. But somehow, she felt, he probably already knew what had happened. He knew everything. Well, not everything; she would surprise him later.

Walking down the narrow stairs towards breakfast, Caro noted a great dark blaze of sunrise, a bruise-coloured mountain rolling fast across east London. Today was without doubt going to be special.

Then, on the bottom step, Caro saw the interloper. Wearing the familiar pink cheesecloth nightie, one bare foot tucked over the other to keep it warm, she was looking up at Caro with a solemn expression. It was the girl. Caro did not believe that her house was haunted, nor that, in any conventional sense, she had a guardian angel. But at important times, on days that mattered, she was accustomed to meeting herself, her earlier self, aged eight or nine; and talking. Caroline could see her ribs moving under the nightie, and her cold toes wriggling. She stopped. She could go no further, neither around nor through this … inconvenient moment, this folded, unavoidable interruption.

‘Why the long face? I would have thought that today, of all days, you might want to celebrate with me. It’s not as if I’ve killed anybody.’

The girl replied in a calm, clear voice. But I used to have a lisp, Caro thought. ‘Caroline, you are not stupid. You know perfectly well that you can end a person’s life without actually killing them. You can starve them of the future, and then they … waste away.

‘Why are you doing this? You didn’t used to be cruel. We were tough, you and me, but we were never cruel … I haven’t killed Angela, not in any way, you silly little thing. She’s destroyed herself. She was always weak, and you can’t just hold up the weak forever. We have always been a good person, and we still are. But now we have the courage to act, and make the world a better place.’ For 7.30 a.m., and before breakfast, it was a long speech.

Caro’s younger self seemed, if not satisfied, at least disinclined to continue the argument; so Caro walked through her, filled the kettle, popped on two pieces of toast and turned on Radio 4.

There was a lot to do today – media, the PLP, perhaps the Palace – and Caro couldn’t afford to daydream or dawdle. As she sipped and munched, however, she allowed herself some quiet reminiscing. The soft side of Angela’s breast; her tight tummy muscles; pushing her down onto a bed. Flushing slightly, Caro concentrated on John Humphrys, who was interrogating her Tory opposite number about the speech she’d given yesterday in the House of Commons. The poor chap couldn’t decide whether he was for it or against it; whether it was an outrageous betrayal or a moral stand. Humphrys was having gentle fun with him, batting him around like a cat whose claws were still sheathed.

‘Wa- wa- well, John,’ went the south London MP, ‘we’ve given Miss Caroline Phillips the benefit of the doubt, haven’t we … We have to ask what she’s wa- wa- wa- up to, don’t we?’

‘Yes, Mr Porter, we do, and that’s why we asked you to come on the programme this morning, and that’s why I have to press you for a clear answer.’

‘Wa- wa- wight. Absolutely wight, John …’

‘Have you any idea what you think, Mr Porter? Or perhaps, you haven’t been told what to think yet?’

This was all too easy: the old Welshman wasn’t even trying. Perhaps things were going to be all right after all.

Caro leafed through the Guardian. There was a poll showing the Labour lead down to five points. She scanned the news pages, but there was no mention of her. She knew she needed to get a move on, but still she lingered. She flicked over from Today to Radio 3, and struck lucky: a Mozart piano sonata, one of the B-flat majors; almost certainly Uchida. Yes, today would be a good day.

Before she left the kitchen table, Caro flicked her laptop open to check Twitter, her alerts, and Buzzfeed. Lots of below-the-line chatter from the usual racists, homophobes and sad-sacks; but from the party, nothing but bland approval.

The pre-agreed statement by the outgoing prime minister, Alwyn Grimaldi, was still running, unchanged.

The Rome conference, apparently, was still grinding on. The Mail Online had a picture of David there, looking lean and dashing in a white suit, with the vice president of the United States. They were speaking from behind lecterns set up in a conference room of the hotel, with their national flags behind them. The usual old bollocks, no doubt.

Rome had been … transformational. But that was not something Caro could allow herself to think about this morning. She put Rome into a small mother-of-pearl box to be opened later on, when there was quietness.

Caroline went downstairs, still listening to the radio: she’d had speakers positioned up and down the narrow townhouse so that she could follow a radio interview or, more often, music, from room to room. Then her train of thought was rudely derailed by the phone. That wasn’t unusual at 7.32, but it was the house phone, not either of her mobiles. Who had that number? She couldn’t bear to speak to her parents yet – the anxious bleating, tinged with disapproval. Still, curious, she picked up the receiver.

‘That was magnificent. Magnificent. I told the editor. He wasn’t sure. But I told him. Magnificent, I said. Absolutely magnificent. Speaking for the common people. Giving us all, in the Westminster bubble, a bit of a lesson, bit of a kicking. Magnificent. I’m saying so in my column today, and I’ve got them to put it on the front. They do what I say. I wanted you to hear it first.’ Caro automatically moved the receiver just a little further away from her ear.

It was Peter Quint. Whenever she spoke to Quint, she had the sensation of being just a little dirtied; already she felt that there was greasy plug of something in her ear.

‘Peter! How lovely to hear your voice. But I’m a little surprised, so early in the morning. We haven’t spoken for a while. I thought you were very much a David Petrie man. Didn’t you call him “the future of socialism” only last week?’

‘Yes, yes, mock away. Now I’m calling you “the future of Britain”, which I think trumps that, doesn’t it?’

There was definitely something in her ear. Itchy.

‘Peter, it’s early. I’m heading off for a busy day. How can I help you?’

‘Not just a busy day. This is a momentous day, Caroline – I can still call you Caroline, I hope – and I just wanted to know exactly how momentous. We’re bidding for the first proper interview after you’ve moved into Number 10. I’d talk to your press people, but I wanted to give you a heads-up myself.’

‘I’ll get somebody to call you later, Peter, I promise. I’m all at sea myself, as I’m sure you’ll understand.’

‘Have you spoken to Angela? In your position, with all the resources of the Home Office, you must …’

‘Goodbye, Peter.’

Loathsome man. But if Peter Quint was fawning on her to that extent, she must be home free.

The house phone began to warble again. Caro glanced at the number, and let it ring. She allowed herself to think properly about David Petrie, his Scottish joking and his dark, long-lashed, girlish eyes. Gay men, she knew, tended to like him. In all truth, before the past twenty-four hours he had hardly even looked at her, and had probably hated her on principle. But he’d made her heart race, long before they’d spoken properly, because of his naked, contemptuous and threatening ambition. Well, that was another unopenable door safely closed. And, after all, neither of them was free. He was married, and untainted by scandal. And she was famous for the other thing. No, it was completely impossible at every level. It couldn’t be happening.

As she opened the front door, Caro drained the last of her coffee, and smiled briefly to herself. She would need David Petrie in the months ahead. That last little undefined crack of possibility kept her cheerful. The car was waiting. The office had sent the Rover, she hoped with Paul inside.

There was just one photographer outside on the pavement. She couldn’t see any camera crews. Good. Fixing her face into a smile, she walked through the door and into the midst of half a dozen men who’d presumably been crouching behind the low brick front wall, and who now leapt into the air like a ragged rugby lineout. She reeled back slightly to avoid being hit in the face by a camera, and closed her ears to the sudden hubbub of questions, spittle-flecked lobs of sound – ‘Oi, wha’ say, Caroline?’ – ‘Arter a job?’ – ‘Oo’s ya boss?’ – ‘Yah-yah-yah?’

She remembered what the Master always advised: ‘Whatever they say, keep smiling. Wave at them. Smile, smile, smile. They’re looking for a guilty or an angry face – that’s what sells a photo to the picture desk. Smiles are small change.’

So that was what she did, not even flinching when one snapper, scurrying to get the best angle, banged against the wing mirror of the waiting car and knocked it off.

All the paps had their own personal tricks: one of them specialised in walking backwards in front of his target, and then appearing to trip and fall. The innocent victim would automatically reach forward, with a look of concern or shock, to catch him; and that was the picture the snapper had been waiting for – that grimace, that moment of shock. The snapper snapped fast, even as he was going down. More Westminster careers had started to slide downwards, the Master had told her, after a distorted face appeared in the papers, than had ever been destroyed by parliamentary inquiries.

Once she was inside the car, buckling up, Caro held her smile. Paul was driving. As the car pulled off, with hands banging on the roof, she closed her eyes and tried to remember her last peaceful moment that morning.

Leaving the house, she had passed a wall of pictures and photos. There were snaps of Devon, of Angela, the boys. A Peter Brookes cartoon from The Times that showed her in a pulpit. A pin board just inside the front door was covered with scraps torn from newspapers, and other mementoes. Prominent among them was a stained, creased cardboard invitation, engraved with gold leaf and signed by the Master himself. He’d given it to her, and told her to keep it safe: ‘That’s where it all began.’

Absolutely No Partners

For the politician, every party, every social engagement, is a puzzle, a crossword to be solved. There are hidden clues, connections to be made, information to be passed on. You solve the puzzle. And then you leave.

The Master

Ten years earlier, when the new century was still a kid, that invitation had been new, stiff and with a thin line of gold leaf around its edges – just one of several hundred dropping that morning into letterboxes around London, Edinburgh, the Cotswolds. Each had the name of the recipient handwritten at the top in faultless italic, clearly by an expensive fountain pen held by an expensively educated hand. Then came swirls of black, embossed Gothic print. ‘Neil Savage invites you to his All Hallows Party. Formal wear. Absolutely no partners. Refusals only.’

The party had been held at Worcestershire Hall, in Worcester Square, Mayfair. One of the last grand Edwardian houses still in private hands in central London, the address underlined the lavish nature of the invitation, and refusals had been few. Neil Savage – more properly, Lord Lupin – was not, in any case, a man accustomed to being refused. Private banker, art collector, philanthropist, crossbench peer, he was known for his foul temper and his brilliant wit. ‘Often disliked, never ignored,’ he said of himself, with intense satisfaction.

And that Halloween, as the black German limousines nudged one another around the dark and windy square, the party had begun with a certain style. Young men, their gold-sprayed torsos bare despite the cold, stood at intervals along the front of Worcestershire Hall holding blazing torches, so the arrivals had to squint against the billows of smoke, and brush small embers off their clothes. Straggling up the Portland stone stairs and into the house, they were greeted by servants in white tie and tails offering cocktails with squid ink and peppers, vodka and absinthe. Champagne was available for the weak-stomached.

Lord Lupin himself, dressed all in black with a red bow tie, whiskers painted onto his chalky face, gave a passable imitation of Mephistopheles as he greeted the guests one by one. In they flowed: one former prime minister – no, two former prime ministers; half a dozen other senior politicians from each party; once-feared newspaper editors; minor royals, portly and inclined to be affable; radical playwrights with long, well-cut grey hair; radical establishment artists who made large plastic eggs for the Chinese market; gelded rock musicians; celebrated lawyers; notorious bankers … plus, of course, the shadowy PR men who kept the country moving – in the wrong direction. By 7.30 p.m. it was already clear that this was a party like no other; not a single face here, not one, was anything other than exceedingly famous.

In those days Worcestershire Hall had not yet been gutted; but it was dilapidated. Chilly, underlit rooms, with dusty curtains and dirty Dutch pictures, led off from one another in endless confusion. ‘No Old Masters here, I’m afraid. Just Old Pupils. The family …’ Lupin said. Dark little staircases spiralled up and down, apparently pointlessly. Only when the guests reached the old ballroom, laid out for a feast and glittering with hundreds of wax candles, was there any real glow of welcome. At one end, a small Baroque orchestra was playing melancholy and haunting music, a tripping gavotte, a dying fall. In front of the orchestra, exquisite young men and women dressed as satyrs and fauns were performing some old, complicated dance, as if in a Peter Greenaway film.

The guests gathered in knots, broke up again and re-formed as they circulated around the house. In even the most neglected rooms there was always a candelabra and a sofa, where a journalist or a photographer might be placed. The flashes of photography ricocheted through the house like perpetual lesser lightning. And there was plenty to photograph – all those seamed, creased, famous faces: the curving eyebrows and drawn, tortured, gathered-up and stitched flesh of actresses better known for who they had bedded than for their talent; the pendulous, hairy jowls and stained-toothed smiles of public servants. There a law officer, here a criminal; and here the two together, a hand resting lightly on a shoulder. Swarming through the dark honeycomb of the house, human crocodiles, human lampreys, human prairie dogs, all jostling and snapping when they spoke.

And, just as there was plenty to capture, so there was plenty to speak about, so many old friends to discover. Stories of old political battles, long-forgotten legal suits and complicated love tangles were being rehearsed as the drink disappeared. Good old Burgundies, flinty unoaked and vintage Chardonnays circulated on the silver trays – sweet, succulent southern sunshine for gaping, dusty northern gullets. For those who preferred, the best Islay malts and vintage brandies were there to scald and burn on the way down. The massive mahogany table at one end of the ballroom was expertly stripped by the beautiful staff, who brought round plates of bloody grouse, like the aftermath of a Balkan massacre, and slivers of white halibut, and dishes of oysters.

All was going swimmingly until, about an hour into the party, something strange began to happen.

It was like a quiet but irresistible wind. The susurration started at the downstairs bar, worked its way up the main staircase, arrived in the ballroom, and then pushed outwards into numerous smaller rooms and crowded corridors. As it shouldered its way through the guests, the disturbance gained strength. Gasps spread with the speed of an epidemic; mutters grew to the volume of a waterfall. Everywhere there was a shaking of the atmosphere, a shared shock you could touch and watch move from group to group. ‘It’ was nothing but comprehension, Lupin’s boldest artwork taking shape. It was an awakening, the more real the more the guests looked around.

Almost every single person there, they realised, was not just famous, but infamous – disgraced. There in one corner were those who had lied while taking Britain towards damaging and dishonourable conflicts. Opposite them was a clutch of politicians who had been caught hiring themselves out like common prostitutes – and look, the men who had hired them – and observing it all from the other end of the room were the prominent, well-paid journalists who had ignored it because they were too busy bribing officers of the law in order to destroy decent people. Eating their canapés were NHS bosses who had tried to conceal deaths caused by incompetence and cruelty. Swilling down their wine were bankers who had destroyed their own banks and scurried off with barrowloads of money to roll in after they were stripped of their knighthoods. Loud laughter came from popular entertainers accused of raping young fans, and ex-DJs whose paedophile obsessions had become public. All evening Neil Savage, Lord Lupin, had been waiting, wondering when the penny would drop.

The very few who hadn’t already been disgraced looked as guilty as if they expected it at any time. There, for instance, nursing a whisky, was the Conservative peer Lord Auchinleck, with a face like a swollen, furious baby’s and pouchy eyes, his little pot belly squeezed into tartan trews of his own design.

Hardly anybody had been invited to Neil Savage’s most lavish party who had not been publicly exposed for their greed, lust or overweening ambition. But mostly greed. Almost without exception, every person there had once been on the front page of a newspaper, looking ashamed – or shocked, as a photographer tripped over in front of them.

What kind of honour was this? What species of revelry? The wind of panic grew stronger. Within minutes, people were uneasily shuffling towards the front door, only to be confronted by another row of cameras. At Worcestershire Hall that night there was no hiding place.

It was a one-time lord chancellor, who’d lost his job because of his addiction to rent boys and cocaine, who confronted the host. ‘What the fuck? What the fuck?’ he spluttered as his large purple forefinger jabbed Savage.

Lord Lupin smiled coolly back. ‘Fanny, Fanny, we’re all friends here. What’s the problem? Don’t like the food? Don’t like the music? You clearly do like the booze. So maybe it’s the company?’

‘This is some kind of sick trial by media, you ghastly little shit. Some kind of joke, and we are all the punchline,’ replied the elderly man. ‘I feel like making you my punchline, actually.’

‘Calm down, Fanny.’ By now there was quite a circle of equally upset men – and a few women – crowding around the banker-philanthropist host. ‘Yes, all right, I am making a point this evening,’ said Lord Lupin. ‘You are the people they would like to disappear. You are the people they would like, for their own paltry peace of mind, to think are villains, rare creatures who break the rules. But you are not – none of you – anything more or less than ordinary human beings, with your appetites and your competitive instincts and – forgive me – your swollen cocks. And you are still here. I am still here. So laugh at disgrace, I say. Mock the smug hypocrisy of the herbivores and dreary midgets who pretend to judge you. Raise your glasses, drink deep and – Welcome to the Underworld.’

Lord Lupin regretted the party when he awoke around mid-morning the following day. After a lifetime of political interference, he’d learned that some of his best jokes had unexpected consequences. It was Lupin, back then simply Neil Savage, the aspiring rock guitarist, who had dissuaded the young Tony Blair from a career at the bar and pointed out to him that the then-failing Labour Party provided the smoothest route into Parliament and onto a front bench. It was he who, as a young man, had turned Boris Johnson away from his youthful Eurocommunism and towards the Bullingdon Club. Neither of these pranks had turned out exactly as he had expected.

And now there had been a death. It was most unfortunate. The ex-lord chancellor had followed Lupin’s speech with a bellow, a flailing fist, and a heart attack. Central London roadworks ensured that the ambulance arrived late, and the overweight grandee expired. On the night for dead souls, there was now one more to remember.

After the Funeral

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.’

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