My Father’s sense of foreboding is not entirely assuaged by the morning papers

The headlines are better than in My Father’s dreams; quite a bit better, he thinks, as he sits with the papers spread out before him on the vast expanse of sanded table-top in the semi-subterranean North London kitchen of the Woman He Loves.

He is sipping the acrid black coffee that the Woman He Loves loves, and which he, as her lover, has learned to brew to her demanding specifications, using her ancient and somewhat temperamental stove-top espresso-maker. It’s far too bitter for My Father, but, like everything that passes his lips within these four walls, it tastes of love and freedom and becoming the man he was born to be.

He turns his attention to The Times, still, in this pre-Murdoch era, a paper of record; a voice more likely than most to influence the course of the campaign, over these last crucial forty-eight hours. And yes, it really could be a lot worse. True, Trade setback for Labour is not a banner headline that anyone would regard as positive press coverage. But for an hour or two yesterday, before My Father went to work on the story, words like crisis or disaster seemed a lot more likely to lead this morning’s front pages. And the analysis below the fold by that arrogant prick Jay (whom My Father hates on the grounds that he is younger, better connected and more successful) is rigorous but far from harsh, describing the trade figures as “erratic” – which delights My Father, because it creates an impression of the nation’s finances being buffeted by unpredictable external forces – and broadly following the line peddled so assiduously in that critical first hour after the figures broke, to the effect that they were no more than a blip, a minor setback on Britain’s unstoppable march towards the sun-lit Socialist economic uplands.

My Father knows he has done his job well, and quite possibly saved the campaign. But what matters, of course, is whether others – Marcia and the PM, to be specific – know this, too.

Is there any danger that Haines will somehow have managed to steal the credit? No, My Father reassures himself; not possible. He has witnesses! His herculean efforts to frame the story in the least negative way possible (the word spin has not yet entered our political vocabulary) were undertaken in full view of the entire campaign team, as well as everyone in the No 10 press office. No one present could possibly deny it was he, My Father, who led the successful fightback that turned a potential crisis or disaster into a mere setback!

Shove that up your arse, Haines, you duplicitous four-eyed cunt, thinks My Father.

Otherwise, the press coverage is almost all good. No one dissents from the view that Labour are on course for a solid victory, possibly by a landslide; Mr Powell’s assault on his party leader from the racialist right is still seen as fatally disruptive to the Tory campaign; and there is much speculation about who will succeed the hapless Heath as leader, when he resigns – as he certainly will – on Friday, when the scale of his defeat becomes clear.

But one thing in the papers – not strictly press coverage – bothers My Father. A small ad for Ladbroke’s offers 6-1 against a Tory victory; in from 8-1, and even longer odds, over the previous days and weeks. Like many members of the political class, My Father has a powerful near-superstitious reverence for the omniscience of bookies – who, unlike pollsters and journalists, stand to lose actual cash if they get it wrong.

Luckily, for the sake of My Father’s peace of mind, even his all-seeing eye fails to alight on this whimsical enquiry tucked away among the Telegraph’s letters to the editor: Speaking of strange reversals of fortune, could it be that Harold Wilson is 2-0 up with 20 minutes to play?

Above My Father’s head, in the upper reaches of the tall narrow house belonging to the Woman He Loves, ill-fitting window frames start to rattle as her three young boys begin their hyperactive assault on another day. Loud shouting, which could be adversarial in nature, or merely boisterous; discordant caterwauling (violin practice: the boys, though young, are all intensely musical); small feet thundering up and down stairs, amplified by the building’s cavernous acoustics.

My Father hears nothing. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he registers nothing. Throughout his life, My Father possesses an unsurpassed ability to block out any distraction that might interfere with the efficient working of his mighty intellect. No one is better able to inhabit a space bodily, while vacating it in every other more important regard.

“I’ve lost my fucking flute. Have you seen it?”

Gustav, the eldest son of the Woman He Loves, tumbles into the kitchen – having launched himself from the half-landing – looking ridiculously like something out of a Botticelli, with his stratospheric cheekbones and shoulder-length golden curls.

Even My Father is incapable of disregarding such a bluntly direct request for his attention. He smiles. He loves the way her children swear. It feels so grown-up and sophisticated, somehow, for parents to be relaxed about such footling transgressions of social norms. In any case, who says kids shouldn’t swear, or express themselves in any way other way open to adults? Apart from that ghastly shrivelled crone Mary Whitehouse, and her fascistic followers.

“No, sorry. Do you need it for school?”

“Of course I fucking do. Why else would I be looking for it?”

This is probably taking freedom of self-expression a little too far for My Father’s tastes. But before he can calibrate his response, the Woman He Loves has also appeared in the kitchen, looking – well, not beautiful exactly (objectively, she is far from being one of the most attractive women My Father has been involved with), but utterly captivating; tousled (her hair looks in need of a wash, in fact), still wearing nothing but the Hawkwind T-shirt, drowsy-eyed (she is most emphatically not a morning person) yet unmistakeably crackling with anger.

“He’s lost his fucking flute,” she tells My Father, her intonation suggesting that this is an inconvenience roughly on a par with, say, unexpectedly losing a general election that you were confidently expected by absolutely everyone to win.

“Yes, he did mention that.”

“So? What you are doing about it? Why do you assume – why does everyone assume – that I have nothing better to do than search the entire house, from top to bottom, for Gustav’s fucking flute? How can you possibly think that when you know I have an exhibition opening in less than two weeks?”

“I don’t think that, my love,” says My Father, emolliently. “I really don’t.” He loves it when she gets angry like this. Her anger is so big and cartoony and readily identifiable. So easy to ignite and extinguish, too. And so, so different from what he has been used to in his relationship with My Mother, where rage takes many forms, almost all of them long-simmering and not infrequently hidden behind a smile.

“Let me help you look,” he says.

“Help me?” she snaps back, “I don’t want you to fucking help me, My Father, I just want someone in my life, just for once, to take some responsibility and not leave everything, every last bloody thing, to me.”

My Father loves it when she calls him by his surname. So chic and metropolitan, somehow?

“Where did you last see it?” he asks Gustav, responsibly.

“If I knew that, it wouldn’t be fucking lost, would it?”

A generalised search of the tall narrow house ensues. The younger two boys, Caspar and little Pablo, appear and make various breakfast-related demands. Consuela arrives and starts vacuuming – which causes Attlee, the geriatric golden Labrador, to bark dementedly. In the hope of calming him, the Woman My Father Loves turns on the radio, which doesn’t help. The house becomes cacophonous. My Father, poking around under the boys’ beds, briefly reflects on why he enjoys this kind of domestic turmoil here, whereas he has always hated it at what he still thinks of as home, with My Mother and their three children.

Eventually, the flute is found – underneath My Father’s newspapers on the kitchen table. All eyes turn to the Woman He Loves, rather like a crowd at a bonfire party waiting to see whether a firework will bathe the night sky in brilliant fire, detonate with shattering volume, or fizzle damply out.

For a moment, she puts her hand over her mouth, as if to suppress a scream. Then she snorts, and splutters inelegantly, expelling particles of snot and larger fragments of the piece of toast she has been chewing. My Father is enraptured by the way the Woman He Loves laughs, as if nothing in the realm of human experience could possibly be funnier.

When My Father’s taxi arrives, she comes outside, to see him off. Over these last couple of weeks, they have actually spent more nights together than usual, because My Father has been accompanying the PM on campaigning day-trips, returning to London late, then leaving again early the following morning – making it unfeasible to sleep in his own bed, at home in the Surrey suburbs. But now, as the campaign reaches its conclusion, they face a long separation. My Father opens the cab door, and throws his briefcase and his old and disreputable canvas overnight bag (he is not a man who pays attention to accessories) onto the back seat. As he turns to face the Woman He Loves, she does a thing he likes, stepping onto his feet and cradling her hands behind his head. She isn’t tall, but like this, with her face upturned, their noses touch.

“I can’t bear it,” he says. And for once, his words are entirely free of guile or calculation. He can’t bear the thought of being apart from her. What he feels, if the chemicals flooding his cerebral cortex at this moment could be analysed scientifically, is virtually identical to the emotions he experienced taking leave of his parents before boarding the steamer that would take him to prep school in England, at the age of nine.

“You can. We will,” she says, fiercely. “But not for much longer.”

“Mm.” My Father’s assent to this sounds less than whole-hearted.

“I mean it, My Father,” she says fiercely, pressing her weight down on his feet. She is small but muscular, and surprisingly heavy. It hurts. “After this is over, you have to tell her. We must become real. “

“I will.”

“You will. Or…. “ She lets this hang, but My Father is perfectly clear about the ultimatum being presented to him. Either, once the election is won, he leaves My Mother in short order, and fully immerses himself in this North London quarter-life he has been living for so long. Or he follows the example of so many discontented married men before him, by vacating the field of love and valour, and scurrying back into the emotionally desolate security of his suburban burrow.

My Father says nothing, but nods obediently. She kisses him on the mouth. “Now go and win us the election, my brilliant man,” she says. The “us” here, he knows, is used in the Lady Macbeth sense, referring to what she and he as a couple stand to gain from victory on Thursday. And he feels a warmth he has never known before, being with a woman who loves him, and believes in his exceptional abilities, and truly wants him to be happy and successful (which for My Father are the same thing).

“I’ll do my best,” he says, disentangling himself from her, and climbing into the oven-like cab. Another blazing day of this sweltering campaign has begun.

*

In the cab, on the way over to Lime Grove, My Father thinks miserably about his wife and children, starting their day in Worplesdon without him. He tries, briefly, to persuade himself that he has been absent so frequently of late that he will barely be missed when his membership of the family unit is officially terminated, as it must be very soon now.

He blinks exaggeratedly, screwing up his whole face, once, twice, as if to wipe the unbearable mental image of his abandoned family – but only succeeds in replacing it with another, no less troubling, of the Other Woman opening his letter. She knows his handwriting, of course; but he never writes to her, so as she scrabbles at the envelope with trembling fingers, she must, surely, know what’s inside? In which case, it hardly matters what he actually wrote, does it? Though, anyway, he reminds himself, she leaves for work early, so almost certainly won’t receive his letter until she gets home this evening.

A third unwelcome thought invades My Father’s mind, causing him to experience a sudden surge of nausea, and a moment of vertiginous terror like a man stepping through lift doors to find only fresh air under his feet.

6-1! As of today, the all-knowing bookies no longer regard a Tory victory as a hopeless long-shot….

***

09:50

My Father loses control of the PPB

Uncharacteristically, My Father arrives early for the pre-production meeting, which is due to start at 10. Just as well, it turns out, as the BBC’s Lime Grove studio complex is not, as he imagined, a single large building, but a baffling Escher-esque labyrinth, navigated via miles of drab industrial corridors on multiple levels and half-levels, linked by winding steel staircases. Even the liveried functionary designated to conduct My Father to Studio G – a grizzled elder who has presumably worked here for decades – seems unsure of the geography.

“Sorry, sir,” he says, spinning on his heel, having fruitlessly tried to open a locked door. “Think we might have taken a wrong turn back there….”

A minute or two later, he tries another door, successfully this time. “Lead performer’s dressing room, Studio G,” he announces, with a note of triumph, as he ushers My Father in.

Marcia and Kaufmann are sitting alongside each other, facing an enormous mirror surrounded by bare light-bulbs. They have a faintly conspiratorial self-satisfied air, with perhaps just a whiff of caught-in-the-act about it.

“Ah, My Father,” Marcia greets him, brightly. And he knows immediately, from the way her eyes flicker away from him towards Kaufmann, what has happened. They have stitched him up.

She waves a sheaf of A4 at him. “You’re going to like this,” she says.

My Father holds out his hand, knowing for certain that he is not going to like this, at all.

“Geraldo has done a little work on your brilliant script,” she begins. “He’s made just a few small – very small…. “ Momentarily, she falters here, unable to decide between “improvements” and “refinements”.

“Tweaks, dear boy. Mere tweaks!” jumps in Kaufmann, who is wearing a relatively sober midnight blue suit today, albeit with a paisley-patterned cravat.

My Father looks at the typescript he’s now holding. Marcia has a soft spot for Kaufmann, but she only calls him Geraldo when their goals and desires are perfectly aligned, and the bond between them at its most unbreakable.

“Tweak-ettes!” says Kaufmann. “If that’s the word for a teeny-weeny word-massage!”

“All right,” says My Father, resignedly. “Let me read it.”

My Father sits on a battered chaise longue, the only available seating in the dressing-room where the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will shortly prepare to record the broadcast that may define the nation’s future. He reads, fast. And yes, it’s exactly what he expects. The intro, approved by the PM at yesterday’s meeting, remains intact – with the addition of a couple of fairly effective sentences in defence of the trade figures, lifted directly from My Father’s rearguard action yesterday. Otherwise, Kaufmann has simply excised all trace of My Father from the script. The country’s economic strength (despite the trade figures) is once again the envy of civilised nations around the globe. Socialism, as the indispensable engine of growth with social justice, seems to crop up in nearly every para. And the PM is restored to fully presidential, if not dictatorial, status, with no mention whatever of a senior ministerial team sharing the burdens of leadership.

As he reaches the end (which is terrible – some complacent shit about everyone facing an important choice on Thursday, with no indication about what the right choice might be), My Father glances up to find Marcia and Kaufmann watching him, expectantly.

“Well?” says Marcia, in a tone intended to convey that she confidently expects his response to be positive, but utterly failing to do so.

My Father sighs. He knows he should fight, for every sentence, every word, every comma that’s been lost. He knows the election – and his own brilliant career prospects, not to mention the nation’s future – could depend on it. And yet, he feels a terrible lassitude. Looking at Marcia and her beloved Geraldo exchanging glances, he knows this battle has been fought and won before he arrived. In an instant, My Father decides to conserve his remaining energy (he’s fairly robust physically and mentally, but this campaign has been the most exhausting experience of his life) for a fight he has a chance of winning.

“It’s fine,” says. “It’s good. Just a couple of tiny suggestions….“

And My Father makes a couple of suggestions that, to the relief of Marcia and Kaufmann, really are tiny, and made only for face-saving purposes. And so the script is finished, and Marcia takes it off to phone into No 10, for Haines and the PM to give their final approval. And My Father and Kaufmann, left alone together, take important papers from their briefcases, and study them intently, and make the occasional marginal note, and say nothing to each other.

“Are there phones?” My Father asks, eventually.

The PM isn’t due to arrive until 11, and there are calls My Father should be making.

“Next door,” grunts Kaufmann, wasting none of his famous charm on My Father.

Out in the corridor, it’s not immediately obvious where “next door” might be. Expanses of blank wall stretch in both directions. Choosing left, My Father eventually comes to double doors, which he nudges open to reveal a cavernous studio, at the far end of which a group of long-haired young men with guitars are singing a song if possible more inane than the one about the weather being hot. (“Lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-la!” croons the one with longest hair, repeatedly, over the racket made by the instrumentalists.) Withdrawing, unnoticed, My Father thinks for a moment of his elder son, a talented bass guitarist, far more dedicated to making a career as a rock musician than to studying for the A-levels he is currently sitting. Without consciously registering the thought, My Father makes a lightning-quick calculation to the effect that by the age his elder son is now, he himself had not seen his own father (or any other member of his family) for nearly five years, being separated from them because of the war.

Behind the correct door, My Father finds a smaller less starry dressing-room, in which there is a trolley mounted with two telephones, provided for the Prime Ministerial party. He is conscious that he has promised to call My Mother, but he can’t face it now; he’ll do it later, from the hotel. Instead, he calls his office.

“Nothing much, yet,” Linda reports. “I’ve put a couple of meetings in your diary, for when you’re back next week, but nothing you need to worry about.”

Back next week! My Father’s leave ends on Friday, the day after the election, so he will indeed by back at his desk on Monday. But at this moment, with everything – absolutely everything that really matters, now and for the rest of his life – in play, to be lost or won, over the next few days, the idea of returning meekly to humdrum daily routine seems a bizarrely implausible scenario, like a butterfly carefully reinserting itself into the cocoon.

“Aitken hasn’t called?,” he asks. “Beloff?” These are his two most well disposed journalists, both of whom have provided him with priceless insights – particularly into Tory strategy – during the campaign.

Linda is employed by British Steel, and theoretically prohibited from playing any part in My Father’s political life; but over the years, this boundary has become increasingly permeable.

“No, neither of them.”

Glancing at his watch, he realises they are almost certainly still in the Tory press conference, which was scheduled later than usual this morning. What are those bastards saying? What desperate last roll of the dice are they trying? My Father would give almost anything to know.

“OK, I’ll catch them later. Or if either of them calls, you can give them this number….“

***

11:45

My Father still hates the Fucking Pipe

The recording is not going well.

Even before getting started, there has been a dispute over make-up. This being the first broadcast by the PM to be transmitted in colour, a new palette is needed, particularly as, after nearly three relentless weeks on the campaign trail, the Prime Ministerial complexion is pallid, going on pasty. The PM himself seems unconcerned, but Marcia is outraged by the clownish colours applied, and a protracted negotiation is needed to arrive at a slightly more muted compromise, acceptable to all. There have been technical issues, too – namely a whimsical autocue that insists on going at its own pace, racing ahead of a comfortable reading speed, or dragging behind, at random.

But by far the biggest impediment to rapid progress is the fact that the PM is clearly off his game. The most brilliantly accomplished political performer of his generation is fluffing everything. Again and again, he stumbles over words, and has to retake. For the opening sequence, where the PM’s voice is heard over the footage of adoring crowds greeting him on his travels, this is merely tiresome, since parts of numerous takes can fairly easily be edited together, to create a flawless one. But, after that, for nearly nine long minutes, the PM must talk directly, confidingly, to camera, laying out for each individual viewer, each voter, the reasons why electing a Tory government on Thursday would result, inexorably, in economic disaster and national perdition. On a good day, he might very well do this in a single take; but this is, emphatically, not a good day – and, as My Father coaches and cajoles him from the control room (“That was brilliant, PM – but let’s just do it once more, from the top of the para”), the PM becomes increasingly irritable (“If it was – and I quote you, Oriel – ‘brilliant’, why, may I ask, do we need to do it again?”).

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the PM’s fabled professionalism begins to clank and grind into gear, and the process of recording becomes a little less torturous. Nevertheless, it’s decided – by Marcia and the BBC producer, a pimply youth who looks about 19 to My Father – that the Pipe is needed.

My Father groans inwardly. The fucking Pipe! He knows instinctively that it’s wrong; that whatever positive connotations the Pipe once conveyed are now more than cancelled out by the image of a dense swirling cloud enveloping the PM’s head. But My Father has to concede that the Pipe will almost certainly help to relax the PM, as well as providing useful cut-aways (CU hands of PM briefly tamping; CU pipe rests in ash-tray), to assist in the construction of the final continuous master-shot.

Eventually, with time running out (the PM is on a very tight schedule today), the final sentence – total shit! – is recorded. The PM, released from the studio, comes into the control room to watch the near-complete broadcast. He’s looking pleased with himself now.

“How was I?” he enquires. “Not too pink, I hope – and I mean that in an entirely non-political sense.”

“You were fabulous, PM,” says Kaufmann. “As ever.”

“Exactly the right colour,” murmurs My Father, who feels called upon to say something. “You were very good indeed, PM,” he adds, realising more is required from him.

But the PM is distracted, and barely registers his response. “Where’s Marcia?” he asks.

My Father, who has been tightly focused on the PM’s performance, hasn’t been conscious of her absence from the control room.

“She had to take a call, PM,” says Kaufmann, who misses nothing.

“Then we’ll have to wait for her before we watch the broadcast,” says the PM, discontentedly. It’s odd that Marcia’s angry disruptive energy is such a source of comfort to him, but he always becomes fretful when he is separated from her.

“I’ll go and chivvy her,” says Kaufmann. “If I do say so myself, I give good chivvy!”

But before he can move, or My Father can vomit, the door swings open and Marcia surges in like a warrior queen, riding a wave of righteous fury. Suddenly, the airless room’s limited supply of oxygen seems to have been replaced by liquid fire.

“Well, they’ve done it,” she remarks quietly. As she pauses for effect, everyone freezes, imagining whatever it is they fear the worst if this campaign should still somehow, despite all those reassuring opinion polls, go disastrously wrong. My Father pictures himself back in his dingy office at British Steel, wrangling endlessly with minor civil servants, without a peerage or any prospect of advancement, facing a long grey slog towards retirement, still shackled to My Mother and condemned to live out his life in suburban mediocrity.

“Those fucking Tory bastards have hit us with devaluation!”

It’s as bad as they feared. Not quite as bad as, say, incontrovertible evidence coming to light that the PM is a Russian spy (the security forces are still working on that), but very, very bad indeed. And yet there is also a sense of inevitability about what is happening. After all, thinks My Father, as soon as the immediate panic starts to subside, why wouldn’t the Tories – hopelessly behind in every poll, rapidly running out of time before the day of reckoning, facing imminent electoral obliteration – launch their last remaining missile? In fact, the only real question is why they haven’t done it sooner. Faced with a government claiming economic success, what possible reason could the Tories have for leaving it until now to draw the attention of the British public to the PM’s responsibility for the country’s greatest economic humiliation of modern times – and the strong possibility of it being repeated if Labour should win on Thursday?

The PM alone seems unflustered. In fact, there is suddenly something invigorated – roguish even – about him. For the smallest possible sub-division of a second, My Father allows himself to entertain the thought that perhaps the PM actually wants to lose on Thursday. But no, surely it’s more likely that this is his legendary love of hand-to-hand political street-fighting awaking within him, and stirring the blood in his veins.

“Marcia, what have they said, exactly?”

“I have it here, PM.” She gestures with her pad, which is covered in shorthand hieroglyphics. “It’s just a one-page hand-out – which they gave out after their press conference, because they were too fucking cowardly to say it out loud in front of the cameras.”

“Let’s do this in the car.” The PM is all decisive focused energy now; incredibly different from the weary, slightly woozy elder statesman of an hour ago. “My Father, we’ll need you with us. Geraldo, you stay here and finish up the PPB.”

Geraldo! The PM just used Marcia’s pet name for Kaufmann, to soften the blow of leaving him behind! The PM values My Father’s advice more highly than Kaufmann’s!

In My Father’s world, no one ever really succeeds unless someone else fails.

*

In the Daimler, on the way back to No 10, the PM remains on commanding form. By the time they have picked their way through the roadworks slowing Shepherd’s Bush to a crawl, he has assimilated the content of the Tory hand-out, and is dictating his response, fast and fluently. Marcia, leaning forwardly awkwardly with her pad on her knee, is clearly struggling to keep up – holding up her left hand from time to time, in a slowing gesture. My Father, who, in the hurried departure from Lime Grove, has somehow got himself between the PM and Marcia on the back seat, has little to contribute, though the PM does throw him the occasional sideways glance, looking for his approval of a phrase or sentiment. Each time, My Father screws up his face judiciously, and nods.

The PM’s tactic is offensive defence; a ferocious assault on the Leader of the Opposition’s character, and the lack of judgment and patriotism he has displayed by recklessly talking down the British economy, for the sake of squalid party political advantage.

“He is willing…. “ says the PM, putting his hand on My Father’s arm, in a wait-till-you-hear-this way, “…. to put at risk the strength of sterling, the economic security of Britain, employment, and the standard of living of our people in a last desperate throw to win votes.”

Despite himself, My Father is impressed. This is very well judged; aggressive, righteously indignant even, but not hysterical or flustered-sounding. It feels like a grown-up remonstrating with a toddler who has tried to kick his shins.

“I couldn’t have done better myself, PM,” says My Father, humorously, but meaning it.

“High praise, Oriel. High praise indeed.”

*

Back at No 10, Marcia hurries off upstairs to type the press release, and get it into distribution. The PM disappears into his flat, presumably to root out his wife, who will, reluctantly, be accompanying him on the final trip of the campaign, due to depart very shortly.

My Father, with 20 minutes or so to kill, considers racing out for a sandwich. He has had no lunch, and should be hungry. But in fact the dull ache in his stomach has much more to do with anxiety than appetite. He suspects he would throw up if he tried to eat. He thinks of calling My Mother, but only for a moment. There is nowhere at No 10 where he can be sure of talking privately, and he definitely doesn’t want an audience for that conversation. So instead, he puts in a quick call to his office, and asks Linda to pass on a message to My Mother, to the effect that he will call her without fail this evening. And then he dials the number of Aitken’s direct line, at the Guardian. To My Father’s relief, he’s back in the newsroom now.

“How bad?” says My Father, without preamble.

“Bad.”

“As in…. “ My Father is going to say “we lose on Thursday?”, but can’t bring himself to pronounce the words. Aitken understands him, though.

“Maybe. Maybe not. But, at the very least, there’s been a shift in momentum.”

“We’ve got it under control,” says My Father, and he briefly outlines the content of the press release, quoting the PM’s “putting at risk the strength of sterling” sentence from memory.

“Not bad,” says Aitken, not sounding particularly impressed. “Should be enough to get him back in.”

“Should be?”

“Probably will be, with the polls like they are. But let’s just say it’s a bloody good thing it’s on Thursday. By next week….“

“You really think that?”

“I think I do. There’s just a sense that Heath has got the wind in his sails. So to speak.”

“But that won’t be your line?”

“Of course not. We’ll have to cover the devaluation thing, but we’re treating it as a scare story – we were, even before you gave me the “unpatriotic scoundrels” angle.

My Father is somewhat reassured by this, and moves to wind up the call.

“So, are you coming up north with us?”

“Not sure. Might get up there tomorrow, but they want me here today – so I’ll wait and see how things look in the morning.”

There is nothing sinister in itself about the fact that the only Labour-leaning broadsheet wants its best political writer to focus on the Tories in these last 48 hours before polling begins – at least, that’s what My Father tells himself, as he puts down the phone. But it doesn’t feel right to him; it doesn’t feel right at all.

***

15:30

My Father accompanies the PM on what could be his final trip as PM

As the PM comes down the main staircase, with his wife clinging to his arm, it seems as if the entire staff of No 10 has gathered in the hallway, to see him off. Mary, in a lavender suit, wears a patterned scarf jauntily knotted at her throat, at odds with her air of bravely borne suffering. (She only accompanies her husband on his campaign travels because it is judged to cast a negative light on the bachelor Heath’s lack of a female consort.) Behind them, the PM’s bagman Bill, a colossal ex-Marine, carries a large suitcase and a couple of smaller pieces of luggage.

The mood of the assembled company is hard to gauge. There is applause, and a few shouts of “Good luck, PM!” and “All the best for Thursday!”. This is, after all, the last time the No 10 team – civil servants, secretaries, Garden Girl typists, messengers, postboys – will see their boss and his wife before the election, which most of them confidently expect him to win. But there is also, My Father senses, something faintly elegiac in the air; a shared knowledge that this could, depending on the vagaries of the democratic process, be the end of something; a final farewell; the bringing down of the curtain on a political era.

The PM is almost certainly attuned to this, but, typically, chooses to make light of the occasion.

“Chop, chop, back to work everyone! We have an election to win; you have important jobs to do; and we will all be back here on Friday, ready for the next five years. Well, maybe Monday; we’ll give ourselves the weekend to recover!”

His words are greeted with renewed and more enthusiastic applause, which carries the PM and his travelling companions – Marcia, Kaufmann, and My Father, as well as Mary and Bill – through the front door and out onto Downing Street, where two cars await them.

The press is out in force (though no TV cameras, My Fathers notices), and questions are shouted. “The Tories claim you’ll have to devalue again – what’s your response, PM?” “Still expecting a landslide, PM?” “Looking forward to seeing more of your husband after Thursday, Mary?”

Normally, the PM would enjoy this kind of cut and thrust, but today he has a train to catch; so – as Bill holds open the door of the Daimler for him and his wife – he has to content himself with smiling and waving.

My Father, about to get into the second car, feels something wet on his vast dome of exposed forehead. For a moment, he is puzzled, and glances upwards. Rain! The first to fall on a campaign that until now has unfolded under cloudless skies.

*

On the train to Manchester, the PM does something My Father has never seen him do before. He sleeps. Just north of Watford, his chin tips forward onto his chest, and well before Nuneaton he has slumped sideways, allowing his head to rest, a little awkwardly, on Mary’s shoulder. The finest political mind of its generation is at rest.

My Father, sitting opposite with his back to the engine, wonders briefly if he should try to wake the PM, by coughing discreetly or rummaging noisily in his briefcase. But, in fact, there is very little work to be done at this stage of the campaign, every speech, every contact with the press, every unscripted exchange with the great British public having now been repeated ad infinitum, and committed to memory. One of the PM’s most remarkable talents is his ability to say the exact same words for the hundred-and-tenth time as if they have just sprung newly minted from his imagination. My Father decides not to disturb him.

Instead, he watches the PM sleep. Mary has closed her eyes, too, and may also be asleep. They have, both of them, been kind to My Father, and he feels a real fondness towards them. But it strikes My Father how very…. ordinary they look. Like the nice elderly couple you might strike up conversation with when sheltering from the rain in a seaside café.

As quietly as he can, My Father gets up and opens the door of the Prime Ministerial compartment, then steps into the corridor. He shuffles the bucketing length of the train to the buffet car where, with impressive self-restraint, he buys not a large Scotch (or even an odourless large vodka), but a cup of tea and an unappetising pork pie of uncertain vintage, which he wolfs down leaning on the counter.

Returning to his seat, he finds the PM still sleeping, his mouth now hanging open in imbecilic fashion. Mary is unquestionably asleep, too. And it seems to be contagious, because both Marcia and Kaufmann also appear to be dozing. Why, My Father thinks long-sufferingly, should he be the only one to use this journey time productively? He has worked just as hard anyone on this campaign, and he is tired, too. And, in any case, the only really worthwhile thing he could be doing is talking to journalists, trying to rub the sharpest edges off the Tories’ devaluation scare – and unless someone has found a way to install a phone on board an InterCity express (My Father is not technologically minded, but he’s pretty sure they haven’t), that isn’t a possibility open to him.

My Father closes his eyes. But instead of darkness descending, uneasy visions arise. In the first scene projected onto the backs of his eye-lids, he sees the Other Woman arriving home from work, and finding his letter concealed under the Brentford Nylons catalogue on the doormat, in the ineffably depressing hallway of the shared house where she lives. Next he sees My Mother, in the airy high-ceilinged kitchen of their spacious suburban home, angrily preparing food for the children she has borne him, while paying absolutely no regard whatever to the telephone on the wall, which she would, in any case, very probably be too busy to answer if it were to ring. And now this vision in turn is replaced by the Woman He Loves, hard at work in her studio, tongue folded back – enchantingly! – onto her upper lip in concentration, as she makes final tiny adjustments to one of her extraordinary deranged landscapes, which, My Father feels certain, will turn the art world upside down, when her exhibition opens in two weeks’ time.

Why, he asks, himself despairingly do the first two have to exist? He doesn’t – of course he doesn’t, he’s not a monster – wish My Mother and the Other Woman dead. But oh, if only they had never been born, so that he could have met the Woman He Loves spotless, unencumbered, free! How, in the name of everything that is good and fair, can it be right that his one true path to lasting happiness in life should only have opened before him when he was labouring under intolerable burdens, entangled, ensnared, enfeebled by the consequences of wrong turnings taken years, decades earlier? Why can’t My Mother and the Other Woman just…. cease to be? And, as he is thinking this, he is aware that if his wish were to come true, his children would disappear from the face of the earth, which would make him unhappy, as well as reflecting very badly indeed upon him as a person (a father who cancelled his children!), although it also occurs to him, before he can prevent the thought from taking conscious shape, that if his children had never been born, he wouldn’t miss them or feel himself to be in any way to blame for their non-existence.

And eventually, feeling weary, self-pitying, guilty, and sad – an amalgam of emotions he will endlessly refine and perfect throughout his adult life – My Father disappears into a long tunnel of sleep.

***

20:05

My Father rather wishes he hadn’t invented the “presidential walkabout”

“Socialist…. SCUM! SCUM! SCUM!”

The rain that fell briefly on the capital earlier in the day has not travelled north, and it’s a sultry airless summer evening. On the unlovely streets of Oldham West, the second most marginal constituency in Greater Manchester, burly men brandishing placards with Tory slogans are jostling for position with Labour supporters, and other unaffiliated members of the public – and easily out-shouting them.

The PM and his wife, who have been conveyed here directly from the station, have just emerged from their car, and, though protected by a phalanx of Party officials and police officers, seem in real danger of being submerged in the swirling mass of humanity. If My Father, trailing miserably in the PM’s wake, had ever stood on the terraces at a well attended football match, he would be finding something familiar about the crush of bodies, the noise and sense of incipient violence. He hates this aspect of campaigning – surprisingly perhaps, since he has some claim to being the person responsible for introducing the presidential-style walkabout to British political life.

The format of this innovation is always the same. As they have been here in Oldham, the PM and his wife are set down by their car at Point A in a busy urban environment, then make their way on foot slowly towards Point B, pausing to exchange pleasantries (or, in Mary’s case, smiles) with members of the voting public, and to shake as many hands as possible. Babies, if present, can expect to be kissed, or chin-chucked. Prolonged discussion of Labour Party policy is not encouraged, and effortlessly cut short if an interlocutor shows signs of persistence (“They insist I keep moving,” the PM has become adept at saying, over his shoulder, “but I hope you will read our manifesto, which covers the important issue you raise!”). Arriving at Point B, the PM makes a pithy seemingly improvised speech, and shakes a few more hands before being bundled back into his car.

“Labour, Labour, Labour – OUT, OUT, OUT!”

The Tories in the crowd are now getting some organised chanting underway, but the loudest individual voices can still make themselves heard.

“You’re a disgrace to this country – we won’t let you bankrupt Britain!”

“Haven’t you done enough damage already? Typical bloody Yorkshireman!”

“Heath is going to fuck you on Thursday!”

To this last, the PM can’t resist responding, luckily at a volume only audible to the handful of electors nearest to him: “I rather think he would enjoy that more than I would.”

Of course, it’s not unprecedented for a politician to interact with voters in a more-or-less spontaneous way; but until now, no party leader has made this type of interaction central to their electoral strategy. The plan, instigated by My Father, has been to play to the PM’s exceptional strength in creating an easy rapport with ordinary voters – while casting a withering light on the Leader of the Opposition’s hopelessly frosty and uncomfortable demeanour, in similar circumstances.

It’s widely judged to have been a successful strategy. But, as the campaign has advanced, so the care-free spontaneity of the PM’s walkabouts has become harder to manufacture. In particular, the large friendly crowds that greeted the PM on his travels have been infiltrated by ever-increasing numbers of hostiles; to the extent that now, on this steamy Lancashire evening, it feels as if the nation’s elected leader is not just unwelcome, but could even be in physical danger.

The PM, to do him credit, is unfazed. Someone – probably one of the local Party people – has handed him a megaphone, and his head and shoulders suddenly appear above the level of the crowd, as he steps onto a thoughtfully provided box.

My Father, who has become hopelessly separated from the PM, is unable to follow what he is bellowing into the megaphone, but – from the little he can make out – it’s clearly not one of his well-practised standard mini-stump speeches.

“….Tory friends sound very well lubricated…. enjoy yourselves now…. no reason at all to celebrate on Thursday evening……. no sign of your leader, here in Oldham……… too busy fighting off Mr Powell and his storm-troopers……. promise you this….. would be a vote for economic chaos, lost jobs and higher prices!”

This is met with loud cheers from the friendly part of the crowd, temporarily drowning out the enemies of Socialism. The PM – for the first time in days, it strikes My Father – looks energised, impish, elated. Unlike his wife – cowering nearby under the protection of Bill, who has a meaty forearm draped over her shoulder – he is enjoying himself.

My Father hates the PM for this. Walking (sometimes literally) in his shadow these last three weeks, the faithful self-effacing aide has continually measured himself against his boss – persuading himself that, in many respects – intellect, command of language, understanding of historical context, even detailed grasp of policy – he and the PM are equals; or maybe even that the comparison favours him, My Father. But here, out on the streets, amid the hurly burly, when the adrenalin pumps and politics bears no resemblance at all to a parlour game or an academic discipline, the PM is in a class of his own.

My Father hates the most outstanding political performer of his generation for being better at politics than he is.

***

21:55

My Father enjoys a rare tête-à-tête with the PM

“Ah, Miss Rigg. We enjoyed meeting her, didn’t we, Mary?”

Back at the hotel, The Avengers is just finishing as Marcia turns on the TV in the PM’s suite, in time for the PPB.

“You did,” says Mary, tartly. She is much less subdued now that campaigning is over for another day. It also helps that Bill – who has segued into another of his multiple roles, as Prime Ministerial butler – has poured her a very large medium-sweet sherry.

“Pity about Miss Christie, though,” the PM can’t quite prevent himself from saying.

“And now a broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party,” interrupts the continuity announcer, in timely fashion.

Kaufmann has scuttled back to his constituency, so it’s just the PM’s core travelling campaign team assembled here to watch the potentially decisive broadcast, less than 36 hours before polling begins. The PM and his wife are on the sofa; Marcia has the only armchair; and My Father is less comfortably seated on an upright dining chair, a little behind the others. Bill hovers in the background like a gigantic potentially lethal Jeeves.

The broadcast starts; and yes, it is exactly the one they made earlier at Lime Grove. Stirring music, ecstatic crowds and the PM in voiceover, “It has been like this all over the country….” Nothing, in the intervening hours, has occurred to alchemise their ponderously leaden production into televisual gold.

For the next 10 minutes, they watch in near-silence – broken only by an occasional grunt of assent or affirmation (“Yes, good” when a point comes across well; “That was absolutely fine”, when one of the sticky parts of the PM’s performance passes off non-calamitously.) Only My Father winces throughout; at some points so visibly that he has to put his hand across his face, as if listening with rapt attention and blocking out all distractions from the PM’s words.

Seen and heard here, in this weird parody of a domestic family setting (the PM and Mary as Mum and Dad, Marcia and My Father the teenage kids), the broadcast is even worse than he feared. Partly, it’s the script. “Voters realise that no Prime Minister in this century has fought an election against such a background of economic strength as we have got today.” How did they let that through? What possessed them to think that, with those trade figures on every front page, they could get away with making such a grotesquely overblown claim? But it’s not so much the content as the tone that fills My Father with foreboding, physically present in his body as an increasing pressure just below his rib cage, as if someone is slowly inflating a balloon in his abdomen. In the passages where the PM is aiming to sound reassuring, like a trusted family doctor calming the parents of a sick toddler, there is no issue at all; nobody does that better than the PM. But where is the uplift? Where is the sense of a man of destiny, with a vision of a better future? Where are the dynamism and positive energy that are going to get lukewarm Labour voters off their sofas (or, given the weather, out of their deckchairs) and into the polling booth? Of these My Father can discern no trace.

The broadcast ends, and there is applause – from Marcia and Mary, then Bill, and finally My Father, who joins in just in time for his hesitation not to be noticeable.

“Well?” says the PM.

“Excellent, PM,” says Marcia. “I think we have conclusively cooked the Tories’ goose.” She would almost certainly express this sentiment much more colourfully, if not for Mary’s somewhat inhibiting presence. “So much more inspiring and to-the-point than all that…. nonsense about the Leader of the Opposition’s sailing boat!”

“Top notch, PM,” opines Bill.

“What about you?” the PM asks My Father. “After all, you put the words into my mouth.”

My Father isn’t having that pile of shit pinned on him.

“Well, not entirely, PM. Gerald played a big part…. but overall, I’m very happy with it. I don’t think there’s anything more we could have done.”

Except make a broadcast that would have actually improved our chances of winning on Thursday, he thinks.

Mary, who has been suppressing yawns, retreats to the bedroom, closing the door behind her; and, rather surprisingly, Marcia takes this as her cue to retire, too. It’s unusual for her to choose to leave a room with the PM in it. She switches off the TV before she leaves.

“Anything else, PM?” asks Bill, clearly intending to follow them.

My Father realises he’s about to left alone with the PM, something that has never happened before.

“Perhaps I should….“ he says, making as if to get to his feet.

“Nonsense, Oriel. You’ll stay for a nightcap.”

This is closer to a command than an invitation. And while Bill performs his final duty of the evening, by topping up their glasses, My Father moves to the armchair vacated by Marcia, so that he is sitting alongside the PM.

They both drink.

“What did you really think?” says the PM, as soon as Bill has left the room.

My Father is taken aback. For one so powerful, the PM can sometimes be surprisingly perceptive.

“I thought it was good.”

“Good? Not very good – or excellent, as Marcia put it?”

My Father can’t get out of this now. He has to say something thoughtfully critical of the broadcast, but not devastatingly so.

“I thought we lacked a sense of urgency.” His use of the first person plural is intended to convey that he attaches no blame to the PM.

The PM considers this, but doesn’t share My Father’s concern.

“Well, in my view, you hit the nail on the head – our “solid results” versus the Tories’ pie-in-the-sky promises of spending more and taxing less. My performance may have been a little lacking compared to an Olivier or Gielgud – or a Williamson – but your words would have been hard to improve upon.”

“It was partly Gerald,” My Father again feels compelled to remind him.

The PM smiles on him benignly. “Take a tip from a very old campaigner, Oriel: when you’re offered a compliment, accept it. And don’t let some other bugger take all the credit!”

My Father laughs, with appropriate modesty. “Hardly ‘some other bugger’!”

“No, of course, Gerald is a fine wordsmith, but certainly no better than you.”

My Father can’t help feeling a bit patronised by this. Wordsmith! It sounds crudely artisanal; a fashioner of sturdy paragraphs, and perhaps the occasional sparkling sentence or phrase. By this point in his life, he has always hoped to be recognised as something more than that; a coming man, a political thinker and do-er of real substance; a potential holder of high office (if not an actual holder of high office).

“Thank you, PM,” says My Father meekly. And for a few moments, they sit in silence, as the Scotch they are both drinking performs its restorative function. The more-than-half-empty bottle of Teacher’s stands on a coffee table, by the PM’s knee. My Father feels a lot drunker than he should. For the duration of the campaign, he has greatly reduced his intake of alcohol, thereby, it seems, proportionately increasing its impact.

The PM has a benevolent air about him, too.

“So, after our great victory on Thursday…. what next?”

For a second or two, My Father fails to comprehend what this question refers to. And then, when it dawns on him that the PM is enquiring about his future plans, he feels a brief surge of panic. After all, he can hardly respond openly and honestly, which would mean saying something like, “Well, PM, I’m very much hoping you will confer a life peerage on me in the New Year’s Honours, or, at the very least, that you will see to it that the next by-election in a safe seat falls into my lap, and that, in either eventuality, I will be in your Cabinet, or at the very, very least a junior minister, by this time next year.”

So what can he say? What should he say?

“Well, PM, I have a family to support…. “ he starts, unconvincingly, his objective, as far as he has one, being to remind the PM that he is working on the campaign in an unpaid capacity. “But I very much hope that, whatever happens, I’ll be able to continue to be of service to the Party, and of course, to you.”

“I’m sure you will,” says the PM, leaning forward to pat My Father’s knee. “And of course, you’re absolutely right; family is always the most important thing.”

My Father wants to cry. That wasn’t what he meant, at all! He definitely doesn’t want the PM to think that he considers his family (in any case, which family?) more important than his political career. But the PM is following his train of thought.

“I couldn’t have done any of this without Mary,” he says, raising his glass as if to toast her, but drinking instead. “I know her lack of enthusiasm for this wicked world we move in has sometimes been seen as a hindrance to my career. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s knowing she is always there – steadfast, keeping the home fires burning, if you’ll excuse the cliché – that has allowed me to forge ahead and prosper in my chosen profession.” He ends with a self-deprecating smile; he has just used language appropriate to a modestly successful country solicitor to describe the most brilliant political career since the war.

And now My Father doesn’t just want to cry; he desperately wants to confide, to confess. The PM is so good and kind and wise. My Father wants, almost more than he has ever wanted anything in his life, to tell him everything there is to tell about the Woman He Loves, and how she makes him feel that he is capable of anything, and loves him in exactly the way that he has always needed to be loved. And perhaps if he did, the PM – so good, so kind, so wise! – would be able to advise him on how to escape from his current desperate entanglements, without causing harm or offence of any kind to anyone. In particular, he would greatly value the PM’s guidance on the matter of how best to inform My Mother of her immediate redundancy in her role as partner, helpmeet, lover (though not as principal carer for his children).

But suddenly, from one sip of Scotch to the next, the PM’s face has crumpled, and the most powerful personage in the land is an old man who needs his bed. The sofa is low, and he makes heavy weather of getting to his feet.

“Well, Oriel, we need our rest, for one last heave to secure our landslide, tomorrow!”

*

Back in his own more modest room, on the floor below the PM’s suite, My Father thinks how much – how very much – he would like another drink. Of course, he could call room service, but he knows this wouldn’t be a good idea, with an early start and a long final full day of the campaign ahead of him.

It’s far too late now to call My Mother who, even when not boiling with rage and resentment, considers any phone call received after 8pm almost certain to bring news of a fatal accident. And so instead, he changes into his pyjamas, and calls the Woman He Loves who he knows will be happy, however late it is, to hear his voice; and she is, and so he tells her how much he loves her, and she tells him how the preparations for her exhibition are going, and they almost entirely avoid talking about the campaign because she knows, without him having to say so, that it’s not a subject he wants to discuss, and he tells her again how much he loves her, and then he says: “I wish I was in bed with you.”

And she says, “I wish you were, too. But soon, very soon, we’ll be real, and then we’ll go to bed together every night, for the rest of our lives.”

And he emits a low sigh, which she takes to be assent, and now a few more loving but inconsequential things are said, before My Father falls asleep with the receiver still pressed against his ear. And now, after listening to his breathing for a minute or two more, she does, too. Which means that until she wakes up needing a pee almost four hours later, their love is being charged at the iniquitous hotel rate of sevenpence a minute.

*****

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