The Friends of Harry Perkins Read online

  ‘Our best hope of heading off an imposed candidate is Mrs Cook,’ said Ronnie Morgan. Ronnie and Harry went back a long way. They had both served apprenticeships at the Firth Brown special steels plant, both been shop stewards and it was Ronnie who had first encouraged Harry to put his name in for the Parkside nomination when the seat fell vacant. He was a keeper of the flame. ‘We’ve been on to her this lunchtime. Pointed out that if they are not careful they’ll end up with someone local standing as an independent who might just win. It’s happened before. No threats, like. We just pointed out the realities. Mrs Cook says it’s touch and go. We’ll find out tomorrow.’

  * * *

  In the event, the national executive backed off and decided to allow an open selection. No more was heard of the bright young man from London who had no doubt decided to offer his services in more promising territory. A timetable was published. The selection would take place in ten days.

  There followed a week of door-knocking, during which Fred was introduced by his small band of supporters to as many members of the Parkside Labour Party as could be located. By and large the natives were friendly, though there was some scepticism that any long-haired southern intellectual, even one who lived on an island in Scotland and had been so close to the much-loved Harry, could hope to represent the people of a close-knit northern stronghold such as this. To every such doubter Fred responded with one of Harry’s favourite aphorisms, ‘It’s not where you come from that matters, it’s where you’re going to.’ But he did take the precaution of getting a haircut.

  The selection took place on a cold Saturday afternoon in the oak-panelled council chamber of Sheffield Town Hall. The other four shortlisted candidates consisted of two councillors (one a woman), a young trade union official and a former minister who had lost his seat in the massacre that followed two dismal years of Lawrence Wainwright’s government. All save the young trade unionist claimed a close relationship with Harry. All spoke warmly of his legacy (although in truth his legacy was high hopes followed by resounding defeat) and all promised to honour his memory. The final ballot came down to a choice between Fred Thompson and the former minister. Thompson won comfortably.

  The by-election was set for three weeks hence. ‘A word of advice, son,’ whispered Ronnie Morgan in the club that evening. ‘Always remember that all the instincts of the working classes are conservative. On race, patriotism, the bomb, Brexit – you name it. It’s just that they happen to vote Labour.’

  Brexit Britain was a gloomy place. True, the Armageddon that some had prophesied had not occurred, but neither had the economic miracle promised by the Brexiteers. The value of the pound had fallen steadily against the euro, the dollar and the yuan. The much-vaunted increase in trade with the Commonwealth had not materialised. The Americans, too, were proving particularly obstreperous. Even now, after nearly a decade of negotiations, no significant agreements had been reached. At the UN there was talk of relieving the UK of its seat on the Security Council.

  * * *

  In Washington it was announced that the president had ordered the Pacific Fleet into the waters off the coast of Japan. In Tokyo the prime minister announced that Japanese forces would fight to the last man to prevent a Chinese takeover of even one square centimetre of his country’s sovereign territory. In Beijing chanting crowds laid siege to the Japanese and US embassies.

  THREE

  Fred Thompson was returned as member of parliament for Sheffield Parkside on a rainy day in March. Indeed it had rained for most of March. The only evidence of spring was a few bedraggled daffodils in the patch of grass opposite the Parkside Working Men’s Club. Although the name of Harry Perkins was much invoked, voter turnout was disappointing, with the result that Harry’s majority more than halved. The good news was that the Tory lost his deposit and the UKIP candidate polled less than the Monster Raving Loony Party. The natural order of British politics appeared to be reasserting itself.

  ‘Don’t take it personally, son,’ said Ronnie Morgan as they picked their way dejectedly through the election debris after the declaration. ‘Fact is, you’re there for life now. Unless,’ he added, ‘you do something stupid.’

  Elizabeth had parked the children with her parents in Oxfordshire and joined Fred for the last week of the campaign. They found lodgings in a Hallam B & B. The owner was a Liberal Democrat, but it didn’t matter since there wasn’t an election in Hallam. Fred worried that Elizabeth was too posh for Parkside, but she mucked in without complaint and the locals soon warmed to her.

  * * *

  He was sworn in on a Wednesday, immediately after Prime Minister’s Questions amid some resounding (and so far as some were concerned, a mite hypocritical) hear-hearing from the opposition benches and ironic cheering from the Tory side. ‘Son of Harry,’ shouted one of the Tories. ‘Grandson, more likely,’ cried a voice from the opposition benches. The speaker shook his hand warmly and wished him well. He was proposed and seconded by Jock Steeples and Mrs Cook. Elizabeth and the children were in the gallery.

  Afterwards he entertained the family to tea on the terrace, while the children amused themselves waving to the people on the passing tourist boats.

  ‘Daddy,’ said Catherine, aged eight and three quarters. She had her mother’s blue eyes and fair hair.

  ‘Yes, my sunshine.’

  ‘Do all men go to parliament?’

  ‘Only those who are elected’

  ‘And women, too, darling,’ Elizabeth interjected.

  ‘What does “elected” mean?’

  Elizabeth explained about votes and ballot papers.

  ‘Does that mean Daddy is famous?’ asked Lucy, aged six and one third.

  ‘A little bit.’

  * * *

  As he had promised, Thompson opened an office in the constituency, in a 1960s shopping mall close to the city centre. It had once hummed with life, but now consisted mainly of struggling coffee shops, a branch of Poundland, a betting shop and an Oxfam bookshop. He tried to make his office as cheerful as possible. It was painted in bright colours with his name – FRED THOMPSON MP – plastered across the entire shopfront in white lettering on a red background above the plate glass window. Posters advertised the local theatre, the food bank, times of surgeries and names and contact details for local councillors. He employed two people, Janice Jeffries, a South Yorkshirewoman of a certain age, whose husband, father and grandfather had worked in Sheffield’s now defunct steel mills, and Tom Picton, a bright young graduate fresh out of Hull University whose father was a prominent councillor.

  There were two ground-floor rooms. The front office where the staff worked served as a reception. A framed portrait of Harry Perkins had pride of place on the wall facing the door. The spartan rear room, furnished with a desk and half a dozen chairs and decorated at one end with a trade union banner, was where Thompson held his surgeries. The desk was clear apart from a photograph of the children, a few sheets of House of Commons notepaper, a mug containing an assortment of pens and ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays. Both empty. Mrs Jeffries liked it that way.

  Every MP’s surgery has its regulars who stand out among the housing, benefit and immigration cases: the woman who thinks her next-door neighbour is spying on her with an X-ray machine that can see through her wall; the failed asylum seeker; the hopeless litigant, clutching plastic bags full of yellowing documents dating back decades. They have already approached every conceivable authority, including your predecessor, without result and now your turn has come. Disappointment is inevitable; the only decision for the hapless elected representative is how quickly he or she wants to be added to the long list of people who have let them down. Within three months of election, Thompson had been visited by examples of all three stereotypes and many others.

  Among his early petitioners was a gaunt, shavenheaded, heavily tattooed man aged about forty who reckoned he was owed a little pot of public money in recompense for what he considered to be a grievous wrong that had been done to him in years
gone by. ‘I have worked all my life.’ He spoke with the vehemence of one who believed that a few years’ payment of National Insurance entitled him to live the rest of his life at public expense.

  ‘When did you say you stopped work?’

  ‘Nine years ago. Sacked. Through no fault of my own.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Punched the foreman, but I was provoked.’

  ‘And you haven’t worked since?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you worked from leaving school until you were aged . . .?

  ‘Thirty-two.’ His demeanour was surly.

  ‘And you have no plans to work again?’

  ‘How can I? I told you, I’m disabled.’

  He looked fit enough, if somewhat battered. His nose had once been broken, there was a lengthy scar on his left cheek and his lower jaw didn’t quite align with the upper part of his mouth. It turned out that he had been the victim of a severe beating by three local criminals wielding baseball bats in revenge for some unspecified offence. No arrests had resulted, though the culprits, he claimed, were well known to the police. The incident, he believed, entitled him to a large payment from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.

  Thompson solemnly noted the details and promised to look into the matter. The man slowly rose and limped towards the door, turning at the last moment. ‘I hope you are not one of those traitors who are plotting to take us back into the EU.’ And without waiting for an answer, he was gone, his parting words hanging in the air.

  ‘That man gives me the creeps,’ said Mrs Jeffries.

  ‘Me too,’ said Thompson. ‘I suspect we are destined to see a lot more of him.’

  How right he was.

  * * *

  A message on a pink slip. ‘Call the chief whip’s office.’ He called and an appointment was arranged for later that evening.

  The chief whip, a teacher by profession, was a decent old Scotsman, thought by some of the upwardly mobile to lack the guile and low cunning that his office required.

  ‘A word of advice, son.’

  He paused, glancing at the portrait of Keir Hardie that adorned his wall.

  ‘You need to get out from under Harry’s shadow. Things have changed a bit since Harry’s day. This place is now full of ambitious young thirty-somethings, adept at tweeting and slogan chanting, who think that history began with New Labour. They don’t regard the past as a golden age. On the contrary, many of them blame Harry for putting us out of office for the best part of twenty years. Personally, I loved the man, though he might have handled things a little differently.’

  ‘He took on some mighty vested interests.’

  ‘Aye, that he did. But the problem was that he bit off more than he could chew. More than any of us could.’

  ‘Come off it, Bill. He was betrayed by people who were supposed to be on our side. Reg Smith, Lawrence Wainwright . . . You know that as well as I do.’

  ‘Maybe, but—’

  ‘We don’t yet know the half of it—’

  ‘Listen, son, I’m just offering you some advice. Up to you, but if you wish to achieve anything in this place, don’t waste time re-fighting the battles of the past. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘I appreciate that.’

  ‘Also, you need to remember that, in addition to the young thrusters, there is a bedrock of old codgers who’ve been sitting around the tea room for twenty years without ever registering the merest ripple on the national consciousness. Salt of the earth, some of them, but they aren’t going to take kindly to being leapfrogged by some upstart who has only been here five minutes. Be nice to them. Surprise them. Show them that you haven’t got horns coming out of your head.’

  ‘So, what do you advise?’

  ‘Find an issue. Something that resonates with your constituents. Compensation for industrial diseases, something like that. Get some good solid work under your belt, then you can take up something more esoteric. Play your cards right and I’ll see if I can smuggle you onto a decent select committee.’

  * * *

  Later, in the library corridor. ‘Ah, Thompson,’ boomed the voice of one born to rule. Rupert Farquar, a Tory baronet, a good six feet in height and of considerable girth, who traced his ancestry back to the Normans and who, more to the point, was said to be distantly related to Sir Peregrine Craddock’s wife. ‘Good to see you here. This place needs a bit of shaking up.’

  A firm handshake and then, sotto voce, ‘Very sorry about what happened to Harry. Bad business. Personally I admired him, though we didn’t agree about much.’

  ‘Perhaps we could talk about that some time.’

  ‘Delighted, dear boy. A quiet drink perhaps. Must be a bit discreet though, you don’t want to damage a promising career by being seen talking to the likes of me.’ He disappeared down the corridor, chuckling.

  * * *

  Much later, in the members’ tea room. ‘Looks like we’re going to be here half the night. The Tories are fighting to preserve zero-hours contracts. It’s moments like this when you realise that, despite what our beloved electorate believe, the gulf between the main parties is really quite large. Nothing motivates Tory backwoodsmen so much as the preservation of bit of social injustice. It was the same with the minimum wage. They used to go around alleging that it would increase unemployment, as if they cared. In the event unemployment went down and nowadays you can’t find anyone who is against it. Welcome, by the way. My name is Stephen Carter.’

  ‘Fred Thompson.’ They shook hands.

  ‘Yes, I know who you are . . . You’re famous round here.’

  ‘Or notorious.’

  Carter laughed. ‘Depends how you look at it. So far as I’m concerned, anyone who was a friend Harry’s is a friend of mine.’

  A commotion at the far end of the room where a Brylcreemed spiv was loudly berating one of the young serving women, a West Indian.

  ‘I said I wanted two slices of toast, not one. Don’t you understand English?’

  The young woman, flustered, was apologising.

  ‘And this tea is as weak as rat’s piss. Take it away.’

  ‘I am sorry sir . . .’

  ‘Who on earth’s that?’

  ‘That,’ whispered Carter, ‘is Michael Flather. One of the nastiest pieces of work in this place. Sooner or later he’ll come a cropper. Can’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned.’

  * * *

  It was reported from Tokyo that a half a dozen soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army had been captured trying to plant a Chinese flag on a rocky outcrop, off the coast of one of the Diayou islands.

  FOUR

  There are certain essential ingredients to a maiden speech. A new member must say something nice about his predecessor and about his constituency. He or she is also advised to avoid controversy, in return for which they can expect to be heard respectfully. Fred Thompson’s speech ticked the first two boxes, but not the third, and as a result he encountered a certain amount of good-natured ribbing, but no particular hostility. Generally the speech was accounted a success and congratulations duly flowed. In the absence of approbation from the world outside, Britain’s unloved legislators tend to spend an inordinate amount of time congratulating each other on minor triumphs.

  It was always inevitable that Fred Thompson would be noticed. As soon as his name appeared on the monitor, members trickled in from the bars and lobbies. Curiously, there seemed more interest from the government benches than from his opposition colleagues. He chose to highlight three issues. The growing divide between the fortunate and the prosperous; the need to avoid being dragged into a war with China; and what he asserted was the need to stem the flow of economic migrants before, as he put it, ‘the sheer weight of numbers collapsed Europe’s fragile social systems’. It was this last that attracted most attention, not all of it friendly. ‘Scaremongering,’ according to one old left-winger. ‘Harry would be turning in his grave,’ said another. More astute commentators, however,
remarked that this was a young man destined to go far. He had demonstrated from the outset that, contrary to what some alleged, he was not after all destined to dwell for ever in the shadow of his old friend and mentor. ‘A speech of remarkable maturity,’ The Times called it.

  * * *

  They drove north in the brand new Nissan hatchback that had replaced their battered Volvo estate. The children, strapped in the back, were playing I-spy.

  ‘I spy Sherwood Forest, where Robin Hood used to live,’ said Fred, pointing at a thicket of oak trees.

  ‘Who was Robin Hood?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘A thief,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but a good one.’

  ‘Why was he a good one?’

  ‘Because he stole from the rich to give to the poor.’

  ‘We’ve got the DVD,’ said Catherine.

  ‘How long ago did Robin Hood live here?’ enquired Lucy.

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘Before you and Dad were born?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Before Granny and Grandpa?’

  ‘Long before.’

  A pause while the little brain whirred.

  ‘If Robin Hood were alive today, would he give us money?’

  Before Elizabeth could answer, Catherine chipped in. ‘No, he’d take our money and give it to the poor.’

  Lucy’s face lit up. ‘I bet Robin Hood was a member of the Labour Party.’

  * * *

  They didn’t quite move to Sheffield. Instead they rented an apartment in the old mill at Edale, just below Kinder Scout. It wasn’t until they’d been there a month that they discovered this was where Perkins’ mistress, Molly Spence, had once lived. ‘Small world,’ said Fred. ‘Fate,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Will it bring us good luck, or bad?’

  Every hour or so the little train, running between Sheffield and Manchester, rattled through the valley. They fell asleep to the soothing sound of water running down the hill behind the house and into what was once the mill stream. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary, but gradually became permanent. No one in the constituency seemed to mind that their MP had not quite fulfilled his promise. Edale was close enough for most people. During the week, when parliament was in session, Fred lodged with old friends in Kennington. Elizabeth remained at home with the children, who quickly made new friends and soon forgot the lovely place in which they had once lived.