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How History is Made

At the moment that Ken Cooper stepped into the lift, Lord Trevor Briskett and his research assistant Ned Parminter were squashed together in a commuter train from Oxford. They were both scanning that morning’s Courier. Lord Briskett read the paper from the middle outwards, starting with the editorial and the commentators, then checking the business and political news, before idly skimming the home pages, which were mostly filled with things he’d heard already on last night’s news or the 7 a.m. bulletin on the Today programme. One celebrity was in favour of decluttering. Another was less sure. The girlfriend of somebody on a television show had drunk too much in a club. The age of newspapers, he reflected, was coming, whimpering, to an end.

Ned Parminter was brushing through the iPad edition of the paper with his forefinger, flicking the screen at great speed. The Courier at least still covered politics with some vigour, although the news pages seemed to be in favour of Britain leaving the EU, while the comment pages were aggressively the other way.

Neither of them paused to read the short report on the headless Battersea corpse. Corpses, particularly headless ones, were clearly something to do with the criminal underworld, and were therefore politically unimportant. Briskett and Parminter were following a bigger story than that. ‘Vote clever.’ ‘Vote for freedom.’ A nation torn in two.

Dressed in his trademark coarse green tweeds, with his halo of frizzy white hair and heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, part A.J.P. Taylor, part Bamber Gascoigne, Trevor Briskett was famous enough from his TV performances to attract second glances from his fellow commuters. On the streets of Oxford – that crowded, clucking duckpond of vanity and ruffled feathers – he was stopped-in-the-street famous.

And rightly so. For Briskett was the finest political historian of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His early biographies – Blair, Thatcher, Johnson – were still in print, while the memoirs of scores of almost-forgotten politicians had long since vanished to charity shops and recycling dumps after selling only a few score copies. Briskett’s account of the modern constitution had been compared to the works of that Victorian master-journalist Walter Bagehot. His history of British intelligence during the Cold War had been praised by all the right people. Emeritus professor at Wadham, winner of numerous literary prizes, elevated five years ago to the Lords as a crossbencher after chairing a royal commission on security lapses at the Ministry of Defence, Briskett was regularly tipped to be the next member of the Order of Merit.

Yet somehow these decorative embellishments, which might have weighed him down and made him soft, slow and comfortable, had had little apparent effect on Trevor Briskett. At seventy he was as sharp, as boyishly enthusiastic, as wicked a gossip with as rasping a laugh, as he had been at thirty. The exact nature of the pornography discovered on the minister’s lost laptop. The attempt to blackmail a senior minister over his wife’s cocaine habit. Just who Olivia Kite was taking to her bed these days … If you really wanted to know, you went to Briskett, and he would tap his nose, lean towards you, give a wolfish smile and a ‘dear boy’, and spill all the beans.

Thus, it had generally been admired as a rather brave decision when the prime minister announced that he had appointed Briskett as the official historian of the great European referendum. The PM, himself an amateur political historian, had argued that such was the momentous nature of the choice now before the British people that they were owed – the nation was owed – a proper, in-depth account by a proper writer. Briskett, he had promised, would be given unparalleled access to the members of his inner team for the duration of the campaign. He would be welcomed at Downing Street, he would be given copies of the emails, the strategy documents – everything. And after it was all over, people might actually read his book.

No sooner had the PM announced this than Olivia Kite, on behalf of the get-outers, issued a press release declaring that she too admired Lord Briskett, whom she regarded as an authoritative and independent voice, and that she would give him the same level of access to her team.

The political commentators said that the PM’s decision to give contemporary history what Briskett had called ‘the ultimate ringside seat’ was evidence of his great confidence about the outcome of the referendum. His evident conviction that he would win, and that victory would be the ultimate vindication of his premiership, was itself damaging to his opponents. Olivia Kite had had little option but to make Briskett as welcome in Prince Rupert’s tent as in Cromwell’s.

Basking in this hot limelight, Briskett moved lightly. He wanted to do all the work himself, so far as he could. He had brought in only his protégé Ned Parminter, a shy but brilliant PhD student who, Briskett thought, might one day be a significant contemporary historian himself.

Parminter, with his wiry black beard and intense dark eyes, looked like an Orthodox priest in civilian clothes. Although he shared Briskett’s urbane sense of humour, his romantic English patriotism had a fanatical streak.

Together, the two of them made up a balanced ticket: Briskett’s delight in Westminster gamesmanship inclined him towards the larger-than-life, principled yet unscrupulous figure of the prime minister. Parminter, a specialist in the seventeenth-century development of Parliament, was a natural Olivia Kite supporter. They had, of course, never discussed their allegiances on this matter between themselves.

Now the two of them were on their way to meet the prime minister himself. As the train wriggled through West London towards Paddington, Briskett leaned forward in his seat.

‘You’re seeing that … girl, Ned, after our rendezvous?’

Parminter scratched his beard under his chin, a sign of anxiety, before slowly replying. ‘She’s invaluable. She’s across everything in the Kite campaign. She reads all the emails, all Kite’s texts, on her official BlackBerry and her personal one. She’s copying us into every piece of traffic.’

‘And does the ever-lovely Mrs Kite know this?’

‘Apparently. I think she must. Jen’s nothing if not loyal, so I guess Kite’s fine with it.’

‘Good girl. Good for you, too.’

‘There is one other thing. It’s a bit odd. She also seems to know rather a lot about what’s happening on the other side. Far more than she ought to. Hidden channels in Number 10, perhaps.’

Briskett rubbed his hands with pleasure.

‘Really? Sleeping with the enemy, is she? Delicious. At a moment like this, what is happening in each HQ is our primary concern. Let us wallow, Ned, in the panics, the little feuds, the unwarranted pessimism and the foolish overconfidence. But in a sense, what matters most is what is harder to discover. I mean, what is happening between the camps. It’s there that the deepest secrets lie. And what is this fascinating creature’s full name, Ned?’

‘Jennifer Lewis. But she prefers Jen. I’ve known her since uni.’

Briskett exhaled an irritated hiss.

‘You mean you’ve known her since you were up at Oxford, Ned. I really cannot understand this squirming self-abasement about “uni”. It would be a different matter if it were Keele, but I assume – given her youth and prominence – that she was at Oxford too. Or, poor girl, Cambridge?’

‘Somerville.’

‘Hmm. PPE?’

‘PPE.’

‘Well …’

The two men lapsed into silence until the train was almost at Paddington.

Under a Rebel Flag

But Jennifer Lewis was not going to make her appointment with Ned Parminter that afternoon. Some fascinating new polling results had come in overnight which called for a few late changes to the campaign, so she was more than sixty miles to the east of London, crunching numbers in the gorgeous surroundings of Danskin House. Olivia Kite, meanwhile, dressed only in a short, almost see-through kimono, walked between the rows of campaign volunteers checking the messages on her mobile phone. Nobody even thought about taking a picture. They were a tight, loyal team.

After breakfast Olivia changed the kimono for a vibrantly-coloured Issey Miyake suit; she made a point of dressing up for every day at work in her own home as if she were being presented to the king at Buckingham Palace. He had, after all, called her half a dozen times in the course of the campaign. Some of their conversations had run on late into the night.

Danskin House was the beating heart of the nationalist movement. It was rebel camp headquarters, as much a symbol of defiance of Westminster as Oxford had been when King Charles I had raised his standard there almost four centuries previously. Yet it was an odd place for British patriotism to take its stand. The house was vaguely Renaissance in shape, and was hung with Dutch tiles. Its roofs and turrets glittered pale blue and orange. It boasted an Italian garden, complete with eighteenth-century reproduction Roman statuary, and a Greek temple overlooking a lake. Inside, a long hallway was decorated with suits of German armour and some quite good paintings, not least by the Dutchman Pieter de Hooch and the Spanish papist Murillo. What had once been an insanitary Tudor patchwork had been extensively rebuilt in Northern European style after the Glorious Revolution – the glazed tiles, the statues, the limewashed inside walls.

The house’s current master, Olivia Kite’s husband Reeder, was half American and half Egyptian. Yet, because it happened to nestle alongside a tiny Essex river, Danskin had long since become an emblem of Englishness, featuring in Jane Austen television documentaries and Christ Almighty, a recent Hollywood adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox.

On this particular morning, a dim boy leaned on his rake in the grounds and watched a procession of cars crunch along the gravel drive, then disgorge their passengers between the pillars and into the main entrance of the house. He spat on the ground. He may have been a fool, but he was not so stupid that he didn’t know what was going on.

In the formal garden to the rear of the house, Reeder Kite strolled past the chipped and forlorn Venus and the amputee Adonis and arched his back against the late-summer heat. Already-blown roses oozed a sensuous, sickly scent, intensifying when it met the livelier stench of a trellis of sweet peas around the sundial. Butterflies and bees drifted over borders of rich, moist soil, thickly strewn with astrantia, allium and abelia, mildly invaded by vetch and willowherb. Fertility was everywhere.

Reeder scratched his inner thigh, probed himself, and wondered how soon after lunch he could escape back to London, where his mistress would be idling in her mews flat. He admired his new Nike trainers, his still-strong legs, then tensed his gut – there were still a few muscles there – thrust his arms out in front of him and squatted down. At that moment Olivia happened to glance through the window, and saw her near-naked husband performing his strength and balance training. He looked, she thought, like a walrus attempting ballet.

There was a curious mismatch between the temperatures inside and outside the house. Within its walls, Danskin felt as cold as death. Over the past few months the woman in the mews house in London had destroyed whatever human warmth had once been found there. The effect of Reeder’s adultery had spread like an icy mist, floating down corridors and lurking under beds. Olivia no longer ransacked his email inbox or stabbed her way through his mobile phones, but had instead redirected her fury into a last spasm of energy in the referendum campaign. Each morning the family exchanged chilly platitudes over the breakfast table. Protracted silences and accusatory glances had replaced the former veneer of civility.

As if to echo the dismantling of the family, the main downstairs rooms had been cleared of pictures, books and domestic clutter. Boxes of old photographs, football boots, scented candles, CDs and unloved Christmas presents had been crammed into cupboards and forgotten. The ghostly outlines of Turkish rugs lingered on the bare wooden floors. Where once there had been elegant reproduction antique chairs and polished occasional tables, there were now rows of hurriedly-assembled flatpack desks and plastic chairs. Cables coiled in every direction from computers and printers set up throughout what had been the dining room, the sitting room and the second kitchen. Piles of cardboard boxes filled with files and labelled with thick ink marker teetered in the corners.

Maps of parliamentary constituencies, graffitied with numbers and names, had been pinned onto the walls, and flatscreen televisions were in every room, permanently broadcasting the BBC and Sky news channels. During working hours the rooms were full of smartly dressed young people crouching over their desks with serious expressions, their heads pressed to phones, their necks eternally cricked even as their fingers danced on keyboards. Outside, the background noise was hum and whoosh, living rural England; inside, it was tap and mutter.

At first Olivia Kite’s decision to move the headquarters of the No to Europe, Democracy First campaign away from Westminster and into the expensive country house where her marriage was ending had seemed inexplicable. In fact it was a stroke of genius, distancing the campaign from the political establishment in London, and fusing together its couple of hundred dedicated staff out in the sticks. Their sequestered camaraderie meant that their movement had come to feel like a popular insurgency – and so, in a way, it was. Greece had exploded, Spain was dividing, France was on the march; and now it was Britain’s turn. Far away from elderly, cynical Whitehall, this was a Spitfire summer. For the men and women serving under Olivia Kite, Danskin House was Fighter Command.

The house was not in fact quite as remote as it might have seemed. Just beyond the forest of oak and Scots pine that surrounded its formal gardens and strip of parkland was a busy coastal town, with a good road link to the M11, along which an endless stream of lorries trundled, bringing cars from Germany and containers full of almost everything else from China. Its railway station required only one change from Liverpool Street, and the local taxi drivers had become accustomed to cabinet ministers and minority party leaders, never mind television journalists and other hangers-on, arriving off the morning and evening trains with a self-important air and asking for ‘Mrs Kite’s place’.

Despite the container ships that arrived in the port every few hours, the European Union was deeply unpopular in this northern corner of Essex. Union flags flew from pubs and public buildings, and Mrs Kite, partly because her husband’s reckless infidelity was a rich source of local gossip, was hugely popular here.

As for Olivia herself, she had recovered her domestic territory and stamped it with her own political identity; her skulking, pirouetting husband was beginning to feel like a stranger in his own home. Lionel, their eldest son, who was going through an REM phase, referred to his father simply as the Oaf. ‘Living Well is the Best Revenge’ echoed along the upstairs hallway as Olivia stared at her husband’s froggy face flushing in the garden and thought, ‘No, it bloody isn’t. Stamping on his face with stiletto heels, before burning all his dreams in front of his staring eyes, ripping his fingernails off one by one and humiliating him in the newspapers … that would be the best revenge. But if that’s not an option, I suppose living well is an acceptable second choice.’

Olivia was the Cavalier commander. But she had no intention of losing her head. She had more of Oliver Cromwell about her than any languid Stuart. Jennifer Lewis, by contrast, definitely had the looks of a Cavalier lady: a long, serpentine body, delicate, pale features and hair for whose colour there was no adequate description – corngold and copper, silver birch with licks of flame. With her green eyes and large, capable hands, however, she was a fighter too, and an eager footsoldier in Olivia Kite’s parliamentary insurgency. Olivia treated her almost as a daughter, and relied very heavily on the younger woman’s uncanny grasp of numbers and down-to-earth political sense.

Through the frantic weeks of the referendum campaign Jen was at her boss’s side most of the time, expressionless, taking calls and giving orders. But today her provocative eyes seemed lost in thought. She couldn’t get her mind off her last meeting with her former lover, the newspaper reporter Lucien McBryde. A man with a considerable talent for self-destruction, he now seemed to be falling apart at a spectacular rate. Texts she had received over the weekend told her he had been leaving her messages, even now, through their very private system.

2

Fathers and Sons

Two nights previously, Lucien McBryde had been walking slowly up St James’s Street, deep in thought. (Not deep enough: this was his last weekend alive, although he wasn’t aware of that fact. Had he known, he would more consciously have drunk in the salmon-coloured light on the sides of the buildings, the indistinct urban scent of late summer, the kestrel hovering over St James’s Palace.)

Samuel Johnson held that to live a good life meant acting morally as if you were about to die, while conducting your daily business as if you were going to live for another fifty years. Lucien McBryde failed on both counts.

Morally, his main failings were idleness and irresponsibility mitigated by charm, an addiction to a stimulating powder, and another to stimulating, strong women. In his defence, he would point out that while many men regarded them simply as complicated and expensive instruments for their own pleasure, he was a genuine admirer of women – their smells and tastes, the way they walked and the way they talked – and that they tended to sense this. ‘I am essentially a male lesbian,’ he would declare.

In his professional life, McBryde acted as if he had an endless, charmed life, with unlimited possibilities for second chances and eleventh-hour renegotiations. His tax returns, bills, investments, pension and passwords were in an entirely chaotic state. For the best part of a decade Lucien McBryde had lived blissfully from day to day. But his supply of rising suns and golden sunsets was about to run out.

Tonight, McBryde had a nagging toothache. Eventually his tongue located it. Pain sought pain. Probing the back of his palate, he thought back to the events of two months before, when his father had died and his own life had begun to spin out of control.

Old Robson McBryde, Lucien’s widowed father, had been a hard man to love. In Lucien’s case, this was perhaps partly because they were closer to two generations apart in age than one. But it was mainly because his father was an impossible man to live up to. With a face like an American bald eagle, hacked and fissured by many decades of concentration and humour, Robson McBryde was a legend in Fleet Street and beyond – the wartime hero who pursued a career as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, reporting on the first Gaza camps for the Guardian with a ferocity which led (thanks to a quiet word from a major advertiser to the paper’s impeccably liberal editor of the day) to his summary dismissal on the unspoken charge of anti-Semitism.

Robson migrated to other newspapers as a pitiless moralist in the foreign affairs field, churning out endless lucid and fact-packed columns on the immorality of British foreign policy across the Middle East and beyond. As early as the Suez debates of 1956 he was cited in the House of Commons as an authority, and regarded as the then prime minister’s personal nemesis in the press.

Lucien had grown up in the menacing shadow of his father’s moral certainties. It had been a boyhood of newspapers flattened out on the breakfast table and fingers stabbed down angrily in emphasis, of after-school harangues and sad shakings of the head over his lack of interest in current affairs and, more generally, his academic performance. Old Robson, a liberal and Fabian of the old school, would never have raised his hand against a child, yet in his perpetual disappointment, punctuated by occasional door-slamming tantrums, the old man proved a brutally destructive humanitarian, a Guardian-reading human-hater. His son, lying on the floor with his chess set or watching television, had dreamed of being taken in and adopted by the parents of his best friend Jonathan. They were kindly people, of no known opinions.

The father had never regarded the son as his intellectual equal. Lucien’s attempts to impress him, whether through his school essays or in conversation, tended to result only in hard-eyed silences or sarcastic rejoinders. (‘Ha! Islington’s home-grown Mencken has, I think, mistaken Ernie for Nye’; or, ‘Young Woodward, I presume? Iran and Persia are the same fucking place.’) It is surprisingly easy to destroy a young man’s sense of himself.

When Lucien finally got a job after university as a gossip reporter for a midmarket newspaper, he did not even try to persuade his father that this was a respectable way of earning a living. The old man nourished his disappointment for years, missing no opportunity of praising his son’s award-winning contemporaries, and asking awkward questions about the sources of his minor scoops.

Early on in his career, Robson had given a leg-up to Ken Cooper, now the editor of the National Courier, and they had remained drinking friends ever since, having lunch together every few months. Once they had been three, but the intense, wiry-haired young politician who had been such brilliant company, and who had kept them gasping and spluttering with laughter for years, had drifted away, too busy and too ambitious for alcoholic afternoons. Having kept his head down during the Blair, Brown and Cameron years, neither journalist was surprised when he rose, comparatively late in life, to become party leader and then prime minister.

With Ken and Robson left by themselves, their lunches became almost silent affairs, but somehow they survived Ken’s continued success in the glittery, shallow, modern newspaper world. From opposite ends of the political spectrum, the two friends had agreed an armistice in which the only fit subject of conversation was the catastrophic decline of the country. Their habitual game was to try to identify fresh signs of this, and to probe their origins.

After twenty minutes of gloomy silence, Ken would say, ‘Inappropriate.’

With any luck, Robson would show sufficient interest for Ken to continue.

‘Our forefathers talked about human evil. You and I … well, we’d say that something – I don’t know, child abuse, or trying to strangle your wife in public – was wicked. These days, it’s just fucking inappropriate. That’s the worst fucking word they’ve got.’ (They was code for everyone under fifty.)

Robson would continue to slurp his soup, and Ken to smash his salad to pieces. Eventually one of them would say, ‘Butchers.’

And so it would go on. Sometimes a gambit wouldn’t work. ‘Velcro. Bloody Velcro,’ Robson might say, but Ken would only look up blankly and shrug. Another thirty minutes or so of friendly, despairing silence was then guaranteed.

On only one subject would Robson frown and show displeasure.

‘That boy of yours isn’t completely stupid, you know,’ Ken might say. ‘Brought in a decent little story last week …’

Lucien had been hired by the Courier’s deputy editor, but Robson refused to believe it wasn’t patronage, and never forgave Ken for his supposed weakness.

But Ken was right: Lucien McBryde really wasn’t completely stupid. And so he had fluttered, broken-winged, from perch to perch, eventually making enough money at the Courier to be able to enjoy himself, and to dress well, while never hanging on to it long enough to own property, or any of the other appurtenances of serious, grown-up life.

Lucien was not on the run from his father. That level of exertion would have appalled him. He was, rather, on a gentle jog from adult responsibility, and as he continued up St James’s Street he flattered himself that, in that respect at least, he had been doing rather well. But then he had tripped over Jen Lewis, and had fallen, hurtling head-down, parachute-free, in love.