Time of Lies Read online

  Millwall’s song – ‘No-one likes us, we don’t care’ – would have suited Thatcher and the unions as well as BG. But tonight it was ‘Britain’s Great! End of!’ chanted by a capacity crowd which greeted Kathy, Patrick and Shima Patterson as they exited from the recently-added New Bermondsey overground station.

  The police advice had been to forget about cars but to remember plastic Union Jacks, a sea of which surrounded them. As well as the obligatory one of those, Kathy had opted for a sweatshirt, jeans and trainers. Patrick had gone ‘snap’ but with an extra zero on the price of each item, including the Union Jack, while Shima had stuck with a crumpled beige version of her Whitehall uniform of a jacket and trousers. Together with her stockiness, Shima’s dress sense had easily earned her the nickname ‘Angela Merkel’.

  Shima wasn’t carrying a flag. She was wearing dark glasses. Both actions risked drawing the attention she wished to avoid. None of them was carrying personal phones, cameras, papers or identification; Kathy had a pay-as-you-go Nokia which tracked their position and would let her speed dial through to their invisible tail.

  The crowd was so mixed that the main risk of being ‘outed’ was failing to shout and jump and wave their arms. Kathy reckoned that most of this would fall to her, so she threw herself at it with gusto. Looking at the fervour around them, Kathy wondered when it had taken root – minutes, days or years ago? No one around them looked like a plain clothes officer, which was as it should be.

  The crowd had been stoked by a disastrous news story for both sets of Tories which Shock News had broken during the afternoon. Street-corner conversations had been captured at January’s World Economic Forum in Davos between bankers and Conservative ministers and special advisers, some on long-distance mikes, some on video followed by lip-reading. Nothing was longer than a few minutes, but together they sealed a damning impression. Politicians and bankers alike were frightened of the renewed global crisis, the trillions of public cash used once more to float the finance system off the rocks, and the ever-stronger populists. But however well or poorly those talking knew each other as individuals, the fragments of conversation made clear that these were ‘mates’ in a club for whom there would always be space in the lifeboats.

  Kathy led the three of them round to the turnstiles for the West Stand. Patrick had secured a corporate box. Inside they could hear one warm-up speaker after another lambasting the sitting duck target. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury had resigned at mid-afternoon, but the era when a resignation meant anything had gone. It seemed that the country was not having it – not any more. The Archbishop of Westminster threatened excommunication of any Catholics found to be embroiled in ‘egregious conspiracies against the poor’.

  The six-seat box was tucked away in a corner. It was more than enough to give the three interlopers some privacy to talk. In fact, the set-up was perfect. They would see anything happening on the podium on the giant screen while absorbing the overwhelming sense of occasion – Mexican waves, the floor shaken by stamping feet, the lot. A tureen of ice with bottled lagers, wine, water and soft drinks sat next to sausage rolls, prawn mayonnaise sandwiches and vegetarian samosas – a refreshment package included with the box. Kathy had to pinch herself at the company she was keeping.

  ‘Did you go this year?’ Shima asked Patrick. ‘To Davos.’ He shook his head. ‘I went for two days with the Prime Minister,’ she continued. ‘I can’t imagine how they got those recordings – we were all searched within an inch of our lives. But it can hardly be a coincidence that they’ve released the recordings now.’

  ‘A special rally on BG’s home ground ten days before the election, with Canary Wharf skyscrapers in the background,’ added Patrick. ‘BG make the established parties – if we can still call them that – look like Sunday afternoon amateurs.’

  ‘I can’t see how today’s news is going to do anything other than increase BG’s lead.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Has the post-mortem on the drone shown anything?’

  Kathy’s ears pricked up. ‘Nothing formal yet, but I talked to the lab at Farnborough a couple of hours ago. They’re horrendously guarded about the propulsion system, but that’s because they’re slobbering all over it from a science point of view. You’re talking something faster and with vastly more endurance than the helicopter drones we know – from silent hovering to eighty-five mph for, they think, ten hours non-stop, while only weighing a few kilos. Propulsion apart, it was nothing special – guidance, battery and a modest payload, in this case a digital camera. Probably half the kids in the stadium have something as good in their phone.’

  ‘So, on balance is that good news or bad?’

  ‘I’m betting on two outcomes, Shima, and my gut doesn’t like either of them. The propulsion system clearly isn’t some kitchen-scientist job. Possibly a decade of work and hundreds of millions of dollars have probably gone into it.’

  ‘Which means BG is in bed with a very large corporate with a strategic interest in drone services, or a nation-state. The Russians, branching out from the hacking they did in the US election. The US itself. China. Possibly Korea or Japan,’ Shima mused.

  ‘Or Israel. In either case the relationship is undisclosed by BG. Frankly, the whole thing has to be deeply covert if it’s a nation-state, given how BG bang on about Great little Britain.’ Patrick gave his flag a wave and gestured out of the window. ‘They’d go ape-shit if it was a foreign power. Anyway, a corporate is my first bet. My second is the device isn’t a prototype, and it’s not bespoke. That drone wasn’t just produced; it was mass-produced. Mass as in, even bigger than the Vigilance.’

  Kathy spoke up. ‘But the regulators counted fewer than fifty drones in corporate hands allowed to fly in built-up areas.’

  Patrick grinned. ‘I guess we’ll watch this space.’

  ‘For that purpose, I use these.’ Shima fished some opera-glasses out of her jacket pocket and trained them on the rows of seats, many still empty, within the VIP cordon. ‘I’ll shout if I see anything red-headed.’

  When Shima got bored she handed the glasses to Kathy and launched into an intense discussion with Patrick about coalition scenarios. Until this morning a tie-up between BG and one of the Conservative parties had seemed the most plausible, but the Davos leak had blown that out of the water. Other scenarios fared no better, coming apart faster than gimmicks out of a Christmas cracker. Yet past elections in Britain had hammered home that a party like BG might lead the polls comfortably, but fail to win the national vote. Or it could lead the national vote but get few members elected to the House of Commons.

  Even in Britain’s impoverished Navy, Kathy had kept watch with something more than opera glasses, but soon she got the hang of them. She spotted a few faces which she recognised, most obviously Annabel Wale, BG’s chief of organisation. Her platinum blonde short-back-and-sides and high cheekbones had come up often in Kathy’s research into BG and drones, because Wale headed up the Vigilance. Barely in her twenties, Wale was the BG wunderkind who had re-invented political engagement for young people in the way Zuckerberg had re-invented college yearbooks.

  Sitting next to Wale was a face which at first Kathy struggled to place. She racked her memory for where. Eventually she hunted on the right shelf in her mental library. It was Nassia Sotiris, the beak from Eton at Bob’s party. Kathy counted the deposits of age which twelve years had left on Nassia’s skin: none.

  ***

  The giant screens re-circulated the day’s Shock News – headlines, tweets and interviews: TORIES, BANKERS, OUTRAGE AT DAVOS. An aerial shot of the snow-covered eyrie – brief, since Davos itself looked too much like a public housing project to sustain Hollywood levels of excitement. So swiftly onto close-ups of Swiss private banks – SWITZERLAND: WHERE THEY KEEP YOUR MONEY – inter-cut with aerial close-ups of Davos’s famous and not-so-famous visitors ‘saving the world economy’, or hobnobbing and sucking up
according to taste. Few facts were presented, to save the audience the inconvenience of knowing anything during their rush to outrage.

  Abruptly the screens filled with an orange waterfall of hair and the stadium filled with a roar. Up the ramp towards the stage a cameraman jogged behind Angela Deil. Wearing a singer’s skin-coloured radio mike, she milked the setting like the pro every personally-trained inch of her was.

  ‘Hello Bermondsey!’ Another roar. To the camera, ‘How’s she cutting, Liverpool? Newcastle – are you ready to political party? The time is coming to make Britain Great again.’ The predictable chant starts up.

  ‘The time is coming to choose a prime minister who is one of us. Who shares our dreams. Who will make us proud. A prime minister who can be proud of having built a brilliant international business from nothing – from no GCSEs, no help from the taxpayer, no help, of course, from any bankers’ – the last point wasn’t actually true but that didn’t matter – ‘from a workshop under a railway arch right here in Bermondsey!’ The footballing section of the crowd essayed ‘Come on you Lions!’. ‘He has also organised the most imaginative and the most needed political party in our country’s history!’

  The applause, unforced, continued for at least a minute – a standing ovation yet the event had barely started.

  Kathy was glad to be in a private box. Shima looked at the crowd, dismayed. Patrick looked like someone who had just landed a hole in one. ‘I was right. We had to be here.’

  Angela waved for silence. She didn’t get it, but she got enough leeway to drop her volume some decibels. ‘And I – and Shock News – and all of us – need to say a big thank you to BG especially today. Because it was the Vigilance who flew the drones at Davos’ – an explosion from the crowd and on Patrick’s face – ‘and who released those vital truths which we all needed to hear.’ The explosion turned into cheering. ‘On that score, a shout-out to Aidan Hall in Newcastle. We call him “Batman” – he led the Vigilance team who flew the drones at night and parked them on the roofs of buildings, ready to watch out for us during the day.’

  Bob was just visible now at the back of the stage, half-shadowed.

  Without turning her gaze from the crowd, Angela gestured backwards and shoved the decibels as far into the red zone as they would go. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please thank – and welcome – our next prime minister – Bob Grant.’

  In the sky the passenger jets sinking towards the west tugged the sun lower, behind the roof of the west stand. When the floodlights came on, the shadows inside the stadium sprang to attention.

  15

  London, Saturday 25 April 2020 (2)

  Three minutes after the planes tug the sun lower at Millwall, I watch them sink past the floor-to-ceiling glass of the banqueting suite at the Crowne Plaza Battersea. I’ve never seen so much cocaine; it must have been delivered by Jewson’s in a sack. I ask the waiter who takes me to the top table to change my side plate; someone has snorted off it.

  For me the excitability of the banter isn’t so much a shit sandwich as a shit Battenberg cake. Brown stuff: only the chairman who did the invitation has the slightest interest in thoughts on ‘closing the deal’. White stuff: my bald look makes everyone slap me on the back and tell me Bob Grant jokes. Brown stuff: I simply don’t have the balls to get up and impersonate my brother. Shaking vertebrae in my spine tells me it’s not going to happen. White stuff: they’d probably laugh themselves silly if I read them The Cat in the Hat (sadly my copy is at home).

  In a blinding flash during cauliflower soup I’m rescued by a divine courier from the Muse agency. I can play Bob’s brother: not me but Spike, a sibling I make up. Someone who grew up with Bob and knows him backwards. Someone whom Bob has never mentioned, and within a minute of Spike opening his mouth we will know why. That’s easy. It’s what I can do: make-believe, play-acting. Spike has the licence to kill which Zack missed out on. In dinner jacket and black tie, I’m even dressed for the part.

  So when the uneaten chicken in a Malay sauce has been cleared away, I kick off with a guaranteed winner with this audience – the BG plan to slam the brakes on foreigners owning British homes. The fire-bomb and the BG ‘canvassers’ makes the issue local. But what Spike can tell them which Tom and Dick can’t is what kind of council flat Bob grew up in, and how he ‘went to Eton’. They know Bob’s dad was half-Egyptian, but not how he fucked up his first shag.

  Once I get to the vodka dripping from the ice maiden I’ve got them completely. (I leave Angela out of it – I still have some survival instincts.) Fists on one table start pounding out ‘BG – end of!’. I worry that I’m about to be attacked, but in a split second realise that it’s a sarcastic reversal of Bob’s slogan. I’m being cheered on.

  The next bit accelerates into a blur.

  I remember going for #HateBankers, since today’s news has been wall-to-wall Davos. Estate agents are next, I point out – dung beetles living off bankers’ droppings and selling our homes to foreigners and exploitative buy-to-let landlords.

  I finish by explaining that really I’m an actor. I didn’t get cosmetic surgery for this gig, but because looking like Bob might be the only way to stay safe under a BG government. I throw in a couple of tips: how to get your head shaved free on the NHS, and don’t forget ten minutes in the tanning lounge.

  What a shame Bob’s not here to see. Milord is on stage right now with his own big number to do. Sure, not everyone has to fall for him – tonight shows that. But his audience is 200 times mine. And something comes home in the mini-cab with me besides a thank-you bottle of bubbly: an unexpected and uncomfortable thought. Suppose he gets to Downing Street: maybe I could do a wildly successful satirical show? Something with vox pop fizz, like The Revolution Will Be Televised. I could be the prime minister’s alter ego, popping up at front doors or in supermarket queues, taking the piss out of his policies.

  Even as a boy, a happy Bob was a Bob with everyone else brought down to his level, or six inches lower. I’d fought that all my life. Satire would still be fighting him. But would it be enough? Who joked about the huge amount that cabaret did in the 1930s to arrest the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War? Peter Cook, I’m thinking. If Bob gets his way, do I ride his coat-tails? For fuck’s sake, I don’t want that choice.

  ***

  The spotlight moved and Kathy saw Bob in the flesh for the first time since Eton. She was glued to the opera-glasses. Pictures in the media rarely gave a sense of build. Bob’s legs were stockier than Zack’s, less shaped, but he had worked off some of his paunch. Even Bob’s eyebrows had been plucked, making them a touch closer to her teenage heart-throb in East 17 and a bit less like country hedgerows. Kathy was surprised to notice that Bob had raised heels. Zack was five foot nine, Bob an inch taller, not a height which particularly needed extra inches.

  But movement left no chance of confusing the two brothers. Bob was always moving, a panther in his own domain, exploiting a thirty-by-ninety-foot stage with a two-hundred-foot catwalk leading at head height into the packed stadium. Kathy remembered Zack occupying space – as Julius Caesar, for example, in the summer festival in Mont-Saint-Michel. But what a difference: Julius Caesar took measured paces, with gestures rehearsed and words scripted. If the brothers were in two cages with the audience outside, in Zack’s case neither performer nor audience would touch the bars, whereas on that Saturday evening in the Den the cage bars melted.

  The stage and catwalk turned into tiles of light beneath Bob’s feet. Light and dark resolved themselves into British Pathé newsreel of the coronation review of over 300 ships of the Royal Navy, off Spithead in 1953. Kathy knew today’s count was fewer than seventy. The Russian navy had 200, building back towards a Soviet fleet of 600. Granted, one missile from a Vanguard submarine could throw more firepower further than the entire 1953 fleet. But one, maybe two, torpedoes could sink Britain’s entire at-sea ballistic capability in a minute.
/>   Bob ambled down the catwalk into the crowd, followed by a camera-man. ‘Less than a mile from here, five hundred years ago, Henry VIII built a dockyard. At Deptford. That dockyard, here in South London, gave birth to the world’s greatest navy.’

  Bob stopped, far enough down the catwalk to stand under open sky, clear of the stadium’s roof. He looked around, a shaven-headed forty-one-year-old publican beaming at his twenty thousand Saturday evening regulars. Wearing grey chinos and a red polo shirt with a discreet white lion, he moved as if to wipe some tables. Instead he intended to wipe the floor with old-style politics. The screens closed in on Bob’s brow, his eyes narrowing as he looked directly at the camera. ‘Starting tonight, near Deptford, we will give birth to a new country. Safer streets, stronger borders, new jobs, new hope. Starting tonight.’

  He broke back into a conversational tone. ‘At BG, we treat you with respect. We don’t talk like politicians do. When they say “tonight”, you know they don’t even mean at the election in ten days’ time. They mean maybe three years after that if they win, if they can be bothered, and if you’re damn lucky.’

  Another change of verbal gear, his right finger underlining in the air the first word of the sentence. ‘Tonight – tonight – tonight! – you’ll see a new force for Britain. Experience a new energy for Britain. Admire a new ambition for Britain. Our country great once more. Let me tell you how.’

  For forty minutes with no autocue, Bob Grant ranged over the economy, the constitution, defence, foreign policy, health, education and welfare. He served up a substantial first course – a new class of citizenship for Britons born in this country to British-born parents or parents serving in the armed services and police. For them priority housing, no NHS waiting lists and the first two years of university or vocational education free. For these ‘lionhearts’ there would be a special gold lapel badge, and a prison sentence for its misuse. Patrick and Shima shook their heads.