JAMES
1 November 2016
Six
James walks briskly through Portcullis House, across New Palace Yard and through Westminster Hall, taking care not to glance at the tourists, who are peering up at the vast, cavernous space above them, rising up to the fourteenth-century, hammer-beamed roof.
His brogues click over the stone floor, carrying him away from the babble of accents – Czech, German, Spanish, Mandarin at a guess – and the careful over-enunciation of a young tour guide; a recent politics graduate, perhaps, who is delivering his spiel – the largest roof of its kind; the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster – as he shivers in his old fogeyish tweed jacket and tie.
Westminster Hall – chill, austere, redolent with history – is the part of the Commons in which the gravitas of his job – MP for Thurlsdon, junior minister in the Home Office, a member of Her Majesty’s Government – always strikes James most clearly. The largest room in all of Westminster, it was saved at the expense of most of the rest of the buildings when fire raged through the Palace in October 1834. There is no pretence in Westminster Hall; none of the over-elaborate fleur-de-lys tiles or marble statues or garish murals. None of the colour – that distinctive poison green for the Commons; the vermilion red of the Lords – that illuminates the Palace, as if an interior decorator had been let loose with a 1940s colour chart while on acid. Westminster Hall – all severe grey stone and rich brown oak – is as ungarnished and sombre as Oliver Cromwell could ever have wished it to be.
It is bitterly cold, though. The sort of cold that demands people wrap up in furs in keeping with the hall’s medieval heritage; an uncompromising cold that laughs in the face of modernity and reminds James – should he ever get above himself – of his current insignificance in the history of this place. He sweeps on past a couple of policemen warming themselves by a vertical heater in St Stephen’s Porch, and on through the warmer, more intimate St Stephen’s Hall with its glittering chandeliers, bright stained glass and murals; its imposing statues of great parliamentary orators, resplendent in spurs and cloaks with marble folds. He passes the spot where the only British prime minister ever to be assassinated was killed, then has to duck around a bucket. The whole place is falling down.
No one spares him a glance here – and on he goes through Central Lobby, the heart of the Palace, bustling with tourists, where a Labour backbencher, chatting to a member of the public, gives him a knowing, unfriendly nod. He hangs a sharp left, past another couple of policemen at the entrance to the area where the general public are forbidden: the relatively narrow Commons corridor leading to the Members’ Lobby, and beyond that the Chamber itself.
He feels safer here. There is no way a lobby journalist could collar him, now that the House is sitting, unless, glancing to the corridors leading up to the lobby where they are allowed to hover, he chooses to catch their eye. There is no need for him to venture here today: Home Office questions aren’t this week; there is no debate that requires a large front-bench presence; it isn’t PMQs. And yet he feels the need to brave the public spaces of the House: to visit the tea rooms, to lunch at Portcullis, to sit in the Chamber. To prove to himself – and his colleagues – that, as he told Sophie, it really is all over and done.
Meeting Tom, for a secret gym session this morning, has convinced him that Olivia and the subsequent fallout is a closed chapter. Chris had been incandescent when he heard about it later, but he had snuck in and out of Downing Street by 6.15 a.m.
After forty minutes of bonding over the rowing machine, he refrained from giving his oldest friend a hug.
‘Thanks for not hanging me out to dry,’ he said at the end of an ergo which stripped everything back to basics. Sweat glistened on his skin and he wiped his drenched forehead.
Tom, thicker waisted since becoming PM, couldn’t speak at first, he was panting so heavily.
‘You’d have done it for me,’ he managed, eventually.
The most powerful man in the country bent over the handles of the running machine but, when he straightened, his look took James back over twenty years. They could have been sprinting round Christ Church Meadows; pushing their bodies in joyous relief at the end of finals or in frantic desperation. James resisted that memory – but, once again, Tom wouldn’t let it drop. ‘Let’s face it: it’s the least I could do. Probably my turn to bail you out.’
And so far today, it has all been fine. There have been a couple of jibes from the more sanctimonious Labour MPs – out-of-shape northerners who probably haven’t had sex since the millennium – and some disdain from the more shrewish Labour women, but many on his own side have nodded in support. There have been kind notes, particularly from a couple of older politicians: former ministers who remember Alan Clark, Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, Steve Norris, David Mellor. Not to mention Stephen Milligan, who auto-asphyxiated, trussed up in stockings. No one is pretending this government is going ‘Back to Basics’; no one cares – so sharply – about individual sexual morality. There is a frisson of concern about his having dallied with an employee, but Chris Clarke’s strategy has worked faultlessly. James’s sense – and his instincts for this are usually sound – is that his dalliance might be a mark in the chief whip’s apocryphal black book, or worth a paragraph or two in a future political memoir, but that, in terms of his long-term career, a line has been drawn underneath the affair.
The relief is immense. He pauses by the oak pigeonholes: perhaps anachronistic in this age in which his phone vibrates constantly with texts and emails, but still used, frequently. His is illuminated, revealing a message: a note – surprisingly unpatronising – from Malcolm Thwaites. He pauses, looking towards the entrance of the Chamber beyond the principal doorkeeper, another anachronism in his black tails and waistcoat, who gives him a measured but courteous nod. The lobby is quiet and he stands in the calm of the antechamber, looking up at the bronze of Churchill, hands on hips, head jutting forward like a prize fighter. On the other side of the lobby is Mrs Thatcher, right hand raised, index finger poised, as if at the despatch box. His is a new brand of conservatism and yet he needs to channel their unwavering self-belief; to regain his chutzpah. He nods to the Iron Lady; turns and gives the doorkeeper his most charming smile.
All will be well. Walking backwards, he glances up at the arch to the Chamber and the reddish patches left by the flames when the Chamber was bombed and completely destroyed in the Blitz. The roof to this lobby caved in, yet you wouldn’t know it. All was rebuilt just as his career – knocked out of kilter but not irreparably damaged – will be. The key, as well as being less aloof with his more tedious backbench colleagues, is to make something of this Home Office brief, a potential poisoned chalice, though Tom knows he can shine. He’ll get back to the office now – and he strides down the Commons corridor, leaving the inner sanctum, the beating heart of this House, behind.
He crosses into the peers’ lobbies – all thick red carpet and panelled walls, topped with the crests in peacock blue and gold leaf of attorney generals. An elderly peer totters to the printed paper office and nods. Neither speaks, the atmosphere as hushed as a Trappist monastery, though the High Victorian Gothic décor is far from austere. He prefers this sumptuousness and secrecy to the shiny openness of Portcullis, the modern part of Parliament with its vast fig tree-lined atrium, though it might have been better if that committee meeting had been in that part of the Commons. For a moment he considers how events could have been different: there, the doors of the lifts are made of glass.
He shoves the thought aside and takes a short cut down a spiral staircase and through a maze of admin offices before emerging into a yard at the far end of the building, sheeted in plastic and barricaded in scaffolding, right by Black Rod’s entrance. The autumn sunshine is beating down and, behind him, the Thames sparkles and reminds him of the golden bits of Oxford – he has long since compartmentalised the not-so-golden bit. And then Tom had to allude to it this morning. Let’s face it: it’s the least I could do. Probably my turn to bail you out.
‘Mr Whitehouse?’
The voice drags him from his thoughts. A middle-aged man and a woman in her early thirties come towards him as he prepares to cross Millbank and stride down towards the Home Office.
‘May I help? Can I ask that you make an appointment?’ He glances behind him in the direction of the Commons with its police protection and security guards. It’s not that he is wary of meeting members of the public but he’d rather not, particularly since this man is making for him with the smirk of a nutter.
‘We were hoping you could make an appointment with us,’ the man says, coming closer. The woman – not bad-looking, the assessment is automatic, though her ill-fitting trouser suit and lank haircut do little for her – follows a pace behind.
‘I’m sorry?’ James notes the twang of his voice but then the man flicks a Met Police ID card from his wallet – and James’s smile hardens into a rictus grin.
‘Detective Sergeant Willis; this is my colleague, Detective Constable Rydon. We’ve been trying to contact you, Mr Whitehouse, but your office seemed unaware of your whereabouts?’ He says this with an easy smile, though his eyes don’t waver; his voice, stuffed with glottal stops, holds an edge.
‘I switched my mobile off for an hour. Criminal behaviour, I know.’ James chooses his words deliberately, trying for a smile that is unforthcoming. ‘Occasionally I do, at lunchtime. I just wanted to be able to think.’
He smiles again and offers his right hand. The detective looks down at it as if it is something he would not normally encounter, and refrains from taking it.
James, affecting not to notice, moves his hand as if to guide them. ‘Perhaps we could talk elsewhere? In my office at the department? I’m heading there.’
‘I think you might prefer that,’ the other man says.
His junior, slim and delicate-featured, nods, implacable. He wonders what it would take to make her smile; and at the same time, where the most discreet place would be.
‘Perhaps you could tell me what you’d like to discuss?’ he says. His breath is coming quickly, and he concentrates on slowing it down.
‘Olivia Lytton,’ DS Willis says, looking at him directly. He rolls back his shoulders, surprisingly broad for a slim man, and suddenly becomes more imposing. ‘We’re here to ask you a few questions in connection with an allegation of rape.’