Party Games (20 page)

            “Mr Richmond issued a statement on behalf of himself and the party and he has no more to add.”  Clare found herself repeating over and over, until she became sick to death of the sound of her own voice yelling over the top of
News 24
.  There was only so much Clare could take of the image of Martin Arnold pushing his way through scrambling paparazzi on his way home from church with his family – a good, moral Christian politician who had the misfortune to be seduced by a socialist temptress.  The Party Chairman had even dashed back to London for a whirlwind media round to try to contain the fall-out.

By 5pm, after being at her desk for a record twelve hours, Clare had been ready to drop, but already it was getting far too late to ensure pre-reporting of Rodney’s big education speech into the Monday papers.  She had endured a rather strained conversation with Fergus McDermott after attempting but strangely failing to contact the
Bulletin
’s education correspondent. 

“But will you commit to a front page leader?”  Clare asked him, rather cheekily.  Well, she was tired and didn’t care what he thought.  McDermott replied smoothly he would try his very best to get Rodney Richmond on the front page the following morning – as long as she would commit her boss to the long-overdue interview for the
Bulletin
. 

“We try to be as impartial as possible, get Rodney’s side of the story.”  McDermott said slickly.

Clare agreed before heading home.  Although in constant touch with Rodney, Martin Arnold would have to literally commit suicide to get her back into the office again before her Monday began.

Monday, 4.45am

Clare shivered as she stepped out of Westminster station, sleepy and desperate for her warm bed and the boyfriend she had left snoring into her pillow.  How she hated the early start, especially when she had worked most of Sunday. 

It was 5.02am precisely when she walked through the glass doors of the media unit, a travel mug warming her fingers, her mobile in the other, trying to upload the
Bulletin
website.  She knew something was up instantly.   Sashaying into her office, just off the open-plan floor where her press officers worked, she dumped her bag and flicked on her computer, scanning her desk for the row of early editions.  The essential papers all seemed to be there:
The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Morning Engager….
Clare huffed, scraping her hair back into a bobble as her stomach began to grumble.  Expensive yet only semi-filling breakfast bars had an awful lot to answer for.

            “Anyone seen the
Bulletin
this morning?”  She called across the office, appearing at the doorway. 

            “It’s over here, but you need to brace yourself.”  A colleague said, holding up the paper’s front page. 

Clare peeled a banana. “Oh God, Martin Arnold’s not into taking pictures of himself in fishnets then carelessly letting them fall into the wrong hands or something is he...oh holy...fucking...crap.”

            Her banana fell out of her hand, splattering on the floor.  She felt as if she had been winded with a heavy blow to the stomach.  The headline might have been in the simplest of language but it took her mind a few seconds to process it.  Any tiredness she suffered fell away, replaced with an adrenalin-induced sickness and overwhelming feeling of sheer panic.

RICHMOND’S EX-LOVER SPEAKS OUT

 Jenny Lambert, Rodney Richmond’s former girlfriend, breaks her silence over Tory Party Leader’s ‘hypocrisy’ and secret love for another woman which broke her heart.

“Give that to me!”  Clare demanded, storming over and snatching the paper.  It was as if her hands couldn’t move as quickly as her brain while she fumbled with the pages, her fingers trembling through a mixture of fury, confusion and alarm.  It went on for pages, like the Arnold saga but as far as Clare was concerned a million times worse.  “Fergus McDermott, that complete and utter....!  How long have people known about this? Eh?  Someone
answer me
!”

“For about an hour.” A colleague explained.  “We honestly didn’t know about it earlier, the
Bulletin
didn’t seem to want us to know what it had planned, they wanted to catch us completely unawares…”

Clare didn’t care for excuses, nothing would satisfy.  “As
soon
as you knew about it I should have been called!”

“But you were so tired, and we didn’t think…”

“Didn’t think?  God, I’m working with a load of idiots with shit for brains!  Why didn’t I know about this in advance?  I got
nothing
from McDermott about this, no warning!  Bloody bastard!”  Rodney’s speech was shot to pieces as far as coverage went; the spread was a kiss-and-tell ‘I’ve-been-badly-done-to’ stunt from that woman Clare had heard so much about; she should have seen it coming a mile off.  She didn’t know who she hated more – the Lambert woman for talking or that fucking journalist for his deviousness and incredible timing.  

Jenny Lambert was attractive and looked wonderfully leggy and slim on page two, her expression suitably defiant next to a double-paged headline: “’
He slagged off everyone to me in bed, then put them in the Shadow Cabinet
’”.  Each spread was dedicated to a different angle on the story with a string of alleged quotes from Rodney, straight out of Lambert’s mouth.  The worst ‘insults’ were reserved for Colin Scott and Steven Sharkey.  

Gritting her teeth, she slowly sank into the nearest chair, gripping the paper as she read.  Rodney would need to respond; first, however, she resolved she would have to read all of it.  There was little point waking up her boss in a blind panic with only half the information, someone would have to keep a cool, calm head and Clare doubted it would be him.  It was a ‘code red’ - she would need to telephone Deborah first then get in contact with the Director of Communications. 

Jenny Lambert, daughter of newspaper editor Rosie Lambert and business tycoon Stanley Lambert, speaks out for the first time about her life with the man who hopes to be Prime Minister in three years time.  Miss Lambert was Rodney Richmond’s lover for ten eventful months - while he was Parliamentary Private Secretary to former Prime Minister Felix Jeffers, through the general election and the subsequent leadership election.  Their relationship ended in bitter circumstances only days after his elevation to the Tory Party leadership. 

Here, in part one of her first in-depth interview, the glamorous Miss Lambert speaks frankly about how Mr Richmond would shout and rant about his colleagues to her in private then invite them round for dinner to court their vote for the impending leadership ballot.   “He would come in complaining about everyone, then go out and give them jobs in his campaign team.  It was so hypocritical, it made me sick.”  Miss Lambert says.  Today, however, “[Richmond] can’t bear half his Shadow Cabinet...the likes of Gregory Webster and Alex Crossley are tolerated, but as for Barty Phillips I doubt his opinion of the man has changed much in the year since we broke up.”

She recalls the time when Barty Phillips, now Shadow Education Secretary, told Mr Richmond he was unsure whether to back him or his rival, Colin Scott, in the leadership election.  “Rodney simply dismissed him as a ‘total idiot’ and said Barty was only a contender for the Shadow Cabinet because he might be gay and would help him with the ‘rainbow’ vote come a general election. It does make you wonder what deals get done if people Rodney thought, or should I say thinks, are useless end up in prominent Shadow Cabinet positions.”

Mr Richmond was, Miss Lambert points out, rather an insecure man at the time of his election as leader and even thought of giving up in the early stages of his campaign.  “At first he wasn’t quite sure he was the best man for the job, but he had so much support he didn’t want to let everyone down.  Eventually he focused himself on being the candidate who could best keep out Colin Scott, a ‘disaster waiting to happen’.  Once he told me he thought Scott to be quite unstable
in outlook and temperament and was incredibly pompous and self-assured.  The party, in Rodney’s view, was now relying on him alone to bring it to its senses.”

Other colleagues of Mr Richmond’s were also often the subject of his annoyance.  The week following the Tory routing, Miss Lambert admits he was so concerned an “intellectual bully” like Steven Sharkey would stand for the leadership he was set to do a deal with him in case the vote was split.  “Rodney was desperate to make post-leadership arrangements with Steven.  He said a Sharkey-led Tory Party would face oblivion again in four years’ time because he had no idea about conciliatory politics and most people hated him. Rodney said Steven
liked nothing better than to verbally beat a person to a pulp in an argument and he couldn’t serve under a man with that sort of attitude.”

There was, however, one colleague Miss Lambert says Mr Richmond never talked about it derogatory terms.  In part two of the interview, to be serialised tomorrow, Miss Lambert talks publicly about her love for the Tory leader - a private man whose personal life has been the subject of much speculation.  She speaks frankly about how she fell for a politician who went from doting boyfriend to cold and unloving in just ten months, why she thinks their romance ended and the secret love Richmond has been harbouring for years.

*****

5am

Rodney lay still, wide awake, blinking into the darkness of his London bedroom, the thick curtains pulled tightly across the window and a jumble of thoughts racing through his brain.  He had been awake for hours.  Something told him today would be a momentous day and he put his mild anxiety down to the education speech.  Always the perfectionist, he was far more nervous than he would show. He sometimes felt physically sick – his dash to the toilet just before his last Party Conference speech had been far from a bladder-emptying exercise, but after a mint and a quick re-touching of his ‘television’ make-up nobody was the wiser.

            Shortly he would have to get up for a blitz of the media studios, arranged by Clare with military precision. He loved it when he had a busy morning with journalists, it reminded him of the career he had left behind and he felt very much at home in the surroundings of a bustling newsroom. With a restless groan, he rolled onto his side and felt his way to his bedside radio, flicking on Radio 4 just in time for the early news bulletin on the
Today
.  This would, at least, give a flavour of how his speech might be received.

            “…and the fighting is set to continue in the region as civil unrest grows in the capital.  In other news, Conservative Party leader Rodney Richmond faces allegations this morning about private conversations he is said to have had with his former lover Jennifer Lambert regarding his now Shadow Cabinet colleagues.  In an explosive set of interviews with the
Daily Bulletin
newspaper, Miss Lambert, the daughter of newspaper editor Rosie Lambert, alleges Mr Richmond used her as an ‘emotional punch bag’ to air his frustrations while he was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Felix Jeffers, and subsequently candidate for the Conservative Party leadership.  Mr Richmond is set to make a keynote speech today giving the strongest hint yet of the direction the party will take over education policy within the next few years, but the continuing tensions surrounding senior Tories look set to overshadow what the party leadership hoped to be a turning point in Conservative fortunes...”

Rodney’s first reaction was to sit bolt upright in bed, his jaw slack and his eyes wide.  His mind was a strange, blank void; for the first time in 24 hours his speech wasn’t preoccupying his thoughts.  Nothing was.  He couldn’t deny all Jenny said because he simply couldn’t remember.  She must have rushed off and written it all down, there was no way she could recall everything and not kept some sort of diary or record.  He had shouldered most of the blame for their break-up and he had accepted his treatment of her had been questionable but for her to do this, now, was simply unforgivable.  He had no idea whether the motive behind it was fame, revenge, money, or all three.  She had worked for Labour and stank of dirty tricks.  Jenny had loved him once, not so long ago. Or so he had thought.

The mobile on his bedside table began to ring and he snatched it up.

“Rodney, I’m afraid I’ve…”

“Some bad news?  Morning, Clare.”  Rodney found his voice, just.  “I’ve just heard it on
Today
.”

“I’m sorry, I was going to call you ten minutes ago but I thought I’d better read it all first, so I can summarise, I mean at first glance it looks bad, but really they’ve spun so little into a major story.”  Clare’s decision to remain calm and ‘carry on’ had been short-lived and her voice was higher than usual and she was rushing her words.

“I think I was given a succinct summary.”  Rodney replied testily.  It wasn’t her fault, of course it wasn’t, but talking suddenly made it real and his temper was rising fast. 

Clare gave a heavy sigh.  “I’m so, so sorry.  I should have rung, I should have…”

“I think we’ll just have to wait and see what the reaction is when the world wakes up, although I doubt my private conversations with my girlfriend are what the British public is most concerned about in their daily lives.”  His words were an attempt at comfort, for both himself as well as Clare, but his tone was slightly less convincing as his annoyance bubbled away.

“Is that going to be the official line to take?” 

Rodney could hear her scribbling on her notepad.  “Probably best if I read it all through first.  I’ll get to the Commons as quickly as Fred will allow, we can go over it all then and afterwards we’re to stick to the media rota on the speech like glue, no matter how much anyone protests – including Deborah.”