Political Suicide (5 page)

Later on, over beer at the Conservative Club, Harold Fawcett chatted over the selection meeting with Sir Richard Rayne, who owned land on the borders of the constituency, and he expressed surprise at the margin of Craybourne-Fisk's victory.

“Thought he might get it, but not by so many. Didn't expect him to get
your
vote. Was it the hopeful side of his performance?”

“Not at all.”

“Did you like the chap better than you expected?”

“I did not. He's a horrible little shit.”

“Why did you vote for him then?”

“I've got a feeling in my bones we're going to lose this by-election, and it's best we lose it with a little shit sent down by Central Office. Then we can put a local man in for next time.”

• • •

Jerry Snaithe did not arrive in Bootham for the Labour Party selection meeting by train, but by car. Jerry Snaithe was essentially a loner. He talked a lot about collective action, collective decisions, and workers' collectives, but essentially he was a loner, and the car is the loner's
form of transport. He arrived alone. His wife was working, he said, and in any case he didn't believe in turning the process of selection into a beauty parade. Once within the town limits of Bootham, he drove round the town three times, partly because the traffic system, dreamed up by a sadist in the Town Hall, made it almost impossible to do other than drive round in circles, partly because he wanted to get the feel of the place. He sniffed; he sensed the poverty and aimlessness; he saw the decay and dereliction. Like Lancelot Brown confronted by ancestral acres, he saw the place had “capabilities.”

After two circuits of the town he had located the Great Northern Commercial Hotel (Temperance), and after three he drove into its parking yard. He registered, chucked his hold-all into his poky room (hardly noticing anything beyond its number), and, taking a sheet of paper from his inside pocket, he went out into the street. He had, he told himself, to “get busy.”

By getting busy, Jerry Snaithe did not mean he was going to meet the people of Bootham and talk over their problems. Nor did he mean that he was going to nobble the selection committee in advance to ensure his selection as candidate. It was not necessary. Workers for Revolutionary Action had occupied twelve of the thirty places on the Bootham General Management Committee since the previous summer and had seven sympathizers in their pockets. When, in December, one week after the death of James Partridge, the committee had decided that the re-selection of their previous candidate was not to be automatic, this was only the public expression of a previous
fait accompli.
When Sam
Quimby, the previous candidate, had told the
Bootham Evening Advertiser
that he had always been in favour of re-selection, but that he regretted that the local party in Bootham East had been taken over by a tightly organized cell of Marxist activists, it was tantamount to an admission of defeat. The political correspondents of the national press had said that this decision meant that the seat was “up for grabs,” but they were wrong, and Jerry Snaithe had known they were wrong. It was all arranged. He had not come to Bootham for selection, but for coronation.

So when he told himself to “get busy,” he did not mean organize his own selection, but to plan with his friends his future campaign. He went to the men on his list, and the woman, to Harry, Sid, Arthur, Fred, Quentin, Percy, Sean and Alice, and they planned strategies, speakers, tactics. In the evening he met the rank and file members of the WRA, all nineteen of them, at Alice's. Alice made some sandwiches, and they all had, as Jerry told her at the end, “a great time.” By the end of the day they'd got together a list of potential speakers and campaigners. They'd got Albert Spadgett, a Trade Union leader who vied with football hooligans for bottom place in the affections of the Great British Public; they'd got militant leaders from the Greater London Council and the Liverpool City Council; they'd got a student activist leader from the North London Polytechnic, where he had been studying since the late 'sixties; they had agreed to a speaking engagement for the Labour Party Leader, and had agreed that they would even accept a visit from the Deputy Leader, if Labour Party HQ insisted. It was all, as Jerry said, “falling into place.”

So when, next day, the candidates assembled at a Methodist Hall hired by the Bootham East Labour Party, Jerry did not bother to go through the sort of deprecatory disclaimers that Antony Craybourne-Fisk had gone in for. He stood there, tall, broad-shouldered, red-shirted, certain in his certainties, and he made no attempt to hide the fact that he was going to be the Labour candidate. The other six people who (for form's sake) were to go before the General Management Committee—five men and a woman who didn't seem to know why she was there—milled around him, resentful, bewildered, and out-manœuvred. Sam Quimby, the soon-to-be-ousted candidate, said to him: “I know it's just a formality. I know I'm out.” Jerry smiled in a superior way and said: “We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?”

After the inevitable had happened Sam Quimby, who in the sentimental jargon of political commentators had “a lifetime of service to the party” behind him, came up to Jerry again.

“Well, I don't like the way it was done. I don't like it at all. But I've been a loyal Labour man all my life, and I'll not go against my principles now. For what it's worth, you can have my endorsement as candidate.”

“Good of you,” said Jerry.

“I'll even, if you want me, come and campaign for you.”

“We'll see if something can be arranged,” said Jerry, positively lordly.

“But I'll tell you this: I would have won this seat; and you, with your brand of politics, haven't a hope in hell.”

“I don't know that politics is necessarily about winning
always,” said Jerry, in his “explaining things to infants” voice. “What matters is that at last we've got a chance to get real Socialist policies across to the electorate.”

This was conventional wisdom in the Workers for Revolutionary Action movement. What mattered at this stage was capturing the party machine, and using it to get a Socialist message across. But though Jerry Snaithe subscribed to it with his mouth, he did not do so in his heart. Jerry very much wanted to get elected, and, having used his friends from the WRA, he now intended to do everything in his power to ensure that he was. Including, if necessary, ditching his friends. He was, like Antony Craybourne-Fisk, a real political animal.

• • •

That very evening the
ad hoc
, part-time representative of the Social Democrats in Bootham East was rung up by his party leader from the House of Commons.

“I was wondering if you'd done any of the soundings you promised to do among the local members. About whether they wanted to keep this local candidate, or whether we should shunt in one of our national figures.”

“Well, yes, actually, I have,” said the representative. And he had, too. It had not taken him long. The Social Democratic Party had very few paid-up members in Bootham East, though as he had told the Party Leader in an earlier conversation, there were lots and lots of people who said they might well consider voting Social Democrat should the opportunity arise.

“First of all, though,” the representative went on,
“I don't know if you've heard, but the Labour Party has selected Jerry Snaithe tonight as their candidate.”

“Great!” said the Leader, with real enthusiasm. “A splendid bogey-man figure for us. ‘Labour Party taken over by extremists,' and all that. It'll be true, too.”

“Quite. I thought you'd be pleased. But with one candidate from Conservative Central Office, the other on the GLC—”

“Yes,” said the Leader, his voice showing that he knew what was coming.

“I think the general feeling here will be that we should stick with the local man. It could be a winning card . . .”

“Yes,” said the Leader again, trying to keep the scepticism out of his voice. “And this Mr—er—”

“Worthing.”

“Yes, Worthing, he's a—what?—schoolmaster?”

“A lecturer at the local College of Further Education.”

“Of course. What sort of candidate will he make, do you think?”

“He's very engaged, well up in local issues . . . very earnest . . . He
has
been the candidate before, you remember.”

“I remember. But without the sort of media exposure he'll get this time. That's the vital point. That can make or break a candidate. Is he a good speaker?”

“Yes—
quite
good . . . A little dull . . . Inclined to be long-winded, in fact . . . But it's quite easy to stop him. I just pull at his sleeve. And he's
very
hard-working. Bones up on the subjects at issue, has all the facts at his fingertips . . .”

“Right,” said the Leader, accepting the inevitable.
“Well, that's decided then. Now all we have to do is get the bandwagon rolling and send in the storm-troopers.”

It was not a very appropriate image for the leader of the Social Democratic Party to use.

• • •

Thus were chosen the candidates for the three main parties for the by-election at Bootham East, the campaign for which was not scheduled officially to begin until February 6th, and which was already promising to be a media-event of some magnitude; several national newspapers had begun drying out their political hacks in preparation, and their editors were sharpening the language of their political invective. Two days later, the
Daily Grub
, in a rare departure from its steady diet of tits, bums and stories about Prince Andrew, printed photographs not only of the three main candidates, but also of the MP whose death (“which has not yet been satisfactorily explained”) had caused the by-election. It was this picture of James Partridge that brought the little man from Battersea in to see Superintendent Sutcliffe, and to start questions about James Partridge's death buzzing once more around the corridors of power.

Wilfred Dowson was a retired local government clerk who for many years had laboured in various of the bureaucracies of the London County Council and the Greater London Council (“before they were hijacked by this present gang of comedians,” he used to say, over a half-pint of shandy). He was a local government official of an old but well-known type in his generation: a deeply conservative Labour voter, he had an encyclopædic knowledge of bye-laws, departmental minutes, sub-sections in standing orders—in fact, he was a master-spider in the vast web of local bureaucracy, and very few were the applicants for handouts from their council who got past his cautious and parsimonious temperament. “Never do anything in a hurry” was his motto, and he ran his little Circumlocution Office in such a way that as often as not this meant: “Never do anything at all.”

Now he was retired, and he spent much of his time in Battersea Public Library, not far from his home. It
was warm there, so he saved on heating bills; there were people there (he had buried his wife, gratefully, some two years before he retired), so he never felt lonely; and he could read all the national and local papers at his leisure, and pursue in the Reference Library some arcane by-way of his favourite hobby, moths.

When Wilfred Dowson saw the picture of James Partridge in the
Daily Grub
for January 21st, he frowned, puzzled, and thought it over for a day or two. He had been rather “off colour,” as he put it, in early December, and had not got into the library as much as usual. So now he demanded the back files of
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
, and read what they had had to say—it was a meagre amount, in fact—about the death of James Partridge. Then he decided to go to the nearest local police station. Here there was another hiccup, because the man on the desk there at lunch-time when he went in was a PC of more than usual dimness, a young thug who had only joined the force for a bit of legitimized violence, and who lived for those times when he and a few of his mates in blue could put the boot into blacks, druggies and other weirdos who were what was laughably described as “resisting arrest.” This thick youth sat at the desk, yawning and scratching his crotch, and he told Wilfred Dowson that as far as he knew there wasn't no case, and it didn't come within their province anyway, and it didn't sound as if there was much in it, did there? Oh yeah, if he really felt like it he could go along to Scotland Yard—it wasn't any skin off
his
nose, was it?

Wilfred Dowson was so incensed at the unenthused reception of his information that it was only after two
days, and after penning an indignant letter to the Battersea Police peppered with phrases from his local government days (“pursuant to this matter I volunteered information”), that Wilfred put on his raincoat on the morning of the twenty-seventh and trotted over Vauxhall Bridge and down Millbank to New Scotland Yard. Here he mentioned the matter at the desk to a young sergeant who was a very much brighter article; he looked in files, and rang straight up to Superintendent Sutcliffe. Within ten minutes he was sitting in Sutcliffe's office, with its fine view down the Thames, and a constable was bringing him coffee from the Yard canteen. Mr Dowson blossomed. This was more like. This was giving him the importance that he had always known he deserved.

“I saw his picture in the
Grub,”
he explained in his precise, punctilious voice. “Not a paper I would normally read, or not normally
buy
, but this was in the reading room, you understand. I was surprised at his having been an MP. So I went and looked up the account of him in the
Telegraph
, and found that he lived with his wife and family in Cardew Walk, Chelsea. That really did take me aback! Because of course he didn't!”