The Knives (17 page)

Gazing up at a sorry sky he could nearly believe that to be stood as he was – in a school playground, shivering a little, clad in a numbered tee-shirt and tracksuit bottoms – was to have travelled horribly back in time.

The school was a low-rise brick block flanked by HORSA huts, the playground a cracked concrete yard that might have been designed for the grazing of juvenile knees; and set down into its midst was a high metal cage like some medieval touring borstal, around which two dozen thirteen-year-old schoolboys wearing PE kits milled expectantly. In silent contemplation Blaylock felt another shiver go through him.

‘Would you like me to fetch you a coat, Home Secretary?’ At his side was the smooth-cheeked Tory councillor who had invited him to this community project.

‘Never worry, son,’ said Blaylock. ‘I’m from the north.’ He glanced to Ben Cotesworth for approval, but his spad wore a look of suppressed mirth, as if in his mind he were already describing the day’s big debacle to some pals across a table of pints – or else posting it, snap by indecorous snap, to Instagram.

This patch, Blaylock knew, was one more place in England where to be a Tory was a tough gig: a deprived ward, largely given over to social housing, worth at most a handful of votes from private landlords renting ex-council properties. Nonetheless, the order had come down from the Captain that for the duration of conference his commanding officers should be seen to be busily engaged all round Birmingham. This, then, was Blaylock’s contribution. He only hoped his Cabinet colleagues were playing
the game properly, too.

A community police officer, tubby round the middle, was doling out coloured bibs bearing the logo of a local estate agent, and already one urchin was performing quite an expert array of juggling tricks with a fuzzy fluorescent football. Blaylock watched, respectful of the boy’s cocksure skills, slightly hoping he would slip and cock up – until the police officer lumbered over to him, so full of seeming contentment at being relatively popular for a morning that Blaylock found it heartbreaking.

‘I’ll say this, usually when I’m around you’d not see these kids for dust.’

Blaylock had got distracted by one towheaded boy sat forlornly apart on a wall, dangling his feet. ‘Somebody’s not so cheery.’

‘Yeah, well. There’s always one doesn’t get picked.’

‘It’s five after nine, David,’ said Ben, now fretful. He was media bag-carrier for the morning, Mark Tallis having bigger fish to feed back in town at Conference Centre. The young woman from the local paper was present and correct, camera round her neck, tapping at her phone, but they were waiting still for a crew from the regional evening news.

‘Okay,’ Blaylock resolved. ‘Let’s just do this. Just a kick-about to get warmed up, maybe? You, and you, versus you, and
you
.’ He beckoned to the disconsolate boy on the wall, who peered at him, first with suspicion then with dawning joy.

‘Freddie?’ said the community cop. ‘But he’s not got his gear.’

‘They just need bibs, right? Howay, get them bibs on.’

Ball under arm, Blaylock ushered the boys into the cage as a crowd formed all around and faces pressed into gaps between bars. Wishing he had a whistle, he dropped the ball, put a foot on it and rubbed his hands.

‘Right! I want to see a good clean game – no bad tackles, no barging, no grabbing. Five minutes starts
now
.’

He rolled the ball into play, darted from the cage and clanged
the door shut. The resultant pell-mell was exhilarating to see, and Blaylock’s hoarse directives soon passed from officiating (‘
Hands off him!
’) to coaching (
‘Pass it, your pal’s right there!’
). Freddie was not much of a player, but keen as mustard, even managing to scuff one toe-cutting shot into his opponents’ hutch-like goal before his team ran out 3–7 losers.

As the boys trooped from the cage, grinning and panting, the councillor patted their shoulders and Blaylock shook their hands for the camera.

‘Vote Conservative,’ quipped Ben
sotto voce
from the sidelines.

‘Go piss up a rope,’ uttered Freddie under his breath, pleased with himself.

Climbing into the back of the Jaguar Blaylock felt first the enveloping warmth, then a tickle in his nose, and he ducked his head and sneezed convulsively four times in succession.

Martin drove at speed back to the city, ten miles in under ten minutes. Blaylock stared out the window at housing estates flitting by, their weathered facades and blank windows, their separate worlds.

Quarantine
, he thought.
We quarantine the poor here, and call that a service. ‘You lot stick to the outskirts of town, a good stone’s throw from the orderly bit where the rest of us do the business. And try not to call us, yeah? We’ll try to keep pushing the basic food and lodgings your way.’

The view changed to rows of redbrick and whitewashed semis, then to the concrete innards of the Second City. To Blaylock what he saw of the built-up area still spoke to him of decline – over-planning, under-usage, the long-term diminution of productive forces. As they slowed toward the ‘ring of steel’ around Conference Centre he could see off-duty members of Warwickshire and West Midlands Police Federations thronging on the civilian side of the barriers, bearing placards and banners that decried both government cuts to
police pay and the exorbitant cost of policing the conference.

Bannerman will be pleased
, Blaylock thought.
Thanks, Chief.

On the other side of the cordons and berms their police colleagues, numbers boosted by burly private security staff, faced the protesters impassively.

Blaylock took his dutiful place in the hall for Caroline Tennant’s big morning speech, but he listened only fitfully. For some time he was transfixed by the huge logo projected behind her – an electrified Union Jack, bursting with light, above it the legend ONWARD TOGETHER. Then he fell to stealing sidelong glances at delegates in the block of seating to his left, who listened far more attentively to the Chancellor.

For years, it felt like, Blaylock had heard well-intentioned people asserting that the day was nigh when the Conservative Party would be remade by the transforming force of generational demographics. He did wish that the revolution would come – if only so he could tell Jennie this was another weighty matter on which she had judged him too quickly. But, plainly, they still awaited that rosy dawn. Here in the stalls, at least, Tories remained an older crowd – well-tended beef, dressy women, fleshy men, sideburns and bald pates aplenty, Rotarians in blazers, a scattering of toffs in Barbours, a proportion of otherworldly jug-eared types and pain-faced gurners, and a cohort of sixth-formers, mature for their age, no doubt, and yet looking awfully juvenile in what could only be their first ill-fitting grey suits.

Even now – staring up at an unmarried, childless, female Tory Chancellor – it seemed to Blaylock that the crowd remained much the same old Tories, only smaller in number and a tad more confused, inclined to nod their heads when told of the regrettably sometime ill effects of the movement of women into the workplace, otherwise to shake those same heads gravely over ‘the failure of multiculturalism’, just as they applauded attacks
on ‘red tape’ and crooked pension providers, and cheered any defence of the local post office or ‘our returning heroes’.

In advance of his own turn at the podium Blaylock first discharged a duty in sitting for lunch in the conference hotel’s goldfish-bowl atrium restaurant, with the editors of the
Times, Telegraph, Express, Mail, Post
and
Correspondent
. A ritual discussion of issues was enacted. He was given his five minutes’ grace to deliver the basic message of a sensible Conservative programme of government staying its course, after which he accepted prods and teases about more complicated messages, coded or otherwise, that the editors had discerned within the speeches of his Cabinet colleagues, and he tried to disentangle himself from these as deftly as he could. He then affected a listening mien as, over coffees, they whacked away on the issue of immigration, especially the ‘fishing expedition’ of dawn raids before the House rose. To Blaylock’s surprise the
Telegraph
seemed to side with various protests that the clampdown had inspired among the settled London communities of Chinatown and Brick Lane. But the day had yielded results: two hundred arrests, seven hundred repatriations. Guy Walters had not, in the end, streaked down Whitehall.

As he rose for goodbyes and handshakes the
Correspondent
editor was newly solicitous. ‘Your fringe event this evening, it’ll be chaired by our new political commentator, Abby Hassall? She’s a talent, you’d better be on your game.’

Blaylock smiled, thinking only of the profile in which Ms Hassall had queried his ‘bottle’ and obtained some treacherous quotations.

The editor of the
Post
had kept close to Blaylock’s elbow as though a final and private word with the Minister was his paper’s special entitlement.

‘Domestic violence, Home Secretary?’

‘Yes?’

‘We’ve got very much on-board with this, you should know. Our readers are very engaged with the whole issue. They believe in it. I believe in it.’

‘Sorry, in what precisely?’

‘The calls I believe you’ve been getting for a large-scale inquiry? We would back those. We’ll be keeping a bit of heat on you about this. Obviously I won’t stick you on the front page every day, ha-ha. Unless that’s what it takes for you to make a decision …’

Blaylock made a vexed note to self to take this seriously. As much as Marjorie Michaels had troubled his conscience he had been fudging the matter of lobbying Caroline Tennant for funds to act. Now he could envisage the
Post
trying to force his hand with a campaign that cost them little but spare-change indignation.

With the editors gone, Blaylock drained his coffee in peace and looked about, past the potted palm fronds, observing the jungle and its wildlife. On a flat screen relaying live coverage from the hall, Jason Malahide was delivering a rousing attack-dog speech, decrying a variety of things that struck him as ‘
waffly
’ and ‘
wishy-washy
’, among them statistics, EU directives, ‘
all this bossy rulemaking, a wholly unnecessary burden on honest hard-working people who want to get on with their business’.

Then, amid the cheery crowd-pleasing, Malahide’s eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened to an indigestive moue – what Blaylock knew to be the Business Secretary’s version of gravitas.

‘Our opponents don’t understand how money is made, because they’ve never run a profit-and-loss account in the real world! But my experience in the energy sector taught me what business needs! And the business of this government is business!’

The applause was tumultuous. Blaylock wasn’t surprised.

Five minutes later he was striding over the elevated walkway from hotel to conference hall, Ben, Mark and Deborah flanking him. They passed Malahide and his entourage going the other way as if pointedly.

‘Knock ’em dead, Rocky,’ Malahide grinned.

Passing the conference souvenir stall Blaylock clocked for the first time the piles of engraved collectable tat that had been rush-produced in his approximate image: mini-boxing gloves and Lonsdale-style shorts, even a china figurine of himself kitted out for the ring, grinning incongruously and looking about twenty pounds heavier than how he truly tipped the scales.

Restive in the wings, ready to go, Blaylock suffered through a short introduction by a knighted septuagenarian actor, a salt-of-the-earth type lately seen on screens in gritty crime drama
The Guv’nor
. In the flesh this knight was smaller and better spoken, yet the crowd seemed to wish to see him as a tough customer, and he didn’t disappoint. ‘
Tell you what
,’ he said, looking up with a studied, punchy pause.
‘I wouldn’t want to be a villain with this guy around.’

Blaylock took his place, checked the wafer-thin glass autocue on his podium and the big LCD scroll spanning the back of the hall, and plunged in.

‘You know, we talk a lot about pledges to fight for this and fight that. It’s a well-worn metaphor and the public can be forgiven for getting weary of it. The fact is, politicians can’t fight alone. Nobody can. We fight together for a shared cause or we don’t fight at all. It’s just as General Patton told his troops before D-Day, “All of the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters … Every man has a job to do and he must do it. Every man is a vital link in the great chain.”’

The applause came easy for that one, as Blaylock expected, though he knew his audience might have preferred something by Churchill. But he was off and running. He thanked his ‘superb’ team of ministers, his ‘sterling’ Cabinet colleagues, his ‘inspirational’ Prime Minister – even the West Midlands Police; whereupon he came to the ‘Policy’ section.

‘One thing we have pledged to fight is illegal immigration.
That’s not to say that the numbers of people seeking entry to Britain illegally are the gravest enemy we face. Some say those numbers are relatively small, so why bother?

‘You bother because of the principle of the thing – the fairness of systems, and the trust of our citizens in how they function. Each of us as a citizen has a tacit and conditional contract with the state, for which the state requires our consent. Unless the state deals fairly with us, the systems can’t function.

‘It comes down to this. Are we a nation or aren’t we? Do our citizens have a say in who lives alongside them or don’t they? As long as we agree our borders shouldn’t be wide open, then the views of existing citizens ought to come first. That fairness is worth a great deal.

‘When a system is persistently exploited, people get demoralised – even a bit is too much. So we have to put a stop. And once you’ve made clear what you won’t tolerate – clamped down on the so-called minor offences – it’s remarkable how the clamps stick on the major ones, too.