Analysts of 20th
century British politics consider The Church Hall Riot to be a
classic example of how a single unexpected event can change the
course of history.
The candidate question and answer
session in an obscure Gridchester church hall confirmed the Tories in
power for another decade and set Borthwick Prosser upon an upward
trajectory that would take him to a Cabinet post as Secretary of
State for Transport.
The Party Leader (and Brian
Pelleroe) retired.
The hall erupted as soon as Brian gave
a clumsy assent to Paul’s interpretation of the Cummings
question. Furious residents of the Nye Estate surged forward
exocet-style, and Prosser seized the microphone from an incredulous
Vicar Bottomley.
And THIS, friends (jabbing at
Brian with his finger) is the alternative to the stability and
harmony of Conservative government!
THIS MAN has today said in public
what his Party bosses say in private!
They say that decent people on
modest incomes live in such squalor that they have introduced into
Gridchester a PLAGUE of the very VERMIN that he is paid to
exterminate in his day job!!
THIS MAN AND HIS PARTY HAVE TODAY
STIGMATISED A WHOLE SECTION OF SOCIETY !!!
She did not think that the Nye
contingent seemed stigmatised; nor did they appear especially decent.
They looked triumphant and were
exhibiting the type of violent behaviour that would, in other
circumstances (kicking chairs; overthrowing the candidates’
table) have ensured a night in the cells.
In addition, she was sure that some, if
not most of them, were acting under the influence of alcohol or
drugs.
Angry voices charged Brian with
deliberately targeting them during the course of the campaign;
visiting repeatedly for the sole purpose of reporting them to
the Council on trumped up public health charges and entering their
names in secret files.
Prosser appeared to be conducting
them in a parody of Last Night at the Proms and it was
only when Vicar Bottomley fell to the floor and disappeared beneath a
jumble of disorderly limbs, that somebody called the police.
It was a relief to go to work the next
day; although she had barely slept after a furious row with Paul that
had woken up the children and distressed the dog.
She accused him of sabotaging Brian’s
campaign for the purpose of destroying her credibility with the Party
and depriving her of the only friends she had managed to make in this
God-forsaken hell-hole.
Of course it did not stop there.
By the time Vanessa came downstairs,
crying
I can’t sleep because you’re
KILLING MY DADDY!
she had treated her husband to the
entire canon of grief screamed at full volume; her ruined career; his
horrible father; the vile patronage of Gillian; her breadline
existence while St Nicola and her brats lived in luxury; the
pathetic fawning of the Nuttalls and his infidelity with that Hunt
bitch.
When Paul countered, nastily with
How does it feel to be dumped for a
pregnant teenager?
she threw the alarm clock.
He threw his boots.
When Paul scooped Vanessa up and left
the room with the piece de resistance
St Nicola? This type of behaviour is
tantamount to child abuse.
she did not reply but sat alone in the
darkness.
Lynne was in Toronto, living it up. She
was in Binley, living in hell. Tomorrow, she would crawl, grovel –
do whatever it took to patch things up and carry on.
Tomorrow
Tonight, she was simply too tired…
Philip Twill’s exclusive in
The Gridchester Post did not remain exclusive to either
his paper or Gridchester.
Within the space of a day, the streets,
shops and pubs were crawling with journalists from national outlets;
attempting to exploit a story that had transformed the course of a
pedestrian General Election campaign.
The Party Leader made a statement
disowning Brian as a naïve and inexperienced candidate whose
aberrant views were in no way representative of either the thinking
or the programme of the Party.
He attempted to dismiss the unfortunate
comment as being of little relevance, but his assertion that
Gridchester North is not a seat we
would expect to win in a landslide
opened up a further seam of misery.
Robbie Nantwich interviewed a number of
MPs defending small majorities, including Derek Kingsmill from
Lowerbridge.
The events of the past few days had
clearly affected Derek who looked more than usually puffy and
anxious.
No, he said,
Of course the Leader had not said
that the feelings and opinions of the people in Gridchester were not
important. Of course they were just as crucial and VALID as those of
the residents of Lowerbridge …
Similarly, the Leader had not meant
that any old idiot with dangerous views was welcome to stand
in seats like Gridchester. No, not at all.
And as for what the entire debacle
revealed about the Party’s methods of selecting candidates –
well, it wasn’t his place to say, really, was it? They generally
did very well and picked first-rate candidates, absolutely
everywhere...
The Crier’s front page the next day
lead with:
MP CLAIMS PARTY COULD NOT ORGANISE A
P*** UP IN A BREWERY: KINGSMILL SLAMS CORRUPT CANDIDATE
SELECTIONS
She and the girls were sitting
in the living room of Gail Pitt’s small terraced house, eating
Twiglets and drinking a second bottle of Sancerre.
During the campaign, they had abandoned
their weekly Malmsey Head evenings; firstly because of election work
and now to avoid the undercover journalists who had infiltrated every
single hostelry in Gridchester.
The second bottle had been purchased in
an attempt to comfort a distraught Sylvia, who was alternately
sniffing and sobbing after a bruising encounter with Lisbet Pelleroe.
Since the Church Hall Riot, three
days ago, Brian had been holed up in his home bunker; cowering behind
curtains whilst the flower of journalism staked out his garden.
Lisbet had not felt impelled to placate them with refreshments and
the advice from the Party’s National Office had been to remain
under cover.
However, Sylvia (who had not seen Brian
since he had been unceremoniously escorted from the meeting by two
uniformed constables), had telephoned his home incessantly and on
receiving no reply, had turned up on the doorstep, braving notebooks
and cameras, armed with a steak and kidney casserole.
Lisbet Pelleroe’s elderly mother, who
had not been privy to the Party’s advice to keep exits and
entrances closed, opened the front door and was virtually crushed by
a stampede of journalists and photographers who surged into the hall,
knocking the casserole to the floor.
The sight of photographers taking
pictures of steak, kidney and gravy seeping into her new Axminster
carpet and treading it into the pile was too much for
Lisbet who turned on Sylvia and screamed:
Get out and leave my bloody husband
alone!
This was bad enough, but what was worse
was the ensuing array of headlines and photographs in the press which
were all variants of:
DISGRACED CANDIDATE IN LOVE TRIANGLE
ROW
Sylvia was inconsolable. Quite apart
from her distress at the behaviour of Lisbet and humiliation at the
hands of the press, there was the issue of Shaun.
I told him that nothing had gone on,
but he said that was worse than if it had!
she wailed.
He said that everyone at work was
laughing at him because his wife fancied the Rodent Officer who
didn’t fancy her back – and all the mums on the school run are
talking about me. I want to die; we’ll have to sell the house –
and how will I cope as a single parent?
I hate Brian Pelleroe! I wish he was
dead!
She suspected that Sylvia was not the
only person or group of people (including the Party Leader) to
be cherishing murderous thoughts about Brian Pelleroe, but as she
refilled Sylvia’s glass, she reflected that the love triangle
issue had come in handy.
The Pelleroe affair had developed a
life of its own and the fact that her husband had lit the
touch paper at the meeting had gone largely unnoticed.
Things at home settled down; after a
fashion.
She and Paul circled each other for a
day or so, like wary jungle beasts, watched fretfully by Vanessa –
and then resumed their normal behaviour.
She had no illusions about her marriage
or her husband; she had weighed them in the balance and found both
wanting. But they had children, a house and a dog, so she put
up, shut up, cooked, cleaned and had sex as usual.
Women of her generation and Sylvia’s
did not want to be alone, so they worked at their marriages until
such time as their marriages did not work and they were dumped
anyway.
That time was not yet.
The day before the Election saw the
Pelleroe affair at last departing the front pages of the papers and
acquiring a quieter berth towards the middle sections.
Opinion polls that had seen the Party
assuming third place behind the Liberals, perked up, after an uproar
following the death of a child who had received the wrong dosage of
medication during a tonsils and adenoids operation in Newcastle.
Brian Pelleroe had ventured out of his
house into an empty garden and the Gridchester comrades
decided to meet in the tap room at The Duke (after an Eve of Poll
leaflet drop) to see the closing edition of Election Round Up;
the BBC’s authoritative pundit programme.
She sat with Hazel and Gail, keeping
her distance from the Beeches and Vince O’Reilly, who had made some
nasty comments about Paul at the height of the Pelleroe affair.
A subdued Sylvia had wedged herself
between Shaun and Martin Sweet, keeping as much space between herself
and the Pelleroes as it was possible to achieve without actually
sitting in another bar.
Brian just looked ill.
And now, said presenter, Gilbert
Daventry, who enjoyed the type of seniority and prestige that Robbie
Nantwich was yet to achieve:
in a final twist to one of the most
EXTRAORDINARY election campaigns in living memory, we have an
exclusive interview with the woman who should have been a candidate
in Gridchester North; the woman who was spurned by a vengeful Party
in favour of a man who says that poor people are responsible for
infestations of rats; the man who has stigmatised a huge swathe of
decent people living and working in Britain today.
I give you the lady herself : Clare
Butcher!
The room was silent and all eyes were
mesmerised by the Medusa-like figure of their former Treasurer
relating in the ringing tones that had once been used to harangue
the candidate of a County Council by-election for financial
profligacy, how she had sacrificed years of her life working for the
Party to the detriment of her marriage, only to be deprived of
the right to stand for selection because of the crimes of her
husband.
She, Clare, had taught at Sunday
school and was a member of Vicar Bottomley’s flock who had
personally organised the successful Party Band Aid Knitting
Programme.
Her application was founded on
excellent work, strong principles and absolute financial probity, but
she had been rejected without the courtesy of an explanation.
It was for that reason that tonight
she felt it the mission of a lifetime in politics to urge the people
of Gridchester and elsewhere to vote Conservative.
There was more; an interview with an
ebullient Borthwick Prosser who appeared beneath a poster emblazoned
with the Tory slogan: CONSERVATIVE: COMPETENCE WITH COMPASSION;
and a shot of the Party Leader running into an alleyway to escape a
shower of eggs and tomatoes - but she was not paying attention.
She was thinking about Clare Butcher.
The former Treasurer, she of the
flapping trousers and shapeless pepper'n’salt hair style
had now broadcast to the nation sporting a youthful brunette pixie
cut atop a fitted sapphire-blue -acket with shoulder pads.
Clare looked like Alexis Carrington
in Dynasty! she said.
There was a pause and then Lester Beech
rose, walked the length of the room and pushed his weak chin up
close. She could see his acne scars.
Well, I’ve heard it all now! he
yelled, looking at his support group of our Chantelle and our
Darren:
Who does she think she IS?!
First she wants to scupper this
Party by selecting a criminal and then her bloody husband finishes
the job by pole-axing the General Election!
Wake up and smell the coffee love -
and while you’re at it why don’t you walk out of that door?
We don’t want YOUR SORT round
here!
Gail laid a restraining hand on her
shoulder, whispering
Ignore him, he’s drunk
but a line had been crossed.
How dare this vile, ignorant, vulgar
man who stank of fags and beer speak to her like this? The Nye estate
was too good for him!
I don’t think, she said,
collecting her bag and moving towards the door
that we want YOUR SORT anywhere,
unless it’s in a prison cell for handling stolen goods!
And if Brian wants some rats to
exterminate I suggest that he starts with YOU!
Beech lunged but she was out of the
room; out of the pub, into the street and running.
It was over, and so was Election ‘87.
She would not go to the Count.
A fortnight later, she sat with Hazel
in the Coffee Cabin, where they were taking a break from an
exhausting morning at the summer sales.
She was pleased with her grey velvet
jeans; she had been stalking them for the past two months in
Benetton; monitoring as they inched down in price, until at
half the original mark up, she had swooped. They were slightly too
tight, but this (taking a bite) would be the last of the
Penguin biscuits!
I’m starting the High Fibre diet
tomorrow, she announced.
Hazel smiled weakly, looking askance at
her purchases, within their Evans the Outsize bag. She had
tried everything from Weightwatchers to yoga and was convinced
that her resolutely size 18 figure (tucking into a custard slice)
was due to her glands.
They mulled over the fall out from the
Election.
The result was much the same as in
1983.
The Party Leader had gone before he was
pushed; Derek Kingsmill’s majority was now a slender 278; Norris
Farmer had taken early retirement; Brian had lost his deposit and
resigned his membership.
Although at least we haven’t got
to console Sylvia; she really hates him now, observed Hazel.
The real winner was, of course, Clare
Butcher, who had been inundated with requests to sell her story and
had used the proceeds of a string of interviews to move house. She
was already being touted as a strong contender for a Tory seat next
time.
Lester Beech had been reported to the
Sectional Team over his car-boot wares and his membership was
suspended, pending enquiries. She was relieved that his
drunken attack had been universally reviled, including his comments
about Paul.
Your husband’s just shy, anyone
can see that, Hazel had soothed.
Anyone could have said that –
after all, he was just trying to EXPLAIN to Brian wasn’t he? And
everybody hates the Beeches; Lester is a thug and she’s no better
than she should be. Gail says she saw her coming out of the Clap
Clinic at the hospital! Might even be on the game!
Hazel’s belief in Paul’s innate
niceness was still the prevailing opinion- although perhaps it took
someone not nice like Lester Beech to guess at the truth.
In any case, things had returned to an
even keel and Paul had taken on some private pupils from the Convent
so that we can have a holiday,
Sweetie.
They picked up their packages, left the
café and she thought about Clare who was minus a husband, but plus
a new look, new house and maybe a new career.
If Clare Butcher could do it ….
She dismissed the idea as preposterous
but reflected as they drove off in the green Renault that the
ancestor of every action is a thought.
She had always rated Emerson…
No comments:
Post a Comment