On an unstoppable bandwagon
Sandra Howard
FIRST LADY by Michael Dobbs Headline, £17.99, pp. 372, ISBN 0755326830 ✆ £14.39(plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Why, oh why, Michael Dobbs, didn’t you write this book two years ago? A crash course in treachery, a guidebook in Machiavellian deviousness, hot tips from your deliciously dastardly heroine and I could have seen to it that we won the election hands down.
I would rather not have had the same spur as your character Ginny — who overheard talk of her husband’s infidelity while closeted in the lavatory — nor should I have much fancied morphing into a sort of female incarnation of Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson rolled into one, as she did.
Ginny Edge, the First Lady of Michael Dobbs’s title, is, in the opening pages, unbelievably meek given her later transformation. At a gathering of fellow shadow Cabinet spouses (her husband, Dominic, is party chairman) she’s a shrinking violet in a bitchy, boozy bunch, all busily positioning.
A sudden vacancy for the party leadership — the previous incumbent has died on the job — is the cause of all the scrabbling. One spouse tells her that the Edges will never make it playing by the book. But with the revelation of Dominic’s bit on the side (‘A young tart named Julia Summers. Works in the press department. Likes the late shift, apparently’), Ginny discards her innocent ingénue status as smoothly as a snake shedding its skin.
She wants to win, to get even; she is ruthlessly manipulative, even down to the nicking of a piece of the jigsaw the chief press officer is working on in his lunch hour. She befriends a gay party worker whose Indian father is phenomenally rich, an amenable redtop editor who mostly does her bidding (unlikely) and with whom she has many crude if goodnatured exchanges. ‘Go poach your bollocks.’ There is a lot of talk of balls; not balls talked. Dobbs’s writing is highly polished and divertingly sophisticated. You read on in wonder that there can be yet more tricksy ways of wiping out every poor sod of a rival contender. Ginny’s bandwagon is unstoppable.
Her godly, philandering husband is mystified, but he does as he’s told. He slipped up and stands to become prime minister after all. Rationalising her deeds, Ginny feels she is protecting her two young children, though I think, given the goldfish-bowl pressure, that’s stretching a point. The domestic scenes are inevitably a little sketchily drawn.
A parallel story runs through. Ajok, a woman from the Sudan, a Westminster cleaner, refuses to clean the ‘Prayer Room’ where ministers ‘gathered to discuss the new troubles in Iraq’. She is sacked, but fights her corner with the help of a union, an aspiring barrister and finally scheming Ginny. There is a strong piece about the appeals tribunal, the remoteness of the adjudicators from a dignified woman like Ajok.
The scene leads on to a sure-footed passage about Iraq. And we are into the home straight, the demolition of the prime minister — just in time for the general election. He is a Gordon Brown character from the Fens. ‘His passions were dark, often impenetrable, swept along by a strong, moralising tide.’ His wife is from a poor background, foot-putting-in-it and flashy. Our heroine sees her off too.
This is a great romp. It is not difficult to suspend disbelief about what goes on in Westminster, given the recent follies of some of our MPs, but with Mrs Edge and all her winning wickedness I had to take a rather larger gulp. Good gulpers will enjoy it to the full.
Sandra Howard is a columnist on the Sunday Telegraph. Her recent novel, Glass Houses, is published by Simon & Schuster.
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