When things go wrong at the top
Andrew Gimson
SECOND TERM by Simon Walters Politico's, £16.99, pp. 399 This galumphing thriller describes the decline and fall of a fictional Tony Blair. Steven Cane 'ain't no socialist': indeed his rival, Gareth Greaves (Gordon Brown), comes to believe that Cane's mission is to bury socialism. The interest of the story lies in wondering which of a dozen different calamities will instead bury Cane. Walters, by trade a political journalist, has a keen sense of the vulnerability of even a gifted, handsome, honourable and highly popular young prime minister with a huge parlia- mentary majority who seems to be march- ing triumphantly towards a second term in office. Among the things that go wrong, or threaten to go wrong, for Cane are the early release of convicted terrorists from prison, the euro referendum, his relations with his wife, his relations with the Queen and his relations with his press secretary, which become carnal.
The press secretary is not, incidentally, a man: one cannot help feeling that Walters missed a trick here. The Alistair Campbell role is played by a woman, Charlotte 'Char- lie' Redpath, a fiercely unscrupulous and devastatingly sexy Glaswegian redhead with `taught [sic], unlined skin' and the CND symbol tattooed on her left breast. Cane succumbs to her charms at an EU summit in Florence: 'He plunged his head on to her breast and sucked and sucked at the CND sign.'
Walters is good on the corruptions of power, and especially on the ruthless manoeuvres of the people just below Cane, including the Peter Mandelson figure, called Ronnie Silverman:
The moment he moved into the Cabinet limelight, he looked more sinister than minis- ter. The unfairness of it all gnawed away inside him, yet no one was more responsible than he was for turning British politics from the battle of ideas into the battle of images.
Silverman's misfortune is to have reached the top in politics ten years before people will accept an openly gay prime minister who can walk 'along Downing Street on victory day hand in hand with his male partner'.
There are many enjoyable touches in Walters' book, not least the marvellously offhand way in which the minor characters are sketched. After the Royal Navy sinks a Spanish trawler with the loss of 22 lives, the Spanish ambassador tells Cane:
Prime Minister, thees was no accident. Twen- ty Spanish men and two Englishmen 'ave been killed as a result of a reckless attempt by you to show that you can defy the Euro- pean Union. This 'ad nothing to do with fish- ing policy; it was a bit of electioneering to 'elp you with with the referendum. The 'ole world knows that.
When General Nick Baxter (General Mike Jackson) has a walk-on part, to tell Cane how the SAS can take out Saddam Hussein (who has kidnapped seven nuns, murdered two of them and tortured the others), we are told, 'Baxter's rugged com- plexion, muscular build and businesslike manner told you he was no armchair gener- al.'
Walters is no armchair political corre- spondent. Earlier this year I saw him almost throttle an odious little gossip columnist during lunch in the press gallery restaurant at the House of Commons.
Previous page
