Pilgrim's lurching progress
Paul Routledge
INNOCENT IN THE HOUSE by Andy McSmith Verso, £13, pp. 311, ISBN 1859846932 There used to be only one way to achieve fame in political journalism: provide your paper with good scoops. To this was later added the writing of biographies of the people you are already writing about in the newspapers. It helps enormously if they have a killer fact, like twice-disgraced Peter Mandelson's secret £373,000 home loan from Geoffrey Robinson. These days, the coming thing is to write novels about the politicians about whom you write in the newspapers, if possible with waspish, thinly disguised portraits of Cabinet ministers.
At his first attempt, Andy McSmith, chief political correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, shows himself to be a skilful exponent of the new fashion. His picaresque novel of New Labour low life is not so much a roman et clef as Effing Big Capitals
His Peter Mandelson hisses sibilantly. His Mo Mowlam is profanity in fur boots and a pom-pom hat. His John Prescott is a tower of foul language and intrigue. His Alastair Campbell walks with giant strides and mutters 'Wasn't somebody set up for that?'.
Into this vicious pantomime stumbles Joseph Pilgrim, a member of the class of '97, one of the wannabes who never imagined they would end up at Westminister. This well-meaning Lucky Jim is told by the whips to ask the Prime Minister a question about European additionality. He screws up, and seeks to cover his confusion by asking an honest question of the 'what are we here for?' variety that infuriates the Downing Street machine, but gets him noticed among the anonymous ranks of Blairite backbenchers. In one of his nicer touches, McSmith describes how MPs greet him like an old acquaintance without troubling to introduce themselves 'because, with the special egotism of their profession, they expected him to know who they were'.
Predictably, Pilgrim lurches from one disaster to another, via a throwback scandal in his Troskyist youth in Newcastle, an affair with a Tory grandee's wife, ejection from the family home, a monstering at the hands of the tabloid press and an attempt on his life, before emerging politically successful, happily married, and, in the words of the title, 'innocent in the House'. Smollett could hardly have contrived it better.
There is a lot of McSmith here, too. Like the hero, he used to run a left-wing bookshop in Newcastle (with Alan Milburn, as it happens) called Days of Hope. Inevitably, it was known as Haze of Dope. The author is also ex-Daily Mirror, as well as a former Labour Party press officer under Peter Manclelson. His portrait of Dave Drucker, the cynical but supremely cunning Sunday tabloid dirt merchant, is brilliantly observed, particulary the hilarious scenes in Canary Wharf. I have met many Druckers, who 'earned good money, but spent it on good drink and bad divorces'. His motto: 'I am a dog, and you are a lamp post' has the makings of an epitaph.
McSmith has previously written a workmanlike biography of Kenneth Clarke, the only decent life of the late John Smith and a volume of serious biographical essays, Faces of Labour. He knows his onions. Yet he gives every appearance of being an inadequate classics master at a prep school who has just been given a ragging by the lower fourth. With Innocent in the House he has surprised us all. My only reservation about this very funny book is the happy ending. It doesn't happen like that in real life. But then, it's only fiction. Isn't it?
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