16. On Trousers and Troop Movements

What Ho Proles!

It was my father who taught me that a man should get messy business out of the way should he find that he’s wearing the right trousers for the task. That was in 1974, he’d just come back from shooting grouse, and we still had a Bolshevik cook working at the Hall who insisted of putting boiled cabbage with every meal. You might say what you want about Father’s methods and his trousers, but you can’t deny that we’ve not seen boiled cabbage since.

In a somewhat similar spirit, after that grey-suited council gasbag called Finch left me that Monday morning, I decided to prod another troublesome bubble with a particularly sharp stick. I had the right trousers for the job and that, as my father would say, is nearly half of the battle won.

Unless you’re one of those particularly bright tacks – and if you are, then bally well done and take a Club Murgatroid badge from the tray by the drinks trolley – I don’t suppose you noticed that in my haste to win the Tory nomination by ingratiating myself with Rosa Shaw, I’d offered a job to her sister’s overweight campaign manager, Melvin Jenkins. It was one of those spur of the moment decisions that threw the proverbial bag of chips in the face of reason. It ignored the fact that I already had a perfectly fine campaign manager of my own. Actually, I had one of the very best in the business.

Laurence ‘Bomber’ Harris has won elections for some of the rummiest fellows ever to park hide on Parlimentary leather and I would have been a fool to let Larry go in favour of a chap who stood every chance of turning blue the next time he crossed a pickle that was hard to digest. Despite what I said about my taking good care of this Jenkins fellow and encouraging him to gorge less and find pleasure in vegetables, there’s an old saying about the likelihood of old dobbin supping a couple of hydrogen atoms plus one of oxygen despite said nag’s proximity to the wet stuff.

That’s why I decided to ring Larry and explain my predicament. Larry’s a card-carrying know-it-all and if anybody was sure to have a bright idea, it was the man who got Pugsy ‘The Goat’ Farthing into the House of Commons.

‘Oh, I know Jenkins,’ he said, apparently indifferent to the news. ‘He’s a good man and runs an effective campaign. He’ll be an asset for the team so long as you provide a big enough buffet.’

‘That’s just it,’ I said. ‘I’ll be honest with you, Larry: I can’t see him being enough of an asset to cover the cost of the grub he’s going to shift.’

‘Oh, never mind about that,’ he chuckled. ‘Just make him your media consultant. Most of the food bill will be picked up by the journos when they come to look you over. Every Fleet Street hack is bound to take pity on a man of his bulk and these days of liability, the last thing they’d want is to be held responsible for inducing a coronary. They’d sooner write a piece about their own mothers necking parcels of Columbian nose powder than make life difficult for a fat chap.’
You see what I mean about Larry’s genius?

‘So, what you’re saying is: we might use his corpulence to our advantage?’ I shook my head in admiration. ‘That’s creative thinking on a sublime scale.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Larry. ‘Take my humble word on this, Murgatroid: healthy staff can be a hindrance.’

It was a thought that seemed to hold reason in one hand as it clutched a fistful of possibilities in the other.

‘Perhaps we could hire people who have to overcome different physical challenges in order to get their work done,’ I said. ‘I’d look more caring than a nursing home full of Lib Dems and my staff would be untouchable. I could say and do what I want!’

I thought the silence on the other end spoke volumes about the man’s admiration for the idea.

‘There’s such a thing as standing on the shoulders of giants and banging your head on the ceiling,’ he said calmly. ‘You do want to win this election?’

‘Of course!’

‘And you want to get into parliament?’

‘Naturally.’

‘You want to help create the laws that will direct the course of the country for the next decade?’

‘I should say so!’

‘Then why don’t you leave the thinking to those that have the capacity for it?’

I suppose he had a point. We leaders are meant to lead not think. I changed tack.

‘To be honest, Larry, I never thought I’d need a media consultant. In fact, I’d always believed that if the constituency of C---- N---- was to be won, it would be a relatively simple matter of dragging a prole by the nose, or at least reminding them that I own the deeds to the ground on which all their houses are built.’

‘For the love of God, Murgatroid!’ he cried. ‘You can’t treat people like that! We’ve stopped running things along feudal lines when Maggie left. Have you not read the latest manifesto? If the London hacks heard about this, they’d have you on the front page dressed as a lemon.’

‘Nonsense,’ said I. ‘A few drinks and a journalist will write whatever we want them to write. As I’ve proved on many occasions...’

‘But only because you dealt with them individually,’ Harris explained. ‘These journos hunt in packs and you can’t buy them off by paying the bar bill. And it would cost you a fortune even if you tried. No, you need to finagle them and for that you’ll need a good sniffer-out-of-trouble up front to steer them around the debris of the campaign.’

‘Debris?’ I asked, just wondering how far Bomber Harris intended to fashion my election after his namesake.

‘There’s always debris,’ he replied. He suddenly sounded quite bored with the whole rotten business and I wondered if his heart was really in the fight. ‘There’ll be babies who didn’t want to be kissed, nurses asking tricky questions, pensioners who’ll blame you for their getting a sniffle in winter. And who knows what skeletons are going to tumble from your cupboard once people start asking questions about you.’ He tutted in a vaguely indifferent way. ‘Dealing with debris is part of the excitement of the British political system. Our job is to get you elected before the real muck hits the fan. That’s our number one priority.’

I hung up the phone suddenly feeling a lot more timid about my chances. It would take a day before my mood shifted back into the positive.

By then, it was Wednesday, April 13th, and at ten o’clock in the morning, I was dressed in my finest Harris tweed three piece and just back from a walk to the village. My spirits were up. Helped by half an hour swinging the walking cane I like to use to bash the critters from the hedgerows as I walk by.

When I got back to the Hall, I barely took a glance at the three cars parked outside but made my way into the house and up to the old nursery that My Man had turned into an operational HQ for the campaign ahead.

The six members of my campaign team had to be brightest political brains the old nursery had ever seen. In addition Harris, Jenkins, and my electoral agent, Cyril ‘I Go Commando’ Henderson, there were two new faces and one I knew only too well.

Henderson had brought along an old friend of his: the gloriously named Samantha Spoon. She was an old hand in Tory by-elections and came with Henderson’s highest recommendation as a grassroots worker. Apparently, she was a mistress of the political dark arts having once thrown pork sausages to David Blukett’s dog and helped cause a near riot during a tour of a hospital.

Jenkin’s addition to the squad was an ex-territorial sapper he introduced as Colonel Duncan Cropper. A tall man with a fine bar of ginger tash below a bulbous blob of a nose, he was another who could run the daily affairs of a campaign but also came with a dozen degrees in electronics. Within ten minutes of arriving in the house he’d rewired the TV to pick up three new satellite channels and the local air traffic control.

The third person was not so much of a surprise as he was my own contribution to team Alpha Murgatroid. It was My Man, who due to contractual obligations, I cannot name. Needless to say, the fellow’s a tireless worker and loyal to the bone.

It was quickly decided that the best way to begin the campaign was to get out and meet the locals. We left Jenkins making up a map of routes to the kitchen and the Colonel rigging out the house with every technical gizmo we’d need. As far as I know, satellites were being launched for Papua New Guinea and squads of Hungarian mercenaries working up a sweat in training camps should we need them. In the meantime, Miss Spoon and My Man went and filled the Bentley with boxes of blue balloons whilst Henderson presented me with the extra large Conservative rosettes he’d brought with him.

‘I get them made cheap in the Far East,’ he explained as he pinned one to my chest. ‘But you might want to hold still. I wouldn’t want you to get picked. There was a note in the box which mentioned unsterilized pins and diseases of the blood. God knows what you might catch.’

My initial plan was to have a quick ankle around the village but Larry wouldn’t hear of it.
‘We need to get into the crowds,’ he said and produced a map from his pocket.

A black line had already been drawn around the constituency of C---- N---- and three large crosses marked the key areas of population.

‘That’s where we begin, Murgatroid. A village might look good for the cameras but today, we need to hit the heartland of popular opinion.’

I looked at the map.

‘Smallchurch?’ I asked and gave an involuntary shudder. ‘I had a great uncle who was burned as a witch in Smallchurch.’

He patted me on the back. ‘I’m sure they’ve forgotten all about it,’ he said as we walked out to the cars.

I can’t think why I didn’t mention how the locals still celebrate pagan festivals whose traditions stretch back thousands of years. To their minds, my great uncle might as well have been pinned to the stake a fortnight last Tuesday.