20. Quack If You’re Tory

What Ho Proles!

Journeying home in the Bentley turned out to be a rather odd business. I put it down to the fact that one of the passengers insisted on riding on my lap and quacking every time we passed stretch of open water. I didn’t know what to do. The last time I’d experienced anything like it was during my time at Oxford when I’d agreed to go along with Rupert Katt’s plan to help Flakey Smythe’s sister elope during Cowes week. She had been all set to join an all-women crew in a voyage around the world but by the time we rode in for the rescue, the queer bird had drank a little too much and spent the whole journey back to Oxford attempting to direct us by the stars; a fine thing if you’re in the middle of the Southern Atlantic but of little use to a chap when deciding where to join the M3 nor-nor-east of Southampton.

I told as much to Larry Harris but the man was much too busy giving cowardice a bad name. Citing ‘health and safety’ as well as a copy of ‘Bill Oddie’s Fieldbook to English Ducks’ which he’d picked up from a local bookshop, he had retired to the front seat of the car and proceeded to flood his system with high quality Cuban nicotine.

‘This is your lucky break,’ he assured me as he blew another plume of cigar smoke out of the passenger side window. The view of the back of his head afforded me a glace of the edges of a smile so smug that it was stretched into a grin wider than the span of his ears. ‘If every campaign began as well as this,’ he continued, ‘I’d have made a fortune as a political advisor. Can you imagine the publicity we’re going to get in the coming days?’

‘It’s only a duck,’ I reminded him.

‘A mighty fine duck!’

‘But, still, only a duck...’

‘Quack!’ said Mr. Mullins.

‘And that’s why it’s a stroke of fortune bordering on genius!’ Larry said, slapping his knee. Then the excitement got too much for him and he slapped My Man’s knee. I could have told him that, even at the best of times, it’s a dangerous thing to do, but it’s downright suicidal when My Man’s driving a speeding vehicle and his reflexes are still in martial mode. I wouldn’t have been surprised had Larry’s head come bouncing into the back seat with the grin still attached and the cigar clamped between his teeth.

As it was, My Man’s only reaction was to swerve the car into the oncoming traffic, narrowly avoiding a tractor, and, in the process, startling Mr. Mullins who proceeded to give a sequence of ever louder quacks.

Larry shook his head and gave another chuckle.

‘All politicians look for an easy win,’ he said, indifferent to the near miss. ‘Sometimes you can get a break when your opponent slips up but that’s not something you can ever rely upon. A gimmick is the surest way to election success. Churchill had his cigar. Harold Wilson had his pipe. Of course, Margaret Thatcher’s gimmick was being a woman and John Major’s gimmick was not being Margaret Thatcher.’

‘And what’s Blair’s gimmick?’ I asked, eager to learn from this respected (though cowardly) political mind.

‘Oh,’ he purred, ‘Blair’s gimmick is that damn smile of his. You have to admire the man, Murgatroid. It’s a beautiful smile and when you really study it, it becomes a rare thing of beauty. It is at once flawed yet perfect.’

‘Pish,’ I replied. ‘In fact, I’ll go further than that pish. I’ll give you a pish raised to the power of posh.’

‘Scoff as much as you like, Murgatroid,’ he said. ‘You could do with a smile like Blair’s. You see: it’s a matter of getting the eyes right while you allow the mouth to reveal an almost perfect set of teeth.’ He turned to demonstrate the smile which he mimicked so poorly that it set Mr. Mullins to quacking again.

‘Have you ever noticed that one of Blair’s teeth in the bottom set sits in front of the rest?’ he asked. ‘That’s the most wonderful part of the gimmick. In some deep recess of the electorate’s mind, they recognise a man with charisma but who is really like them. It’s the flaw that makes him so electable. Too perfect a man could never have enjoyed such a lasting appeal. We grow to love the flaw as much as we love the ideal.’

He blew another could of smoke into the car’s slipstream. It felt like being caught in a wind tunnel but where the line of smoke sped across the car’s profile as well as the elegant lines of Larry Harris’s political theory.

‘But gimmicks that work are rare things,’ Harris continued after a moment or two’s consideration of the road ahead. ‘You don’t know if they’re going to win you an election or alienate you from your key demographics. I’m telling you, Murgatroid. People can sniff out a false promise or a bit of staged razzmatazz easier than a bloodhound sniffing a bucket of kippers in Alaska.’ He pointed the wet end of his stogie over the seat and towards Mr. Mullins. ‘But that, my friend, that is a duck destined to lay you your golden egg.’

‘I thought it was geese that lay golden eggs,’ I said, surprised that a chap who read classics didn’t know the basic premise of the fable.

Harris’s eyes narrowed with that look of shrewd political cunning that sets the men out from the boys.

‘We’ll use that duck on every hustings,’ he said. ‘You’ll carry him to every door and into every interview. That duck will represent what you are bringing to this election.’

‘The way you describe it, the only thing I seem to be bringing is a duck.’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘What you’re bringing is novelty and novelty gives you the chance to attract the attention of an electorate tired of the men in their grey suits. In a way, you’re bringing a new hope to poor disillusioned voters.’

‘Hope in the form of a duck?’ I asked.

‘Symbols are powerful things,’ he said with a knowing lilt. ‘What is commonplace one day catalyses public opinion the next. That duck could be the next Mao!.’

‘I do hope not,’ I said, but catching a look of the bird’s eye, I could see how one might perceive a glint of tyranny lying there.

‘Well, perhaps not Mao,’ Larry smiled. ‘But that duck could be the next Nelson Mandela. Think about it, Murgatroid. That bird has lived fearing for its life until you gave it a home. That duck was consigned to a life of ignominy, imprisonment...’

‘Imprisonment?’

‘What was Mr. Bridlington if he wasn’t Mr. Mullins’s gaoler?’

‘Oh come of it!’ I cried. ‘It’s a duck!’

He held up his hand. ‘And that duck will get you into parliament or my name isn’t Larry “Bomber” Harris,’ said my rash campaign manager, Leonard Andrew Harris.

I gazed at the bird who gazed back at me with those small all-seeing eyes. It is then that I noticed the duck’s bill hadn’t quite been put on quite right. Its lower half appeared to slip over the upper half giving Mr. Mullins an underbite. And damn it if I wasn’t staggered to realise that it actually looked good on him.

Harris threw out the end his cigar and wound up the window. He turned to me.

‘You have to promise me, Murgatroid... Promise me that you’re going to keep that duck close to you. A lucky find like this is worth millions in exposure. I’ll make sure the press get a sniff of this story and I promise you that we’ll be the talk of the country.’ He gazed into the air and began to draw headlines in space. ‘Politician’s Duck Question! Murgatroid’s Feather Touch!’ He shook his head and thought for a moment. Suddenly his eyes were bright with revelation. ‘Quack If You’re Tory!’

Well, I’m not one to question the expertise of a man like Larry, and by the time we arrived at Murgatroid Hall, I was treating that creature like it was some kind of film star. Larry sped off immediately to call friends in high media places while I led Mr. Mullins through the hall and into the house. Everything was going fine until Mrs. Priggs caught up with us as I was about to show Mr. Mullins the dining room.

‘Mr. Murgatroid,’ she said, suddenly blocking my path. ‘You know I’m an honest and loyal servant, but I refuse to allow that creature into that dining room.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ I observed, perhaps a tad too breezily for a woman like Mrs. Priggs. ‘We’ve entertained many a piece of fowl in there over the years.’

‘That’s different,’ she said with a wag of the finger. ‘I will not be having feathers near people’s food. That just not right.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said, though I confess, I don’t like the idea of setting a precedent of the staff taking the upper hand with me. ‘I’ll take him to my study.’

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ she said, moving to my block my retreat in the other direction as well.

‘Then, Mrs. Priggs, where do you suggest that I to take Mr. Mullins?’

‘That is not Mr. Mullins. That is a duck.’

I had neither the time nor the energy to explain that it was really Nelson Mandela. I just looked at her with peaked eyebrows.

‘Where should I put it?’

‘I’ve got a very good idea where you can put it,’ she bit and then closed her eyes and seemed to count to some rather large numbers. When she opened her eyes again, she seemed infinitely calmer. ‘Why don’t you take your friend into the yard? You might like to tie him to the fountain. There’s water out there and I’ll be sure to keep that... that Mr. Mullins fully fed.’

‘You’d do that?’ I said, not a little relieved.

She looked down at our visitor. ‘I promise,’ she said, though I can’t account for the uncertain look in her eye.