3. An Agent Sans Pants

What Ho Proles!

A man can always be judged by his underwear.

I don’t know who first made this observation but it’s a truth I’ve always found to be as verifiable as it is profound. Take the case of your average analytical legal types. If you’ll excuse the pun, they tend to prefer tight legal briefs. On the other hand, your artistic bods take to looser underwear with plenty of room to keep their paintbrushes. Now, you must believe me when I say: though it isn’t the best criteria by which to choose a fellow for a job, it’s certainly not the worst. If the truth behind Tony Blair’s election to the head of the Labour Party were ever made public, you’d think questions about his underpants would be quite a sensible alternative way of judging the man than what really happened.

I tell you this because my friend, Cyril Henderson, doesn’t believe in the concept of underwear in any form whatsoever. That's what accounts for his open nature and his inability to feel embarrassment in any circumstance. It also made him the ideal choice to become my election agent.

The difference between a campaign manager and an election agent needs some explaining but it essentially the difference between a sergeant major and a general. Cyril’s perfectly suited to bashing around on a parade ground but, unlike Larry ‘Bomber’ Harris, he wouldn’t know how to send a chap into danger if you paid him in bullets. He holds a blue in drinking yards of ale and other high impact alternative sports and, living not a mile from my own doorstep and being the chairman of the local Conservative Association, he was the perfect person to charge with the day-to-day running of the Murgatroid camp.

I found him in his small cottage outside C---- N----, where he lives with his wife and twelve cats.

‘You!’ he exclaimed while peeling a tabby from a curtain. ‘But we’ve already got a candidate. It’s a pound to a penny that Flora Shaw will be standing.’

‘I wouldn't touch those odds, Cyril,’ I told him, ‘because I know that this seat will go Murgatroid.’

‘But you haven’t even put your name down!’

‘A piffling little detail,’ I replied. ‘You’re the top dog down there at the Tory base camp, Cyril. Can’t you bang a few woollen hats together and induce a little love for Jacob among the massed handbags? If you support me, they’ll surely come running like a line of blue rinsed lemmings. You know they will.’

‘But I’ve promised Flora she’ll be our candidate…’

I held up my hand. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of your promises to that poor woman,’ I told him. ‘I just want you to do the noble thing. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to break your word.’

He seemed to sag an inch. ‘Thank you, Jacob,’ he answered. ‘I wouldn’t like to tell Flora that I wasn’t supporting her. My word is my oath.’

I shook my head slowly. ‘What I meant when I said that I expected you keep your work, Cyril, is that I thought you’d remember certain promises made in the airy cloisters of an Oxford college over ten years ago. I remember it was something about standing by me when the moment came.’

‘Oh!’ he said sourly, and to my surprise, lost a couple more inches. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

‘And I suppose you’ve forgotten about the certain pickle you found yourself in? Do you happen to know the statute of limitation for crimes committed on church grounds?’ I looked down on the man and watched his spirit break with an audible snap. ‘Look here,’ I said, grabbing his shoulders and trying to heft him up a foot or so. ‘I need you to run my campaign and I know you’ll do a fantastic job.’ I then told him how My Man was already overseeing the clearing of an old unused nursery which I planned to turn into our operational headquarters.

‘It will be like old times,’ I promised him. ‘Remember how we used to drive the Bentley through the down and knock chaps of their bicycles? Well it’ll be the same but instead of a Bentley we’ll have the Tory manifesto and instead of bicycles the other fellows are riding stealth taxes, problems in Iraq, and good old human rights violations.’

‘Well, I suppose you’d make a good candidate,’ he admitted, seeming to grow with the moment. ‘I can’t promise that other people won’t grumble about it but I guess I could support you.’

‘Then when do you tell Ms. Shaw?’ I asked, eager to press home my utter victory.

‘Me? I’m not telling her,’ he shuddered. ‘You can tell her if you like. In fact, Jacob: if you want me to run your campaign, you can definitely be the one to go and tell Flora about the change of plan.’ He shook his head and jabbed a toe into a passing kitten. ‘She’s got a wicked temper. That’s why we were going to vote for her in the first place.’

‘You were motivated by fear?’ I asked, a little taken aback.

‘Not fear, Jacob, but self-preservation. You’ll soon see what I mean…’