The House: Chapter One
An extract from the political thriller I wrote with Imogen Robertson. The Observer called it "Intelligent and disturbing" - I'd love to hear what you think.
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The House: Chapter One
‘May they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but, laying aside all private interests and prejudices, keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind.’
from the Daily Prayer of the House of Commons
Monday 7 March 2022
Philip Bickford gets to his feet and takes the magic half-step forward. He opens his folder and places it on the despatch box then rests his left hand on it, index finger brushing the figures he needs.
The honourable members scattered behind him are quiet. It’s an ordinary morning and no one is expecting much drama during Oral Questions to the Minister for Patient Safety. Philip is not a dramatic performer. No one perks up waiting for him to be funny or cruel, or both. They are expecting bland words and his usual flurry of percentages delivered in – well, it’s not quite a monotone, but sometimes it gets close.
This is ‘local press release fodder’ questions. This is ‘get your MP a line for his Facebook page’ time. It’s celebrating the NHS, welcoming this, reviewing that, consulting widely and acknowledging tough choices will be made without getting into the weeds of what those tough choices will actually be. Philip’s senior, the Secretary of State for Health, will make any important announcements and probably in front of a bank of cameras rather than in the Chamber of the House of Commons, so these regular sessions of parliamentary questions are usually mere skirmishes on the edge of the battlefield. Still, an opposition backbencher might try to make a name for themselves by inflicting a flesh wound with a flourish of their rhetorical blade, or open a campaign which could make the whole government bleed with an innocent-sounding enquiry into something local, specific. The sort of thing you might miss. The ground is treacherous.
In the warren of corridors and committee rooms the enquiries into the government’s handling of the outbreak are continuing. The Royal Commission on Virus Control daily demands further disclosures of emails and minutes of meetings and the civil servants parry and prevaricate; across the river the Commission takes day after day of evidence from nurses who didn’t get the Personal Protective Equipment they needed even as their colleagues started dying around them, and care-home workers weep into the microphones as they talk about their residents left to die alone in their rooms; then there are all the public consultations as regulations made in haste are unpicked with tortuous slowness. Unexploded ordnance is still scattered over the field, in other words, so Phil, swallowing to clear his throat to speak, has to be careful where he treads.
Phil knows he got this job after the 2019 election because nobody in government was paying much attention. The Brexit hardcore had got the top jobs and they still had dozens of junior Cabinet positions to fill. Phil was never going to be a great parliamentary performer, but he turned out to be competent and reassuring when that’s what people needed. He kept his job. Won the grudging respect of his colleagues and the opposition, and got on with it.
So, OK, this isn’t one of the grand pitched battles of parliament, it is a dawn patrol, a routine survey of the battleground. A warning exchange of fire as the pickets and snipers remind each other they are still there.
But. If you’ve never been there you can’t know what it feels like, that half-step into the glare surrounding the despatch box, the feel of the New Zealand hardwood under your fingertips, the blank, hostile faces of the opposition and the sudden jolt of adrenaline, of fear which makes the hairs on the back of Phil’s neck stand up. He gives it a beat, then speaks.
‘I thank my honourable friend for her question and am delighted to join her in congratulating the staff of NHS Kent on the opening of the new wing of Kent Central – another demonstration of this government’s ongoing commitment … ’
He trots out the phrases, hardly needs to glance down for the numbers. The jackals on the opposition benches have nothing to cling onto, no room for a heckle, no hook for a joke. They grumble and sulk their way through his answer, scratching at their cuffs, hunching their shoulders.
Philip sits down to polite ‘hear, hears’ from the men and women on his own benches. They sound like sheep when they see the hay truck winding up the hill. So far so good. He controls his expression. Don’t look smug. Don’t look scared. Don’t look nervous. Don’t look bored. Look calm. Look engaged. Don’t smirk. The battlefield is quiet, but the cameras are still on and the snipers are still watching through their scopes even while they smother a yawn. Spot who among the bobbing MPs the Deputy Speaker is turning to next and listen.
‘Donald Black!’
The Deputy Speaker raises her voice for the first time this session. More members are coming in to find their places before the next item on the order paper. The Prime Minister is coming in to make a statement about the tortuous progress of the trade talks and offer some bullish bromides about great days ahead. Jam tomorrow. Just ten minutes of topical questions left and Phil can get out of here and back to work. An afternoon of meetings in his parliamentary office, then a strategy session at the department which is scheduled to run till seven, but will probably bleed on until nine.
Yes. The Honourable Member for Southampton West, face like a misshapen orange with tiny dark eyes – cloves stuck in the pith of his pockmarked skin. Collar too tight, knot in his tie too small. Voice nasal.
‘Would the Honourable Member agree with me that as we approach the second anniversary of the peak of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom … ’ What’s left of it. The thought, heavy with the bafflement and fear of those first weeks, hits heavy behind Phil’s eyes. He thinks of the camp beds in rows in sports stadia, that photograph of a nurse coming off shift in Lewisham, his face gaunt and grey with exhaustion. The slow unravelling after the first crisis passed. The spiralling unemployment figures, shuttered restaurants and bills. The endless brain-aching bills. ‘ … that now is the time to commemorate that moment in some significant way, and particularly offer some public memorial to the frontline NHS workers who lost their lives in their heroic struggle against the virus.’
An easy one. Surprisingly easy from the opposition. Phil stands up. Half-step forward again, the words ready behind his lips. More people are coming into the Chamber and a movement in the visitors’ gallery catches his eye.
A man in his late sixties, wearing the open collar, thin sweater and jacket of a retired white-collar worker, is finding his seat behind the glass panel. He nods politely to his neighbour as she lifts her scarf and bag out of his way.
Something deep in Philip’s brain twitches into anxious, vigorous life. The man sits and faces into the Chamber. Dark eyes, pale brown skin. A stutter of memory. A summer’s evening. Distant pounding music. Owen’s voice shouting something, Georgina crying. The yelp and squawk of a siren. Philip’s brain goes white. He’s frozen for what feels like minutes. Two point three seconds, he’ll learn later. Long enough.
The tricksters and hecklers on the opposition benches snap to attention. Blood in the water. Say something, Philip tells himself. Stop looking at that ghost in the gallery and say something.
He clears his throat. ‘The government believes that a lasting public memorial would indeed be appropriate to celebrate the deaths of frontline workers whose selfless actions … ’ Laughter, cries of ‘Shame’ bouncing off the walls. What has he said? How has everything changed? Three minutes ago he was listening to the birdsong and now the air is full of explosions. Order papers rolled into clubs are being pointed, fingers stabbing the air like knives. Keep going. ‘ … saved thousands of lives. But the Mayor of London must cease distorting this simple sign of national recognition into a political football.’
It redoubles. The Deputy Speaker is looking at him with barely disguised contempt. Why? Then he hears his own words repeated in his head and he feels the blood rush to his face, the prickle of sweat behind his collar. Sauve qui peut.
‘Madam Deputy Speaker … I … with many apologies. We wish to commemorate those workers. I … misspoke.’
Too late. Too slow. The moment has flown. The opposition benches are fake roaring themselves purple, but among them he sees faces twisted with genuine rage. They have the full sentence. Government ministers didn’t just allow the deaths of our nurses, they celebrate it! He can see the newspaper and social media headlines next to a picture of his own sweating face.
Phil sits down, knowing he looks like a child. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Humiliation runs through his arteries, pumps through his organs and poisons them. He folds his arms and looks at the benches opposite him with loathing, then upwards. He needs a moment, just a moment to stare at the vaulted roof.
It’s fine. It’s fine. These things happen. A slip of the tongue. How many times have people warned about the perils of breakfast rather than Brexit? Appeals to aid the shitting industry rather than shipping? God, his own mother is a nurse! They can’t forget that, can they? Of course they can. The opposition were bored and are now going wild for it.
The pith-faced member for Southampton West can’t believe his luck, and has just enough nous to act on it.
‘Point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker!’ The idiot can’t help licking his lips.
She allows it.
‘The minister has just revealed the government’s true thoughts on the hundreds of thousands of public sector workers who were ground down by a decade of austerity then forced to risk their lives daily to save others. What remedy does this House have to force the Minister to apologise to the families of every lost public servant?’
He reaches a near hysterical pitch. ‘Isn’t it the case, Madam Deputy Speaker, that no one will ever trust the party opposite to run our public services again?’
He sits. His eyes have almost entirely disappeared, he is smiling so broadly. The MPs behind him reach over the bench to pat him on the shoulder. He’s the most popular kid on the playground. It was a mistake! A simple mistake!
Phil gets to his feet and says words. Reminds them that the government knows better than anyone what is owed to the NHS, the exemplary care given to the Prime Minister, and thousands of others. Reminds them about his mother, about the record investment in the NHS, the pay rise for the frontline, the writing off of its crippling debt, yanking hospitals out of the financial black holes the opposition had driven them into with its private financing initiatives when in government.
It should be a strong recovery but nobody hears him – they don’t even pretend to listen. In Hansard this sensible, well-constructed answer will be printed in full and look no more or less important than his last answer. But right now he’s the kid who’s spilled juice down his crotch in the playground, the girl with her skirt caught up in her knickers walking through the office, the cuckold, the viral pratfall, the gazelle at the back of the pack with the injured leg.
Final question. The Deputy Speaker has called someone else. Christ, they are actually going to make him stand up again. It’s another of the government backbenchers who looks, as he’s thanking Phil for his department’s swift action on something or other, as if he’s going to throw up. Phil knows how he feels. Phil lurches back onto his feet. Muscle memory. He says more words. He speaks for the microphones, hardly audible in the Chamber. He is on automatic pilot now and feels like his own ghost as he gives a lacklustre answer to the follow-up under the cacophony of heckles and sneers, pausing only when the Deputy Speaker, her voice starting to crack, calls for order again.
Philip looks up again at the man in the balcony. Remembers being young. Remembers the sirens and the smell of damp grass, the feeling of drying mud on his hands. The interview room. The man stares back at him then leans towards a woman sitting next to him and says something. She nods, then flicks her long braids back over her shoulder.
What in God’s name is Sabal Dewan doing here? His hair has gone completely white, and even sitting you can notice the slight stoop in his shoulders.
The Deputy Speaker moves on to the next item of parliamentary business. Phil can escape. He passes the Prime Minister as he leaves the raucous Chamber behind him. The Prime Minister blanks him. No – worse than blanks him: lets his eyes flicker over Phil then his expression resolves into one of mild disgust. That chancer, that scatterbrained blustering … It was a mistake! One mistake! After years of dutiful shit-eating during Brexit and then twenty-hour days and sleeping in his office for half of 2020 trying to save lives! Then Sabal Dewan turns up and brings back the memory of the worst night of his life, his losses, and in that sudden moment of reliving it he made one mistake and now the mop-haired martyr of Westminster looks at him like he’s the excrement on his shoe.
Damn it. Damn these people, damn them to hell. Let the sodding building collapse in on itself, cordon off the Palace with yellow tape and leave it to rot, let sewage flood the basements, let the frayed wires flame and consume, leave the statues for looters and let the busts of parliamentarians serve as garden ornaments, let the terrace tumble into the Thames and take all these failed comedians, nonentities, intellectual lightweights, tribal warriors and braying asses with it.
Phil needs a minute. Just a minute to clear his head and recover from the solar plexus punch of it, to get his game face back on. Out of the Chamber he risks touching his forehead. Good. Not clammy. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he…
Owen McKenna, Labour Member of Parliament for Warwick South, is standing in the Central Lobby with his researcher. Damn. Phil hears the throbbing music again. It just had to be Owen, didn’t it? Owen will take one look at him and know exactly how nightmarish the last fifteen minutes have been. And it will make his day. His week. His month.
Owen sees him and grins wolfishly then turns slowly back to his researcher. Philip has a sudden memory of Owen in the house in Lambeth, a can of Stella in his hand and seeing that same grin. They are both in suits now. They both have staff and homes and status and, compared to most people in this staggering, staggered country, power. Phil has stayed slim, Owen still looks like a brickie but he’s kept his hair, while Phil is afraid he is beginning to thin at the temples. Whatever. It’s the same grin, the look Owen got when he’d really managed to get one over on someone, his hungry delight in the fall of an enemy – and now it’s directed at Phil.
Owen’s researcher nods, writes something down on the legal pad held across her chest, asks a question. Phil wants to walk across the lobby, grab the pad and strike Owen across the face with it, send his owlish glasses flying onto the patterned tiles. How many punches could he get in before security reacted, the cameras and phones came on? How would the squeals of Owen’s researcher echo up the gothic stonework? How would it feel for once to wipe that self-satisfied vicious smirk off Owen’s face?
‘Mr Bickford? Minister?’
‘What?’ Phil turns round and finds himself looking into the face of a dark-haired woman he doesn’t know. He manages a tight smile. She has a visitor’s pass. She fingers it with neatly manicured nails.
‘Can I help you?’
The woman is with a group. Students, Phil guesses. He tries to breathe through the humiliation, the flush the fantasy of smashing Owen’s glasses off has given him. Two of the girls, probably the ambitious ones, wear boxy jackets. Mother Hen must have been taking them on a tour. Phil nods, keeping the smile going while he scans the perimeter to see who their guide is and recognises the researcher for the Member for Maidenhead, the constituency next to his own.
‘Good afternoon,’ Phil says. If they’ve been on the tour, they probably didn’t see his meltdown in the Chamber. That is some sort of blessing. A temporary one. ‘These are some of my best students doing the A-level politics course at Jude Levy College. Can we ask you just a quick question?’
Phil nods again. ‘Of course. I have to get back to my office, though … ’ What was his next appointment? Where was Ian? ‘So we’ll have to be quick.’
The teacher thanks him and points to one of the girls in a boxy jacket. Long dark hair, Indian parents probably. Eager look to her. She reminds Phil of his last researcher, now working in Conservative Central Office in Matthew Parker Street and looking for her own seat to run for. He waits. It will probably be something technical, designed to ingratiate and impress, but as the girl draws breath a taller boy, his hair long and curled on top, his T-shirt patterned with cartoon characters, gets in first.
‘What’s the point of all this?’ The boy waves his hand around, taking in all Westminster, the arches and mosaics, the statues and the security guards, the researchers fast-walking up the shallow steps, the TV screens showing the committees in progress, the BBC Parliament feed from the Chamber. ‘This Punch and Judy nonsense carrying on as usual while the world goes to hell?’
‘Jason!’ the teacher says sharply. Jason shrugs. Thirty seconds ago Phil was feeling the same way, but now his anger switches back and runs the opposite way. Phil’s been answering this question ever since he ran for his seat in 2012, offering the usual words, sincere but apologetic, acknowledging past failures and promising to do better, but now suddenly, today, who knew? He’s had enough.
‘Yes, sometimes I think it’s a complete waste of time,’ Phil says. Angry Boy’s eyes open wider and Keen Girl bites her lip. The teacher’s apology for her student’s rudeness stops in her throat.
‘I mean, democracy – we gave it a good go, but it is basically reality TV, isn’t it? Celebrity politicians who make used-car salesmen look trustworthy, advisors knifing each other in the back, journalists who don’t know or care about policy but just want to make politicians sweat under the studio lights and voters who are led up the garden path. You say parliament is Punch and Judy? Spend half an hour on Twitter and tell me you still support universal suffrage. What do you think?’ The boy gapes at him. Phil shrugs. ‘Maybe we should put every policy to the popular vote. Free beer to everyone and we put the PM in the stocks if the market drops two per cent?’
He waits. The boy says nothing. ‘No? Or maybe we could ask a bit more from the people. From the voters. Maybe you could actually think about who you were electing and why, rather than acting like it’s a game show where you vote for your favourite four-word slogan, or don’t vote at all and tell yourself politicians are all the same because you are too lazy to find out what the differences, the profound differences, are? Maybe if you want us to be better you should better yourself.’
The shock on Jason’s face acts on Phil like a drug. So this is what it is like to say what you mean! He remembers it now, like a reformed smoker taking a long, filthy drag.
‘I—’ Jason begins, but Phil cuts him off. This feels too good. His blood is up. He will, for once, say what he thinks.
‘Because this place matters. It is the mother of parliaments. You saw what happened in some countries – cities and states fighting each other over masks, authoritarians grabbing power. The roots of democracy run deeper here. Centuries deep. And they start here. Our system has emerged out of wars, rebellions, plagues and struggle. It adapts. And that culture of fierce debate and challenge, that stuff that looks like nonsense and Punch and Judy to you – that’s what makes us strong. We bend but we do not break because a system grown up over centuries might look eccentric but it is adaptable and it is resilient. You want efficiency and nice packaging? Go to the Apple Store. Where were your Silicon Valley disrupters when the virus came? Letting the usual lies spread along with COVID and tinkering with their apps. We were here. Risking our lives to do everything we could for the frontline workers, the terrified and the sick. And fighting to come up with the best solutions to impossible problems where there were no good answers. So don’t you sneer at this place, young man. Don’t you dare. And while we are at it, learn some manners. Young lady, I think you had a question?’
Phil turns from the boy, who is staring at him slack-jawed, to the girl in the jacket. She blinks.
‘Yes … I … I just wanted to ask, why did you want to be an MP in the first place?’
Phil smiles again and he means it this time.
‘I wanted to do something that mattered. And it does matter. If the last couple of years have proven anything, they proved that. We haven’t managed to save everyone, we haven’t managed to save every job or business but the people who work here come in to fight for their constituents every single day, give us the room to build, to put lives together again. Whatever side of the floor they are on. You want to make life better for ten people? Fine. Be a good person. You want to make life better for a million people? Get into politics.’
The teacher and her students offer slightly dazed ‘thank-yous’ and Phil heads towards the stairs up to his parliamentary office. His senior researcher, Ian Livingstone, is waiting for him.
What was that about?’
‘Students.’
They keep moving, taking the shallow stairs two at a time.
‘You seemed quite worked up. And one of them was filming you.’
Phil doesn’t answer. What had he said? Some stuff about democracy. A brief respite from the shitshow of his day. He sees the jeering faces on the opposite benches again, like cherubs floating in the air in front of him.
‘Did you see it?’
‘Yes. What the fuck happened?’
Phil doesn’t reply so Ian ploughs on.
‘And I wanted to warn you Toby Dale is waiting in your office. That vein in his forehead is popping.’
Perfect. Of course Toby Dale is waiting for him. The current favourite special advisor shovelling crap in and out of Number 10. Must have sprinted to Phil’s office before he even got out of the Chamber, his lips puckered and head down, his hand-made shoes thrumming along the carpet like a wind-up toy in leather brogues.
He nods. ‘OK. Thank you for the heads-up.’
He pauses in the committee corridor and stares out of the window at the crumbling stonework of Cloister Court. He has to know.
‘Ian, can you find out why a man called Sabal Dewan was in the visitors’ gallery in the Chamber today? Do it quietly if you can.’
‘Of course, boss.’
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Tom Watson and Little, Brown Book Group Ltd 2020
I’ll share another free chapter next week. If you don’t want to wait to read the whole thing, you can order a copy of the book here (Bookshop.org) or here (Amazon). It’s only £4.99 in paperback and on Kindle at Finally - if you enjoyed reading this - would you consider sharing it?