He Retains Our Full Confidence

I had stood at the podium and felt each camera-flash like a slap.

At first.

The press pack had been larger than usual, their ability to scent blood in the water would make a shark blush. I remember clearly that the sky had begun to fall out of my world on a Thursday lunchtime, heralded not by trumpets but by a WhatsApp message from my Chief of Staff.

My indiscretions had apparently been seen, noted and were now to be dredged into the light and sacrificed on the altar of public opinion. The years of service didn’t matter, the severity of my “crimes” didn’t matter and the sheer banality of the whole thing didn’t matter. Every man and woman in public office from Moses to Mussolini had done the same as I, in their own time and in their own way no doubt, but politics was played with big boy’s rules the man was a far easier target than the ball.

*

The PR girl had been very slick – there are acronyms and slide decks to cover every eventuality it seems – and by the evening I had been safely hidden in an anonymous townhouse decorated with all the flair and creativity the government could muster. In some ways I was pleased to see the boredom in her eyes, it meant that my fall was not so new or so shocking and that there were other people weak in the same way as me, enough that there was even a three-step plan on what best to do next.

I hadn’t been slick at all then, unless you counted sweat, and my shirt was stained to the waist. I had been forced to recount every sordid detail, the room crowded with officials and attaches and interested parties. How dull and small your decisions and your actions seem when they are minuted by a graduate in a little notebook, to be turned into bullet-points for an email.

The timeline was the most important thing apparently. Given the uncertainty - the conflicting versions of events - was there any way to camouflage, to blend truth and doubt like a painter? We were forbidden to lie publicly:  the ministerial code was very clear on this, probably the only thing it was effing clear on. People’s whole careers and families and even lives had been deleted for being caught in a deliberate untruth, the cover-up was worse than the crime as the old saying went.

But to obfuscate, to omit or to otherwise prestidigitate was fair game. In many ways it was the game.

*

And so I stood there, the stately grey concrete of the Ministry behind me, weathered busts of my venerable predecessors glaring down. It was not my peccadillos that caused such disdain in their eyes – their own escapades would fill a Netflix series to be sure. No, it was the fact that I violated the true underlying principle of that fig-leaf code, the one that read don’t get caught.

It was strange how going through the motions could be so comforting. My mind raced and my hands trembled but my words flowed as smoothly as they ever had. I hadn’t called this conference to confess – Christ, nobody was that stupid these days surely? It was nominally about some treaty or agreement we’d signed with… I forgot who these days, to be honest. But a crowd is a beast all its own and I caught tell by the rate of the shutters clicking and the ever-so-slightly frozen smiles of my wavering supporters that there was an anticipation in the air; a sense that somebody had fallen off stage and the show had been forgotten. Now it was time for the fun part, for rubbernecking the wreckage of somebody else’s life, for seeing and feeling real blood and drama.

Fuck them.

My predecessor, in a rare break from being a boring prick, had told me once that “History isn’t even written by the victors you know, chap; it’s written by those that give a shit”.

Wise words from a man who’d exited the office disgrace: one too many whiskeys leading to one too many pinched bottoms had started his own landslide from the heights to a quiet life in the countryside. He emerged now only to rake it in for waffling speeches at wonky think-tanks or some Honourable Guild of whatever’s annual dinner. It turns out he wasn’t wrong though and even now as the histories start to print the rougher edges are being sanded away. I had helped them to do it, it’s important to polish the national ego and to keep the people’s eyes on the political magician, never the rabbit of his impact on their lives.

My prepared remarks had run out – the great strides we had taken, the historic bonds of friendship, yadda yadda yadda. I remember being annoyed at the fact that they hadn’t even pretended to be interested. Hundreds of hours of work, decisions made and lives saved or broken, depending on the colour of your tie usually, were forgotten so my moral failings could be peered over instead.

There was a brief moment – like the turning over of a rock when the insects must decide to fight or flee – and then the questions flew.

“How do you respond to these allegations?”

“How can the British people continue to have confidence in you after this?

“-pretty serious breach of your professed values. How has your family reacted?”

“-is calling for a full account to the House. Do you intend to cooperate?”

Despite the saucy little PR girl’s briefing, despite my prepared ‘lines to take’, and despite the fact I knew it was coming I still felt a moment of breathlessness at the hypocrisy of the whole pack of them. It had made my hackles rise. I’d steered my country through war and disease, fought poverty and ignorance and kept this lumbering beast of a country running through the snow day after day - carrying these ingrates on my back! - hearing their whining about the cold as they refused to acknowledge the eyes that followed us through the trees! Jackals!

I’d carried them and now they wanted to tear me down for the fun of it, to sell more papers or to see their effing ‘engagement scores’ tick upwards.

I looked down at their faces and remember seeing real outrage, fake outrage, indifference, guilty pleasure and behind it all I’d worked for, all I’d become swirling down the drain. Until I’d seen the face of one of the security men, grey-haired, fit enough but starting on that path to geezerdom. His professionalism had cracked and his lip had been curled in disgust.

But not at me.

He was looking outwards as well, as this sea of correspondents and columnists, jostling at they strained to catch the killer shot or ask the ‘gotcha’ question.

Perhaps I’m just old but I remember thinking journalism that was hunting the truth – indefatigable as a Neanderthal, reading signs that other people couldn’t: to show people where the water was, or where the chief had stashed the bodies. Apparently, these days it meant re-hashing the same question again and again until your target broke out of sheer frustration, or until he said just the right combination of words that you could excise from the seething confusion that was a life actually lived and splash it across a byline, drawing your reader’s eye down a path that had been pre-decided by an effing committee of all things.

Apparently sometimes it was just re-tweeting when someone else had done it.

Sure, I’d broken a few heads and hearts along the way and bent the rules until I could fit myself through them, but I thought I’d seen it then, that he and I lived in a world where that was understood as part of the game. The line that divided wrong from right was drawn in the sand for a reason and everybody who stood in the actual arena knew why. To be a doer, or to be in the public eye, was to live under a microscope. I suspected that was by design: to zoom out would be to see the ape and angel both that make up a man, to tear a good man down who’d done what he could, and yes, I’ll admit it, enjoyed the perks along the way.

Frankly, I suspected that’s just too hard an idea to sell on a page between the football scores and the latest hot deals of the week.

*

And so, I decided not to play.

I watched with some satisfaction as their frustration grew, their easy kill caught dead to rights not going down. My planted aides had lobbed a few easy questions about the notional topic of my speech and I refused to entertain any digressions. “Please keep all questions to the matter at hand, let’s try and remain professional please” became my shield and sword both – a schoolmaster disappointed at his unruly class who just wouldn’t focus.

And then I ended it, sweeping off-stage like what I was, someone who didn't have time for this charade. As I retreated into my bureaucratic fortress, I paused only to clap my grey-haired muse on the shoulder. His bewilderment made me laugh, and they tried to make that the ‘defining’ photo of my shame for the next few days, an out-of-touch toff “laughing in the face of those attempting to hold the powerful to account”.

They didn’t print the word toff – too many had been to same schools as me.

*

Of course, behind the scenes my supposed sang-froid was not appreciated, with mandarins and ‘comms consultants’ fairly screeching at my failure to follow the plan. I’ll be honest again; I had to change my shirt twice that day.

But the approach and my instructions were simple: this topic is not to be discussed. There were to be no press statements issued, there was to be no counter-briefing and the various backbenchers were to be stood down from their forays with talk-show hosts and radio ‘personalities’. Even my wife was dry-eyed enough, eventually, to play the game.

*

And frankly, it worked.

It turns out that the machine had become lazy and greedy and I only needed to starve it for a week…not even that, four days I think it was? before the vultures were drawn to another attempted carcass, some poor fool “off the tellly” was dead in a hotel room and their prurient eye was directed that way.

Naturally, some of the more persistent members of the press who couldn’t let it go, old stalwarts or those with a particular hatred of me still had some of that old persistence hunter in them. Years later that had written enough that the whole thing still surfaced with a few of those tedious “-gate” monikers that let Joe Bloggs know this was something to do with a politician doing something wrong, not enough to prevent another term but enough to be an irritant.

I’m told they've even created a module about the whole affair at the school or Journalism, or Churnalism, as some wag nicknamed it. All sorts of academic hot air about how my actions had “opened the floodgates” and there was “marked uptick” in “brazenness” from political leaders who “no longer feared the scandal, or even the cover-up” as they could simply “bull through the mess with a disregard for truth, accountability or the dignity of their duties”.

Like I said, guff.

I must admit we did find it harder afterwards to sting the opposition back into line when one of them was found with the wrong receipts, or a boy in his bed, or some fellow’s wife on his knee. But to blame that on me is simply absurd, I had simply done what any good leader would do – I’d focused on the priorities.

Still, I haven’t forgotten my predecessors wise if wine-soaked words and I’ll make sure that, as the first of the biographers comes to write one of those glossy books with my face on it, he’ll be persuaded to put it down in the right way.

After all, there’s another principle now that underpins that laughable set of ‘rules’: if they do catch you, what can they do about it?