SearchYour basket is currently empty!
Chapter One – The Candidate’s Husband
Friday 13 April 2018
I remember something you once said. Men should be banned from politics, it would save a lot of trouble if they were. That’s more or less how you put it. Keep men out of politics, leave it all to women. It was a joke of sorts, a late-night joke as I opened a second bottle of wine and you continued to unpick the world’s problems. Men don’t think things through, you said. They’re impetuous, programmed by their hormones, prisoners of their sex. They make bad decisions, for themselves and for the other half of the population. First World War to Iraq, there’s always a pattern – men screw up and the world would be a better place if they didn’t run it. I laughed and refilled your glass. Here’s to you, Kirsty. Another of your dazzling ideas.
That was years ago, of course, just the two of us at the kitchen table in our old flat, the hypothesis exhausted but you still blazing with righteousness. But it comes back to me now as we sit, still the two of us, in another, bigger kitchen, the press mob outside, baying for blood, your blood, intent on maximising your shame. It’s early morning, barely light, and the house creaks, stretching its limbs at the end of a sleepless night. Your ebullience is gone, your confidence now paper-thin. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Right at the beginning, I told you. Politics is a rough business. Malicious. Threatening. Dangerous. And there really are special tortures reserved for women. I told you and you took no notice.
But there’s no point in dwelling on that. It’s time to go. You put on your grey coat, unpin the rosette from the lapel and give me a watery smile. The front door bell rings. There’s been a short lull. Now it’s starting again, and the bell is followed by a knock on the window. They’re out there in strength, interest in the story fortified by the absence of any firm rebuttal.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘We go straight to the car. Don’t look at the cameras. Don’t say anything – “good morning”, if you like, nothing else. And whatever you do, don’t have a go at them. Ready?’
‘Ready,’ you reply.
I open the door and step out ahead of you. It’s trying to rain. The press pack seems momentarily caught off its guard. Reporters and photographers are idling on the pavement, on our drive, talking to each other. Perhaps we’ll make it to the car unnoticed. But a voice calls out ‘Kirsty’, there’s a flash of cameras and microphones are thrust in your direction.
The worst day in your life is underway.
Tuesday 20 February 2018
It all started, obliquely, with sex. I guess everything in life starts with sex and some things end there, too. It was Tuesday evening, I was working late and someone had been hammering nails into my right temple most of the day. I wanted to go home, but a blank document sat open on my screen, demanding my attention. All I had to produce was a short editorial, five-hundred lawyer-proof words with which to hold to account an errant politician – male, naturally, one of those who in that ideal world of Kirsty’s wouldn’t exist.
A local MP stands accused… It was a start. A local MP stands accused of sexual impropriety. It should have been straightforward, except editorials like this never are. The real story has to be tucked between the lines. I pressed on, my fingers playing the keyboard, the thoughts working themselves into phrases, the phrases merging into sentences, an argument in there somewhere.
Earlier that evening, my boss had called me in to talk things through. His office was a large corner cell, two sides glass, looking out onto the newsroom. It was just the two of us: him, Clive Pascoe, managing editor of The Humberside Citizen, and me, Rick Dewhirst, his deputy, the underappreciated workhorse who made sure we produced a paper every day. All the others had left, but the door was firmly shut and the atmosphere close. It must have been nudging freezing point in the Hull night outside, but here, in Clive’s greenhouse of an office, we were locked in our own micro-climate. He stood glaring at me, a single bead of sweat making its way down his forehead and disappearing under the rim of his glasses.
‘For fuck’s sake, the accusations are… well, who the hell are these women? No names. It’s dodgy.’
I was leaning against the wall next to a framed, yellowing certificate, Regional Newspaper of the Year, Highly Commended, 1987. Once upon a time, this had been a paper going places. But that was long before I arrived, long before Kirsty forced us to move to Hull, long before life imploded. The frame was slightly askew. I resisted the urge to straighten it. Our conversation was about to change down into a lower, deeper, uglier gear.
‘You know what this is, don’t you?’ A finger jabbed the air in my direction. ‘It’s a witch hunt. Except the witches aren’t the ones being hunted.’
He nodded with satisfaction, as if the words exposed an evident truth.
‘Another decent man doing an important job, and they go for him. It’s a conspiracy. Poor sod doesn’t stand a chance.’
He left a pause to allow this further batch of truths to sink in. Somewhere in the world outside a police siren whined.
‘And what’s he done? An appreciative pat on the backside, I bet you, a compliment whispered in the ear, nothing more. I mean, we’ve all done it, haven’t we?’
No, Clive, we haven’t. We don’t all behave like that.
But it wasn’t worth the breath. Let him simply run out of steam. Kirsty would get that. Don’t dignify his rubbish with a response, she’d say, stick to the moral high ground. So I said nothing and stared through the glass at the empty desks in the newsroom as he bleated on. The place always looked dismal at night. There was something about it when it was unoccupied, when human activity no longer disguised its essential shabbiness. It badly needed redecoration and refurbishment, but redecoration and refurbishment weren’t part of the management’s business plan. The grimy cream walls were crying out for a lick of paint, the cheap nineties desks and chairs were hanging in, just, and the thin beige – or was it grey? – carpet had absorbed all manner of unguents over the years and long since given up hope of ever being cleaned.
I turned back. He was now pacing round his office.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a lot of respect for women. But let’s face it, what’s happening now is crazy. One move they object to and you’re on the sex offenders’ register, your career in ruins, your life well and truly fucked.’
Like the newsroom, Clive sometimes struggled in the twenty-first century. He was a throwback to a former, grubbier age. I unfolded my arms, wiped my cheek – his last observation had been delivered with a light spray of spittle – and pushed myself away from the wall.
‘Have you done, Clive?’
He wheeled around and looked fazed by my question.
‘Two simple points,’ I said. ‘Unwanted touching is assault and no-one’s above the law. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Pfft.’
The word, if it was a word, hung in the air like the final splutter of a broken engine. It was debatable how much Clive genuinely believed this crap and how much he just enjoyed trying to wind me up – not that I was easily wound. I came close to it once when Kirsty had been at the receiving end of his behaviour, but I wasn’t going to think about that now.
‘Can we get back to specifics?’ I said. ‘After all, what we’re dealing with here looks like being more than patting a backside.’
The rumours about an unnamed ‘senior politician’ had been circulating for a week or so. They bobbed around on social media, fragments of innuendo, wisps of invention. The digital stratosphere is full of stuff like that, pathetic allegations, personal point-scoring. It comes from nowhere and fades into nothing. But these messages had refused to evaporate. They became more insistent, more explicit, less cryptic. It was obvious that someone prominent was in deep shit.
From the outset I’d had a hunch who it was. Martin Barraclough was the Shadow Home Secretary and MP for North Humberside. Our local man. Someone we all knew, someone who visited foodbanks and old people’s homes, who presented prizes at Kirsty’s school, someone who was in the paper all the time. And someone it was easy to dislike. Barraclough was an arrogant so-and-so, with an old-fashioned reputation as a ladies’ man – the term now felt shot through with irony. Over the years, various tales had done the rounds, but no-one had taken them seriously, or perhaps had chosen not to. Not until now.
I started to dig. If I was right, this had the makings of a massive local story, even if its epicentre was Westminster. I didn’t tell Clive – he and the MP were old cronies, bastards both, cut from the same crude template. Nor did I mention it to Kirsty. It seemed wiser not to. She was a party member and knew people locally. I didn’t want her alerting them, just in case I was wrong. Anyway she would probably have tried to persuade me it had to be a Tory. I needed to be cautious in my enquiries.
In the end however, those enquiries got me precisely nowhere. The phone was slammed down on me, my calls weren’t returned. I was drawing nothing but blanks. After two frustrating days I still had no more than that hunch to go on. I certainly didn’t have a story. I should have been down there, at Westminster, putting myself about, in the Lobby, in the bars, picking up the gossip, finding out who knew what. Instead I was stuck in an obscure newspaper office nearly two hundred miles north. No-one was going to talk to The Humberside Citizen.
And so I had to just sit and watch it play out elsewhere – another paper’s scoop, someone else’s byline. That afternoon the website of a national tabloid with a large circulation – and enough in the coffers to take risks – had blazoned the headline, Barraclough faces sex attack claims. I was vindicated. I was also bitterly envious.
The MP’s accusers were anonymous, two women he’d worked with at Westminster apparently, although the paper hinted there were others. On the face of it, the published story seemed insubstantial, but if it had got past their lawyers, then it must have been reasonably solid. Barraclough had been in Parliament since the early nineteen-nineties, part of the resurgence of Labour, once a figure of hope, a future leader, some had said. Now his career appeared to be not so much juddering to a halt as heading off a cliff. Mine in contrast was just idling along. I’d failed to get the story and all I could do was write a sanctimonious editorial.
But not even that, if Clive had his way.
‘It’s too risky, legally’ he said.
‘There’s a bigger risk in ignoring it. It’ll look as if we haven’t got a clue what’s going on, we’re out of touch. Or…’
I slowed down. I was about to deliver the decisive blow.
‘Or worse, we’re in cahoots with Barraclough.’
I’d hit home and Clive’s face showed it. In my mind, Kirsty was already congratulating me. You’ve done it, Rick, you’ve got him. He took his glasses off and looked into the middle distance. It was the moment to press my advantage.
‘We’ve asked him to respond,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t. So we ask again – publicly.’
Clive turned towards me.
‘The Citizen calls on Martin Barraclough to break his silence and speak out on the allegations. He owes it to his constituents,’ he said slowly. ‘Is that it?’
‘Exactly.’
‘It’ll be thoroughly lawyered.’
‘Obviously.’
‘And I want to see it before it goes.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Well in that case, fuck off and get on with it.’
All this had taken about fifteen minutes but it was worth it. A necessary process. I went back to my desk in the newsroom to savour my victory. And to bask in Kirsty’s imminent approval. A small thing maybe, but she’d be proud of me for holding my ground. I spent a lot of time second-guessing my wife’s judgement. What would she think of this or that? Would she cheer or be disappointed? I carried her around like a hidden barometer, although the mercury could rocket off the scale and sometimes I miscalculated the readings entirely. But this time I was confident. Loyalty to her gender would surely trump loyalty to her party. And she always said hang in there when you’re right.
I glanced over at Clive who was riffling through a pile of papers on his desk. He was clearly still annoyed – with me, with himself, with Barraclough for carelessly causing the problem in the first place and almost certainly with the whole of womankind. After a moment, he jumped up, grabbed his coat and scarf and slammed his office door.
‘We need to do something about the heating in this place,’ he said and was gone.
The Candidate’s Husband
Price range: £3.99 through £10.99