Prelude
“There’s something very wrong with our man today. I’m almost worried about him.”
Martin Barnwell paid no immediate attention to the remark thrown at him from the persistent fog. Instead, Downing Street's chief of staff took a slow, deliberate drag from the cigarette held awkwardly in his yellowing, arthritic fingers. Exhaling slowly, he watched as a slight breeze snatched the smoke away and wafted it unceremoniously towards his assistant as she emerged from the mist.
Amanda Abbott, her bright red coat a vivid contrast to the gloom around her, focused on walking across the uneven ground and barely noticed the smell of tobacco.
In the steel and glass colossus that loomed sixty yards away, a muffled horn announced the end of the early morning shift. Almost instantly, workers rushed out of the exits in the recently opened Grange Brothers food distribution centre. They scurried and scattered like matchstick figures in a Lowry painting across the unfinished parking lot.
At the same time, the nation's media spilled out through the building's main entrance, setting up cameras and jostling for position behind a rope barrier.
The prime minister's hastily arranged visit was ending. In the damp, unrelenting mist, it was time for the fireworks to ignite.
A fleeting scowl briefly marred Barnwell's weathered face, famously compared by an anonymous ‘Downing Street insider’ in a recently-launched book to that of a bulldog licking piss off a nettle while dragging its balls over barbed wire. The assembled reporters, photographers, and TV crews - necessary parasites to be tolerated in his estimation - may have been the scowl’s target. Or perhaps his assistant, but after many years in her role, she remained unfazed by her boss's expressions of disdain, displeasure, or disapproval.
In fact, she was completely oblivious, her attention consumed by maintaining her balance. Heels, even modest ones adorning expensive boots, were ill-advised on impromptu visits to industrial sites. Car parks can be treacherous terrains, and this one was about to prove it.
The Grange Brothers operation was the second largest warehouse in the Midlands, the fourth largest in the country and a brand-new building to boot. So new, in fact, that the car park was not yet finished. Today, the warehouse hosted the launch of a new government food quality initiative. The PM's special adviser had created this ‘ground-breaking event’ just 48 hours earlier, to distract the public from the PM's most recent error of judgement.
How anybody could mistakenly send images of their genitalia to the German Chancellor rather than their mistress was one thing.
Seeking to draw a line under the whole sorry episode on the steps of a building that had replaced a much-loved local hospital was quite another.
That the hospital closure had been approved by the then Health Secretary who now, for God’s sake, was the prime minister, was something else entirely. Heads would roll.
If Barnwell had a hand in it, the PM's special adviser would be the first in a line of one.
“The PM’s not been at his best for weeks,” he responded eventually. “What makes today so special?”
Amanda “Mindy” Abbott came to a halt next to her boss. She took out her smartphone and checked the twenty-six messages she had received in the past five minutes.
“He hasn’t put a foot wrong. No embarrassing comments. Hasn’t even knocked anything over. Asked all the right questions…”
She stopped to delete the message from her publisher, providing the latest sales figures for her book and requesting an extra chapter based on ‘recent events’.
“Miracles happen then. Did the press behave themselves?”
“As quiet as lambs. They’re coming to the end of the tour. The PM will have a brief meeting with the directors over tea and biscuits. He'll come out, talk about the initiative, then head to the car. Someone - probably the Mail - will throw him a question about Todgergate. He’ll stop, say whatever he’s agreed with Michaels, then we’re away.”
Barnwell nodded grimly. “And he’s not put a foot wrong?”
“Not a thing. He’s been quiet since we set off this morning.”
A sixth sense, honed by thirty years of political experience, was screaming at him, but Barnwell couldn’t make out what it was saying.
It didn’t matter.
He knew he was in the calm before the inevitable storm.
He threw the rest of his cigarette to the ground and stamped it out.
“We’ll wait in the car and watch from there. I don’t want to be anywhere near this shambles. Michaels can handle it. Let’s see what’s so special about the special adviser.”
With that, he made for the warmth and shelter of the third SUV, parked in a convoy waiting to rescue the country’s leading politician from too much humiliation.
Anonymous best-selling author Mindy Abbott followed behind, memorising her boss’s words for the new chapter, while avoiding workers keen to get home.
Barnwell’s sixth sense realised it wasn’t being heard, so stopped screaming. It waited, head in hands, for the inevitable.
