A Parliamentary Affair Read Free Page A

jolly pleased with life, as well it might.
    Nigel tweaked his distinctive bow-tie and amused himself by waving graciously from the elbow, like the Queen. He was rewarded as two pressmen obligingly set off flashes in his face. At his side his private secretary, civil servant grade 5 Martin Chadwick, suppressed his annoyance. He didn’t know why the fool bothered; tomorrow’s papers would have no room for an old-timer probably in his last Cabinet post. Instead the front pages would be filled with pictures of the delectable new women appointees, the first into the Cabinet in over a decade, who had posed for the cameras all morning.
    Nigel’s cheerful demeanour concealed mixed feelings. A large number of seats had been lost. This was the hardest, physically the most crushing election he had taken part in since entering Parliament at a by-election thirty years before. He was getting too old for this game. Of course winning against the odds was wonderful: to retain power, to be asked to carry on, to gain the country’s backing in these tough times. Thank heaven it was all over – things would improve now. That Britain in the uncertain nineties would be guided by people like himself made Boswood feel thoroughly comforted.
    Roger Dickson was equally relaxed as he took the escalator from the car park. One hand stayed nonchalantly in his pocket; the other carried no more than a Financial Times opened at the page where its editor grovelled over his previous day’s call to vote Labour.
    The place smelled just the same, a mixture of dust and ancient stone and mildew and leather and fear and the whiff of an old cigar, yet it felt as if he had been away years, not a mere three weeks. He walked through the Members’ cloakroom to see if the named pegs, for all the world like a school, had been reallocated yet. For centuries each MP had placed his sword here in a silken loop, for in this House issues were fought with sharp words. Modern loops, perhaps appropriately, were made of red tape. Then he turned left past vaulted damp cloisters where a dozen MPs would work cheek by jowl and took the stairs two at a time into Members’ Lobby. On the way he glanced at faces, stopping to swap congratulations and anecdotes with MPs in his own party, while not neglecting to nod agreeably at the other side.
    Dickson understood the arduous feat of memory facing security staff. If he were confirmed in his job as a whip he faced a similar task in getting to know all the MPs. Like the police, he maintaineda private system based on acute and often irreverent observation. Already ‘dirty fingernails’ and ‘concertina trousers’ had appeared mentally beside two names, with ‘pink wig’ against a third. ‘Hunchback of Notre-Dame’ and ‘looks mad’ would follow. He needed more than their faces. Whips, the government’s own policemen, had to become acquainted with all their supporters’ foibles, preferences, proclivities and secret telephone numbers, their special friends, sworn enemies and lovers old and new, and know when and how to use this hotchpotch of information to the government’s advantage.
    Dickson did not expect to be hearing from the Prime Minister in the current reshuffle. He enjoyed being a whip, and had said so on the phone to the Chief Whip. This time he could expect promotion to senior whip with the fancy title of ‘Lord Commissioner of the Treasury’, a bigger desk and a respectable pay rise.
    John Major once called the whips’ office ‘the last secure den in western Europe’. Whips were not appointed by the Prime Minister but by themselves in cabal, arguing wickedly about who would fit, who should be encouraged, who ignored. No woman MP had ever been invited to join them.
    Dickson headed first for the whips’ room off Members’ Lobby. Years ago it was the fiefdom of flying men and colonels distinguished in the war, although the terminology –’whippers in’ – came from hunting. The atmosphere then was like an