Out in the real world, that Saturday was going to be a long day for every MP in the country. Peter Collingwood was very unhappy. He had left three or four messages the previous night for Ronnie Ashe, the chief whip. He needed an answer before he began his surgery, which was imminent.
Earlier that morning he had slipped in the shower of his rented constituency house while fulminating about the matter, and had – he thought – broken a toe. The pain was agonising. But he had not given up. He owed it to the constituency. He had pulled on his socks and shoes with considerable effort. Just as he was putting the kettle on his daughter had called from London, in a furious mood. She had come in at 3 o’clock that morning, drunk and stinking of cigarettes, and her mother had ordered her to call him. ‘Mum says it’s your duty to act as a father for once. The cow.’ The conversation had not gone well. Peter could not find quite the right tone of command. In the House of Commons he was a decisive voice. He was known in the press for his strong and traditional moral views. He had a chiselled chin and dark eyes. But none of this cut any ice with his daughter.
It was too early in the morning for a call like that. She had been, frankly, rude, saying he was just full of the same old shit. He was going to make her cry again, she told him – she could feel it. Her voice was going wavery. Why were daughters so completely impossible? The conversation had gone on just long enough – ‘Why don’t you get a life, you poor, sad old man?’ – for Peter, who was forty-nine, to miss his breakfast. By the time he hobbled to his car and set off for the school annexe where his constituency surgery was held, he was in a bad mood.
Waiting for him, he knew, would be two or three hopeless whingers, smelling of damp wool, the kind of men and women who infested doctors’ surgeries day after day. They’d want him to do the impossible – resurface their road, amputate a neighbour’s tree, deal with the impertinent manager of their local Tesco. Then there would be the same hard case he saw every week, a raddled ex-serviceman who had been thrown out by his wife. For good measure there would be at least one entirely insane constituent, possibly violent.
But none of this – not the pain, not the hunger, not his daughter, nor the prospect of the predictable and dispiriting hours ahead of him – was the source of his unhappiness. No. The real trouble was that a dozen, or perhaps two dozen, intelligent and friendly constituents would also be waiting for him, and would ask what he thought about the referendum and how he was going to vote. Among them would be his constituency party officers, eager to spread the word.
‘Collingwood says …’ But Collingwood did not know what to say. All his life he had prided himself on having strong views, if weakly held. But now, on the most important national question of his lifetime, he did not know which way to turn; and he suspected that if his constituency party realised he didn’t know, his political career was over. ‘The worst are full of passionate intensity, and the best lack all conviction,’ he comforted himself. But in politics it was a meaningless truism.
Sophie, his constituency secretary, greeted him with the dispiriting news that eighteen people, most of whom were all too well known to him, were awaiting him in one of the science rooms. A formidable young woman, she stood guard by the glass door leading into the school office while he hastily grabbed a bite to eat. Ever since a Labour MP had been attacked by a constituent armed with a kitchen knife, security even at these humble surgeries had been taken very seriously. Sophie had laid out the usual selection of cheap biscuits, and the tea urn was hissing. Peter was munching his third biscuit, his mouth dry, when his phone started vibrating. He looked down to read: ‘Whips’ office’.
‘Peter,’ said Ronnie Ashe. ‘You’ve always been a sound man, loyal but nobody’s fool. I can’t believe you’re even thinking of not voting for us in the referendum. What are you playing at?’
Peter hurriedly washed out the paste of biscuits in his mouth with a swill of tea.
‘Ronnie, my constituents hate Europe. They don’t trust any of us. They can’t understand why I would vote for more regulations, more red tape and more immigrants. This is what it’s like at the sharp end, Ronnie. In two minutes the door of this room is going to open, and it’s going to be the same conversation time after time.’
Ronnie, who was leading a ring-around from the whips’ office at the House of Commons, started to run through the familiar achievements of the prime minister, beginning with his dramatic meeting with the German chancellor, David McAllister, and the ‘Hanover Pact’ which offered the prospect of a lighter-regulation and more conservative inner Northern European group in which Britain would feel more comfortable.
Nobody really knew whether this would actually lead to anything concrete – the French were dismissive, and the commissioners in Brussels were claiming that such a pact was illegal under European law. In Britain the newspapers had been divided between those which, noting the prime minister’s gaunt face, had christened it the ‘Hangover Pact’ – a fairly friendly nod to his obvious personal exhaustion – and those that preferred the ‘Handover Pact’, a cynical manoeuvre which would only lead to more powers going to Berlin rather than Brussels. The facts that McAllister had a British father, had proposed to his wife by the banks of Loch Ness and spoke perfect English cut little ice: wasn’t he really a Scot, after all?
But the truth remained that only this prime minister could have got German, and therefore Northern European, backing for a radical rewriting of the existing treaties. There was certainly a fight ahead in Brussels, but nobody since Margaret Thatcher had managed to change Britain’s relationship with Europe so dramatically: ‘Trust the prime minister and vote “Yes” ’ was by far the strongest argument the whips’ office had.
In Peter Collingwood’s constituency that didn’t feel like quite enough. Peter met, of course, a disproportionate number of voters who were full of passionate intensity, but even so it appeared that the pact was widely unpopular here. Elsewhere around the country the opinion polls showed that the prime minister was still just about winning the argument: the last-minute concessions from Berlin were seen as a dramatic and unexpected triumph. In return, the PM had given chancellor McAllister his personal pledge that the British would vote to remain in the EU.
‘In the end it comes down to this, Peter,’ said Ashe. ‘Do you trust the PM, or don’t you? You know he’s the best thing that’s happened to this party in years. Without him you wouldn’t be an MP at all. Show him some bloody loyalty.’
Peter sighed and switched off his phone. Like most MPs, the only thing that really mattered to him in the end was getting re-elected. Whatever they thought in the South or in Scotland, here he simply couldn’t risk being on the wrong side. He’d caught the look in his constituency officers’ eyes. If he faltered, they’d kill him. Perhaps literally.
At that point there was a knock on the door, and the first constituent on his morning list was walking towards him. She had a pleasant, ruddy face and a shock of almost white hair. Stifling the pain from his foot, Peter managed a broad welcoming smile and mentally rehearsed his pro-European arguments. She sat down, leaned over and picked up his last biscuit.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘here’s the thing. Some plausible bastard’s got me pregnant, and I don’t believe in abortion. What I want to know is, what are you going to do about it?’