A Parliamentary Affair (58 page)

The picture of Nigel in a dressing gown was best not mentioned; everyone would see it in due course. Nor did it matter that
The Globe
were being wildly inconsistent, claiming both that the boy was forced into an unhappy relationship and that it had lasted a long time and involved cheery holidays. Consistency and reliability are not required of such newspapers.

Andrew had the attention of the room. ‘That’s day two. Day three is Wednesday, when party night will be described in vivid detail. Some of those pictures have already been published but I gather they’re having difficulties with their own lawyers as one or two are a bit risqué.’

The Chief Whip kept his face impassive but raised a condemnatory eyebrow. ‘No doubt they’ll appear sooner or later.
The Sport
would be thrilled to have them,’ he remarked drily. ‘Go on, Andrew. What else does your mole say?’

‘Day four is Thursday. A lot of tear-jerking stuff is planned, all about this tragic boy’s early life in care, and how he was exploited by Sir Nigel here –’

The object of the exercise gave a great racking sob which hung on the air as a reproach to them all.

Andrew swallowed. ‘Sorry, Nigel. You gave them an interview during the summer, didn’t you? One of many, I know, but they’ve picked up particular questions about young people, homelessness and so on. You said you were worried about youngsters sleeping rough and wanted to do more for them. It’s going to be twisted and used against you, I’m afraid.’

He turned to the Chief Whip. ‘I couldn’t find out any more than that. Sorry. My contact dried up at that point.’

The Chief was quietly impressed. Muncastle had made enquiries off his own bat; a little initiative was most welcome.

‘Andrew, thank you. My guess is that they’ll produce the rabbit from the hat at some stage, probably Thursday. That makes sense. It would grab all the headlines on Friday and Saturday and obliterate even the Prime Minister’s pep-talk to the nation. Talk about wrecking the conference! I’m afraid all our efforts at news management this glorious week are looking distinctly bleak.’

Wharton coughed discreetly. The best cases were those where everyone concerned was determined to see the other side in court and both parties could afford to lose a packet. This case was sliding quietly through his fingers. He leaned forward unctuously. ‘I know this may seem unnecessary, but I do have to ask, Sir Nigel: are all these stories true?’

The room’s occupants held their breath. If Nigel denied it his word must be accepted and acted upon. Either way meant trouble.

Nigel nodded and accepted his fate wordlessly, tears running down his cheeks. He looked old and broken. The famous face was wrinkled, hang-dog, with none of the puffed-up bonhomie that had been his trademark. His companions sat sadly for a moment, moved to pity.

Roger broke the silence, as gently as possible. ‘Nigel, we may not get another chance to talk much. Do you want to tell us what happened?’

Boswood shook his head. Yet he owed it to these people, who would defend and shield him for a while, to put the record straight. He spoke as none of them had heard him before, slowly, agonised, as if addressing a faraway shadow only he could see.

‘I’m not sure I know myself. I thought he was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I was going to retire and live a normal life with him. Going to tell everybody – “come out”. Stop lying. Live like everyone else. At least, that was the plan.’

Andrew examined his shoes in embarrassment; Marcus caught his breath.

The Chief was brusque. This was no time to be sentimental. From the sound of it, hurting Nigel’s feelings was not at issue; the boy had done that with a vengeance, and utterly destroyed a good man. It was tragic but one had to be practical. ‘Well, the truth is out now. Do we need to detain Mr Wharton any longer? If we can’t sue he might as well go back to London.’

The lawyer rose. Quite right; no point in wasting precious time. Three other big cases lay on his desk in Fetter Lane – the washed-up actress who had never slept with the South African politician, the Essex builder with more money than sense who wouldn’t dream of passing wads of cash under the table, the Sunday newspaper which had sacked its finance director after finding his fingers, in the till. A busy few months loomed, win or lose. He gathered his papers with an air of anxious neutrality, shook hands rapidly and left.

Nigel rose and lumbered heavily to the desk where he rummaged through files. ‘I’ve written a letter of resignation.’

The Chief held up his hand. ‘Not yet, Nigel. The PM wants to talk to you when he gets here tomorrow. He’d like to test the water, find out what the party thinks. You’re to say nothing, talk to no one. It mightn’t be as bad as all that. These are the 1990s; maybe attitudes have changed.’

The Prime Minister had refused to make a curt dismissal, or a sacking of any kind. If Boswood were to go it was to be in his own time and of his own volition. The PM had stopped short of indicating that, for himself, he would be willing to have a gay man in the Cabinet. After all, gays could be senior civil servants – the law excluding them from sensitive posts had been quietly changed some time before. They could be generals as long as they kept quiet and slept alone. They could be bishops, and several were, provided they kept their hands off choirboys. They could serve in the police and write leaders for
The Times
and win prizes as top columnists. A fair number were MPs, it stood to reason. Surely the day would come when, just as divorced men could serve in the nation’s highest offices, homosexuals could too. Thus the Prime Minister decided to wait a couple of days to assess public reaction. How seriously would the
hoi polloi
view Sir Nigel’s tastes, and would they regard him as unfit for public office?

The public fell about laughing. That was the trouble. The question of fitness or otherwise simply didn’t arise. The spectacle of a Cabinet Minister making a fool of himself convulsed the nation as they read their newspapers, eyes rounded and popping in every corner of the land. In a dismal world it was wonderful to have something ridiculous to laugh at. Press from other countries piled in, taking advantage of the opportunity to publish lurid details kept: secret about their own politicians. Cameramen camped in the rain for days outside the house in Ebury Street, hung precariously like black crows from trees nearby, perched long ladders against the back wall and photographed the kitchen, the bedroom – anywhere – bribed neighbours for the rental of upper rooms and trampled over the last; flowers in the park opposite the house. They laid siege to every property where Sir Nigel might be hiding. A nationwide search for Peter also took place, the hue and cry for Boswood’s exploited victim, who sat tight in his hotel room in Guernsey behind drawn blinds with a muscular
bodyguard and a thin-lipped lawyer watching his every move, until at last the press agencies were tipped off about his return to London on a scheduled flight into Heathrow.

Peter knew the press would be waiting but he had never expected anything like the howling mob which greeted him. The British rat-pack in full cry has to be experienced to be believed. Bewildered and scared, his dark spectacles knocked unceremoniously away from his face, Peter turned from one to another as the crazy scenes were relayed live on television, the flight arrival having been timed to coincide with the lunchtime news. As
The Globe
’s professionals had anticipated, the resulting front-page photographs showed their boy beautiful, vulnerable and tragic, the hungry leering faces of pressmen substituting nicely for his seducer. Even his travelling companions had been chosen with visuals in mind. Beside the burly bodyguards and the grim-faced lawyer he appeared younger, more frail. The editor looked through the latest batch of pictures from the airport and congratulated himself on such immaculate attention to detail.

Knowing the combatants apart from Peter and guessing who was the real offender, Elaine decided to test opinion. Mrs Horrocks and her ladies were invited to join her for breakfast in her hotel.

‘What do you think of all this?’ Elaine asked, gesturing at the reams of lurid newsprint. ‘Is the Prime Minister right to turn down his resignation?’

The good women each hurriedly took a mouthful before answering. The food was splendid, much better than in their own more modest establishments. Conversation was intended as an accompaniment to such a good meal, certainly not an alternative.

‘He was always a very good minister, I’ll say that for him,’ Mrs Horrocks stated judiciously. ‘I remember when he came to speak at our annual dinner – before your time, Mrs Stalker. I presented him with a cake. He was excellent; we all loved him.’

The conversation turned around the similarities with other notable dismissals involving morality. On each occasion it was not, officially, sexual misbehaviour which brought downfall; it was the lies, or the cover-up, or a side issue such as security breaches or corruption.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Elaine pushed them. ‘Can Nigel stay in the government, or not?’

In judgement the women turned their eyes to the next table where a respectable white-haired couple were deep into
The Globe
, mouths open and chortling, then back to Elaine. A politician pursued relentlessly by the press is damaged goods, not to be taken seriously ever again. Eyebrows were raised, lips pursed, shoulders shrugged. The party believed in winning battles. It chose with care almost by instinct the battles it would take on.

‘No,’ they said.

The conference was disintegrating into chaos. All the fine speeches on foreign affairs and policy towards the Third World, the valiant efforts to help the unemployed, were lost in the maelstrom surrounding Nigel Boswood. Pressmen who had waited two days caught him in the hotel lobby stretching his legs at what he thought was a quiet moment, and in an instant the hapless Cabinet minister was surrounded by flashing bulbs and a blaze of spotlights. The resulting film showed the unfortunate man, mouth open in protest and face creased with misery, stumbling upstairs two at a time pursued by the camera-toting pack who were stopped by police at the first landing. The official line was still that he was not required to resign for a misdemeanour for which there was to be no prosecution. That he was running away from responsibility was nevertheless painfully apparent, and more damaging.

It would have been kinder to have let Nigel Boswood leave the government when he had tendered his resignation amid the sleaze of the first editions of Monday’s papers. The pretence that a man in his position could continue as if nothing had happened was absurd and cruel. Had he quit then,
the story would have continued to convulse the nation but would have faded relatively quickly; the Sunday papers would have tried to revive it, but the spice would have gone, for part of the point of such a story was to change history. Forcing a resignation was exactly that. Once that objective had been achieved, commentators would have moved on. Nigel might have kept his head down for several weeks, then surfaced gingerly in Parliament raising local issues. Preferably without any maudlin personal statements, of course. His leaving the Cabinet promptly but then remaining as a backbencher would have been regarded as positively helpful. The whips would have been distant but kind.

But by postponing the decision the Prime Minister unwittingly played into the hands of
The Globe
. By Friday Nigel’s position was untenable. As a Cabinet minister he could say and do nothing to defend himself. A denial would require him to sue. Failure to deny meant the tales were true. He had no room left to manoeuvre.

Boswood was completely unprepared for what was happening. Not that it had never occurred to him that the story might get out; he had planned for that, when Peter was part of his life, expecting to go public, proudly, shyly, almost at any time. When Peter vanished instead he assumed that the boy had walked out of his life for ever. Knowing very little about him and besotted with the boy, Nigel still found it impossible to accept his lover’s true nature. Thus he had failed to arm or protect himself in any way.

The misery of losing Peter had been frightful enough, but somehow he had survived. He had believed that nothing so ghastly could ever happen to him again, but he had been wrong. Dully, moving about the hotel suite in Bournemouth like an automaton, Nigel rehearsed the horrible charges made against himself. In so far as he understood them, he knew them all to be lies. It was not true that he was sexually promiscuous and dangerous; most of the time he was celibate, far more than many bachelors. Peter was his first love affair, at least since university days. It was not true that he had persuaded the boy against his will: Nigel was incapable of such pressure. He was certain the boy had been willing and known exactly what he was doing. It was not true that the relationship had been one of domination by himself, dependence by the boy – much the other way round. Still something in Nigel’s battered heart refused to accept that he had been had for a complete sucker. He could see how the media took the affair, but surely Peter had been decent deep down and somewhere along the line had loved him a little? Was he such a monster, he, Nigel Boswood, that a young man could not love him at all, only despise him, sufficiently to expose their most magic moments, to make him a complete laughing stock?

So the Prime Minister’s misplaced kindness inadvertently caused his Cabinet colleague far more agony. The other loser was the government itself. The Prime Minister’s closing speech to Party Conference was wiped off both front and inside pages. Journalists delved into files on paedophiles, mass murderers, rapists and other genuine criminals and made odious comparisons. Peter’s mother reappeared and told her tale for a substantial sum. His sister decided to keep her head down for the sake of her own children. Two senior police officers who knew Peter too well decided to do the same. The Opposition, despite their stated support for gay equality, demanded Nigel’s head and an emergency debate. The Liberal Democrats insisted on his leaving Westminster altogether; their eyes gleamed.