Meltdown (21 page)

Half a mile away in his Downing Street office, Andy Palmer, the fundraiser and press officer who had sent the text to Sir Rupert, put away his BlackBerry with a satisfied air.

‘Money, money, money,’ Palmer sang, half to himself and half for the benefit of Henry, with whom he had been discussing seating arrangements for the next gala fundraising dinner. It was crucial to ensure that the biggest donors got to sit on tables with any celebrities that they had managed to cobble together with the promise of a nod from the PM.

Henry had by this time been an MP for seven and a half years and had risen to the rank of junior Cabinet minister. He was very much a coming man, having cleverly managed to maintain a foot in Tony Blair’s camp while keeping very thick with his likely successor, Gordon Brown. He was seen as principled but pragmatic, the sort of politician New Britain needed and New Labour excelled in producing.

On this occasion, though, Henry was not happy.

‘I cannot believe you got Tony to put Rupert bloody Bennett up for a knighthood!’ he complained.

‘Why not?’ Palmer replied. ‘I thought he was a mate of yours.’

‘He is a mate of mine. Has been since uni, which is why I can tell you with authority that he is an absolute shit and an amoral arsehole and I can’t believe he’s going to be able to swank about the place insisting on being called sir.’

‘Henry, be practical. He gave us half a mil.’

‘So what you’re saying is you’re basically selling honours?’ Henry stroked his beautiful blond hair in an effort to calm himself. He was as vain as he had ever been. His hair was still thick and he kept it unfashionably long. Henry also played guitar in a House of Commons ‘rock’ band called Cross Party and this, combined with his hair, had earned him the nickname Blondel, which he pretended to hate but secretly rather liked.

‘Of course we’re selling honours,’ Palmer admitted. ‘Can’t think of any better use for them, can you?’

‘Yes I can!’ Henry retorted. ‘Recognizing public service! People who actually make a contribution to society rather than leeching off it! Hard-working lollipop ladies, parents who look after disabled children, limbless bomb victims.’

Palmer smiled a weary smile. ‘That’s what MBEs are for. Those we can give away. Knighthoods we need to sell.’

‘This is
not
what New Labour should be about,’ Henry said. ‘Rewarding bastards is not why I went into politics!’

‘Look, nobody particularly likes it,’ Palmer said with a shrug, ‘but the whole bonus culture thing has put City blokes at the centre of the universe. The party’s broke, mate, and we
need
them. What do you want me to do? We’ve been in power too long and only bastards will talk to us these days. Iraq’s bollocksed us big time.’

Henry grimaced. That bloody word
Iraq
. Iraq. Iraq. I-bloody-raq. God. They thought the war had made it tough for those living in Baghdad. Well, it hadn’t made living in Westminster very pleasant either. Who would have thought in ’97, when a whole new Labour generation had been swept to power on the promise of social justice, that the whole project would end up buried in the sands of Iraq? It was
so
unfair.

But what a cock-up it had been. Henry had voted for the war, they all had. How could they not? Those spooks had
sworn
the weapons of mass destruction were there! God, the US Secretary of State had waved his stick around on the floor of the UN pointing at supposed photographic proof like Kennedy and the Cuban missiles. But the WMD weren’t there and now everybody was saying that Tony had started a war just so that George Bush would take his calls.

It was so depressing. Nobody had noticed the good they had done. They seemed to be getting no real credit for banning foxhunting, for instance.

‘You need to understand,’ Palmer went on, ‘that people don’t like us any more. We’ve screwed up and we need money to get us out of the shit. And money ain’t free. If you want big players to bung you a crumb from their bonuses then you have to give them something in return. We don’t have any credibility left. Face it, we squandered that sucking Dubya’s dick. Oasis don’t come to Downing Street parties any more like they did in the good old days of bloody Cool Britannia. All we have left to sell is snobbery. Fortunately for us, that’s what the people with the dosh want.’

‘How much gets you a peerage then?’ Henry enquired bitterly.

‘Oh I don’t know, as little as twenty-five K if you bring something else to the party – you know, if you’re ethnic or vaguely look like you deserve one. But it’s a whole lot more if you’re a tougher sell. We charge big time.’

‘You do know that selling honours is against the law, don’t you?’

‘Look, mate,’ Palmer snapped, ‘the Tories have cosied up to money for centuries. Scratch the surface and you’ll find they’re rolling in it, they always have been. Our money’s run out. The unions are fucked and the membership’s falling. Is that fair? Is that good for democracy? We are the
people
’s party. Don’t the people deserve a properly funded party? Besides which, why shouldn’t we lick up a bit of the cream?
We
’ve created this fucking boom. It happened on our watch, not John fucking Major’s or St Margaret’s. It’s our economy that’s paying the bonuses these arseholes are buying their yachts with and we deserve a cut. As a matter of fact it’s our
duty
to grab it. What will happen to all the important social legislation we’ve put in place if the Tories get back in? They’ll probably bring back foxhunting.’

Henry’s face showed that he could see the logic in this. Heaven forbid that the important gains they had made should be lost because the party couldn’t afford a proper poster campaign to boast about them. Once more he stroked his hair to soothe himself. Yes, they still had valuable work to do. People would get over Iraq. The New Labour project was working. People’s lives were improving. Society was changing.

The next big thing was to get smoking banned and put some proper warning labels on alcohol.

Robbo’s last bumble

Jimmy took a taxi home. These days he mainly used the bus – there was a pretty good service between Notting Hill and the West End – but on this occasion he was in a hurry.

If Lizzie was making good on her promise then he needed to be there. As his cab made its way along Oxford Street and across Marble Arch he was beset by an irrational fear that somehow Monica would try to complete the loan without him. That she would give Lizzie the wrong bank details so the entire million would disappear into the financial black hole that was his deficit at the Royal Lancashire and do him no good at all.

He tried to phone but for some reason, on this night of all nights, with a two-million-quid loan hanging on it, he couldn’t get a signal along Notting Hill Gate. Jimmy had recently switched to a cheaper network and he was now discovering why it was cheaper. The bloody signal kept drifting in and out. Tantalizingly he’d get a few bars on his display only to see them disappear again before he’d had a chance to dial.

Jimmy felt awful about his desperation. For worrying about money with Robbo dead. Lizzie was just incredible. An utterly amazing human being. To be bothering about his and Monica’s problems at such a terrible time. It made Jimmy push away his anxiety and instead feel wretched and ashamed. He sat back in the taxi and found his eyes filling with tears once more. Lizzie and Robbo. The best of the best.

Eventually Jimmy arrived home and, having shoved a fiver and a tenner through the window for an eleven-pound ride, he clattered through the big door and down his unlit staircase.

Monica and Lizzie were there where he expected to find them, on the big couch in the family room with an empty bottle of wine between them.

‘Jimmy,’ Lizzie said, looking at him with red-ringed eyes, ‘I’m broke.’

Whatever he had expected the first words between them to be, it was not these. He was struck dumb. What had she said? Broke? Or broken? Broken, surely. Of course she was broken, a broken woman. She’d lost the best man in the world. Why wouldn’t she be broken?

But she hadn’t said broken. He knew that. She’d said ‘broke’.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Lizzie added.

That pulled Jimmy to his senses.

Lizzie was saying sorry to him? She’d just lost Robbo, the love of her life and the father of her children, and she was saying sorry to him. Whatever she was talking about, whatever had happened, it was Jimmy’s job to reach out to her, not she to him. Despite all his failures, he was still man enough to understand that. He went over and sat on the floor beside her.

‘Liz,’ he said gently, taking her hand, ‘what is this? What’s happened?’

‘The loan,’ Lizzie whispered. ‘I can’t give it to you.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Liz!’ Monica blurted, clearly repeating a sentiment she had already been pressing on her friend.

‘Of course it doesn’t matter,’ Jimmy said. ‘The only thing that matters is you and the kids.’

‘They’re OK. They’re with Robbo’s parents,’ she said, her voice catching on the word Robbo.

Jimmy squeezed her hand in sympathy, but fear was gripping his innards even as he loathed himself for it.

‘Tell me what’s happened, Lizzie. Please,’ he said.

‘It’s that man,’ Lizzie explained, clearly trying to keep her voice steady, ‘that cheat in America. You know, the one with the scheme . . . what was it called? The Ponzi scheme? Robbo fell for it . . .’

Jimmy could scarcely believe what he was hearing. It had been all over the papers. The biggest fraud in history.

‘Do you mean Lew Bronski?’

‘Yes. Lew Bronski,’ Lizzie spat. ‘That dreadful man.’

Now Jimmy understood everything. The press had been talking about Bronski’s victims for days. It had sounded as if they were all American, but inevitably they weren’t. Greed and stupidity were no respecter of national borders.

‘Oh God,’ Jimmy heard himself saying. ‘How much did Robbo invest?’

‘Everything. Absolutely everything. All our savings. The equity on Onslow Gardens. He even borrowed on our pension fund.’

‘But . . . why?’ was all Jimmy could find it in himself to say.

‘We’d been hit by the crunch,’ Lizzie said. ‘Who hadn’t? I was going to have to close the Knightsbridge gig, which was such a worry because the staff are all
mates
.’

Jimmy half smiled at that. Lizzie always called her employees ‘mates’, even though at her highest point there had been nearly fifty of them.

‘Robbo knew I was worrying about having to make people redundant and I suppose he was trying to . . . help.’

Jimmy could see it all.

He knew that for all his solid English equanimity and immense good nature, Robbo had never entirely relished his position as the gang’s hopeless arse. Even on their famous graduation night when Robbo had volunteered to insert the first and by far the largest radish, Jimmy had sensed a certain desperation in him, a desire to please. He had always taken with great good humour the endless ribbing about the cushy billet he had lucked on in marrying Lizzie. The fact that such a useless lump had scored this sexy and creative and ridiculously successful creature who seemed, against all logic, to love him unconditionally had been the subject of constant jokes.

And now Robbo, who had sat smiling so often under a rain of rolled-up nan bread, had gone out and fucked up in a spectacular manner. In an effort to save Lizzie’s Asian Fusion restaurant and protect her from the agony of having to sack her mates, he had given all their money to a bloke who was running the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.

He had sneaked out while Lizzie was designing cupcakes or trying to think of newer and ever more pointless table accessories (like her little silver plinths on which to rest your butter knife) and given their money to a shit. A man who leeched off fools. People who believed that he was some financial genius bringing them a 13 per cent return on their capital when the banks were offering only four.

‘Robbo was so naïve,’ Lizzie was sobbing. ‘Even I know that when someone’s offering nearly 10 per cent above the interest rate there must be
something
wrong. I mean you can’t make money out of nothing, can you?’

But of course a lot of people had believed that you could. In fact Jimmy’s entire adult life had been based on that same belief. Now he was broke and so was Lizzie. And she was a widow and her children had lost their beloved father.

And she would not be lending him two million quid either because his best friend had given it to a scammer. How desperate and sad Robbo must have been to have fucked up on such a colossal and embarrassing scale. Losing everything his wife had worked for.

God. He must have been desperate. Devastated.

And drunk, of course.

Then he had got in his car.

Funny. The one thing Robbo was pretty good at was driving. Never had a scratch or a dent, not one. But that night he had crashed and died.

A terrible thought flitted into Jimmy’s mind.

A bankers’ gathering

Henry, David, Robbo and Jimmy were sheltering from the baking sun beneath the cooling shade of a vast marquee striped in icing-sugar shades of pink and green.

‘I must say Roop knows how to throw a party,’ Jimmy shouted as he brought back four foaming tankards of fine local ale from the bar.

‘Pamela Goddard knows how to throw a party, Jim,’ Robbo corrected him.

‘Oh yes,’ Jimmy said, ‘of course.’

It was perhaps a
slightly
touchy subject. In the past Rupert’s parties had been designed and catered by Lizzie, but no longer. Rupert had been quite straight about it with his old friend.

‘You’re too fucking tasteful, Liz,’ he said. ‘I’m not throwing a party to attract BBC types, anglophile Yank pop singers and anorexic Oscar winners. I’m throwing a party for
money
. Big money, bankers on a spree. Americans and Russians. Particularly Russians. They want a bit of bling. They like a lot of pretty girls and what’s more, they want nice girls with tits, not silly skinny poshos with diplomas in Fine Arts. They want pink marquees, limos from the helicopter pad and Rod Stewart at midnight. What’s more, they don’t want to have to scrape lemon grass and alfalfa sprouts off their roast beef canapés. They want
meat
, pure and simple. You, Lizzie, are the patron saint of good taste and minimalism, I recognize and respect that, but when I pay a million quid for a party I want MAXimalism.’