“I suppose this means ‘Prime Minister Miliband’, doesn't it?”
There were two men on the train station, waiting for the silly o’clock London train. The taller of the two glowered.
“It’s a job, not a title,” Peter Bone replied with the gruffness that a day without sleep tended to call for, “and no - not yet.”
The re-elected MP for Wellingborough rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn. Truth be told, he hadn’t really noticed a tremendous amount of difference between government and opposition. Given that he was about as far from the A-List as it was possible to be, the main difference from one Parliament to the other had mainly been which side of the Speaker’s chair he had been sitting on in the House of Commons, but something still rankled about the unceremonious fall of the Cameron Project.
The BBC News app bleeped on the other man’s smartphone.
“The PM’s called a press conference for seven”, Philip Hollobone said.
“Probably is going, in that case,” Bone conceded.
The general election campaign had been weak, ineffective crap. For all the talk of ‘majority’ this and ‘LibDem’ that, it had been clear that Cameron had secretly been angling for another term of continuity Coalition. All ‘Neo-Brownism’ this and ‘Gay Marriage’ that. The Boy George had been frightfully keen to distance himself from the legacy of the Cyclops, but that all seemed pretty insignificant now.
“I blame the polling companies, you know?” the MP for Kettering said.
Bone gave his fellow backbencher a weary glance.
“Why so?”
“That fucking methodology change last year that ICM did.”
Bone wasn’t really sure that it had been all that important. Oh sure, it had shown Labour trailing by six per cent, rather than leading by the same, but it didn’t seem to have done much for the impression on the doorstep, especially in somewhere as commuter belt as Northamptonshire, but still...
“I think it was always an illusionary bounce to be honest,” Bone eventually replied to his colleague, “it didn’t turn the Prime Minister into Churchill, it just forced Labour to go down the Attlee root with Millipede, and look what we’ll have to put up with as a result.”
Hollobone gave a hollow laugh, wincing as he took a swing of almost-coffee.
Despite his misgivings about the man on an ideological basis, Bone had always rather liked the Prime Minister on a personal level, which was more than could be said for any of his likely successors. Osborne obviously wouldn’t be standing, May probably would, BoJo was still stuck in City Hall (and presumably kicking himself for turning down Kensington...), Dr Fox (not him, the other one...) was tainted but a plausible enough candidate from the sensible right...
The announcement of the 0602 to St Pancras momentarily dragged Bone away from his reverie.
The issue was that none of them
got it. It wasn’t simply a political thing, it was positioning. There was no point trying to out New Labour New Labour (for all that Miliband had repudiated it, it was still Mandelson and Campbell who had been running the campaign behind the scenes...), and the tacit impression that a majority Conservative government was going to be concerned more about health and education, rather than immigration and the economy, had been a spectacular misstep. Thatcherism hadn’t just died with the Lady herself, the whole ideological movement had been bulldozed into a mass grave outside Cirencester by her children.
Not that it made much difference to himself, of course, Bone mused. Despite the lamentable national picture, he’d actually engineered a considerable swing
away from the national one in Wellingborough (so had Philip, as it happened...) - although that had perhaps been helped by his Labour candidate being disowned by the local party for buying train tickets on an expired bank account.
The East Midlands Train sidled into the station. Bone hauled himself aboard. The obnoxious orange upholstery hit him like the start of a hangover, but it was too late to do anything about that.
It was probably time to think about the future, he thought to himself as he eased himself behind a table. His endorsement for any candidate would probably do more harm than good, but a decent committee place would probably be a sufficient pulpit, although it would make kicking the six shades out of Lammy on ‘This Week’ much harder to achieve.
He furrowed his brow. Something was off.
He opened the
Telegraph on his iPad. As expected, the live blog was now predicting a hung Parliament, but with Labour close to an overall majority. They probably wouldn’t even need the ScotsNats (Salmond’s gurning face - having narrowly lost in Gordon - was probably the most satisfactory moment of the whole evening). Bone scanned the latest results, some decent people had become casualties of the crimson tide, Blackman, Uppal, McCartney...
He suddenly realised what had been bothering him.
“Philip,” he said to the man who was now sat facing him, “why did you get on here? Doesn’t this stop in Kettering?”
The younger man gave an enigmatic smile.
“Peter, there’s something I’d like to chat with you about...”
