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Conservatives
They left their clothes on the beach and went for swim when John Major was in charge. We stole them. Now watch the bastards drown!
- The New Labour papers
Emma Henderson liked having sex in toilets. Next to attending parties in sweaty Soho basements (which she could not do anymore) it was her favorite activity.
She sat astride her chauffeur, her back against the door; he was pounding into her in a kind of frenzy.
“Oh! Sean, Sean!”
He exploded. She felt him sliding away.
“Is that the best you can do?”
He felt the reproach like a stab.
She pulled herself off him and, with dignity, smoothed down her black Prada skirt. She had not been wearing underwear – it was in the car.
“I’m not finished,” he said, pathetically.
Emma pushed up the back of her hair.
“We’re going. You will follow me, in five minutes.”
It was a ladies’ lavatory, so there was no problem – for her. Sean heard water swish into the washbasin. She would be dabbing her lips, putting her face back on. A little later, he heard her kitten heels click across the tiled floor.
She was waiting for him on the back seat of the Jag – composed but in a terrible mood. Sean knew better than to say anything. He slid the car out of the car park and back onto the M40. They were on the Westway by seven o’clock. Emma loved driving back into London at night. It was one of the few advantages of going to her constituency in Middlewich by car.
She was forty-four years old and the Member or Parliament for a dull town in the west midlands. Emma was a minister in the Department of Trade and Industry. One would have called her a rising star, except that her universe, New Labour, elected with great hope and promise in 1997, was fading.
The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, now in his second term, needed people like her. She was a product of the Home Counties and Oxbridge, smart, clever and attractive - a blue-eyed ingénue sometimes attracting the moniker blonde bombshell. She wore expensive, and sexy, clothes. The late nights and the poor diet of politics could have played havoc with her body if she hadn’t spent so much and time and money on making sure that they didn’t.
They passed the Arc – Emma loved that building – and swung down through Mayfair. Emma lived alone in a flat off Kensington High Street. The flat, she told people, was handy for the Commons. It was also convenient for her favorite shops – Harrods and Harvey Nicks. Emma, although she concealed it well, was posh for New Labour. On the outside, she could be warm and charming but underneath one sensed something hard and cold. This accounted for a nickname sometimes used by her friends and associates, the Ice Maiden.
The food of Middlewich sat heavily in her stomach. She was looking forward to plundering her fridge, with its chilled Belgian truffles and delicacies from Marks & Spencer. After the chauffeur, Sean, had penetrated her gated compound, she dismissed him. She was eagerly anticipating kicking off her shoes and having a warm bath.
It was more than two hundred miles up to Middlewich and back – too far. Emma was not sure how much longer she would carry on with this life. Her position was low in the ministerial pecking order – at trade and industry she gave out licenses to mobile phone companies. Admittedly, the perks were good but she wanted something more – a job with one of the real departments, like the Home Office, the Foreign Office or the Treasury. She wanted to be on TV more. And she wanted to be on Desert Island Discs (she had already chosen her eight records). |
