But I’d reckoned without the force of his devoted wife.

How brilliantly the Jacksons turned his lies and his history to their advantage.

Just days before the by-election, a four-page spread in the Telegraph magazine, featuring fetching pictures of the whole photogenic family, brought everything into a dim sort of light. In their new country pile, Marcus told the adoring journalist how very humble his origins were. He was brought up in a suburban Essex semi; his dad’s side of the family – the Clelands – having long ago disowned his great-grandmother when she married into ‘trade’. So Marcus never knew about the reparations money until he ‘unexpectedly’ inherited a fortune in his twenties from that side of the family as the sole remaining heir.

Setting himself up as a bonds trader with the Cleland wealth, Marcus insisted he was horrified when he eventually discovered its origins.

And the tame journalist lapped it all up.

‘I’ve been haunted by the source of the family fortune since I realised,’ Marcus told her over coffee and freshly baked bread by the Aga in their new country kitchen: now he was striving to give back to the community in any way he could.

Ah yes. Marcus rode the publicity waves, good and bad, all the way to the Commons.

Just before Christmas I met Lena on Portobello Road at a juice bar (she’d rejected meeting at the Portuguese place, as it had ‘gone downhill recently,’ she said).

And, over vibrant coloured juice, Lena told me the real truth, dark eyes snapping with fury. It seemed Marcus had tried to bribe a journalist to lie about his past, and then offered to pay Lena to help cover it up – presumably why he’d done the Telegraph piece.

But being related to slave-owners wasn’t the Jacksons’ only disgrace.

‘That awful girl,’ Lena said. ‘She was after my old man.’

‘Ish?’ I stirred my tea, remembering the way she’d thrust her concave belly at him by the face-paint stall. ‘Willow was after him?’

‘Yep.’ Lena scrunched her curls into a band. ‘Luckily, Ish wasn’t interested in what we might call an open invitation. She’d been flirting since the camping trip, but she properly tried it on with him that night at the party.’

To her credit, she didn’t drop her eyes as we regarded each other for a moment, and I think both of us were back at the street party for a moment; Lena maybe thinking of the waitress, who’d gone home to Lisbon; me wondering if the accusations about Zach had simply been a way of Willow trying to feel better about her own rejection.

‘And Marcus?’ His name still stuck in my throat.

‘He’ll be fine. After all’ – Lena rolled her eyes – ‘he’s got his secret weapon.’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘Nella.’

For it was Nella who’d saved Marcus. She’d found someone bigger and far more powerful than Lena in the PR world, someone without scruples, who steered Marcus across treacherous terrain, back to safety.