Cover

Dedication

To my darling sister Juliet

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Monday, 3 March 1997

ALL THAT INTERESTS ME is the narrative, the story, and who controls it. As a glory-seeking journalist, I sometimes reveal scandals. But more often I try to find out what the powerful in politics and business are planning, so that I can reveal it before they have the opportunity to impose their interpretation, their spin. In my more pretentious moments, I justify what I do as empowering ‘the people’ to make up their own minds about how they are governed. Most of the time I am just having fun, pissing off ministers, chief executives, their minders, putting their secret schemes on the FC’s front page. If London is a collection of villages, I am the pedlar who wanders between the communities of politicians, financiers and businessmen, trading nuggets of information until I have enough to tell a tale that you’ll pay to read. Britain’s capital is vast and claustrophobically small. Everyone who matters knows everyone else who matters. My job is to eavesdrop, then share it with you.

Tonight, I have an appointment that I hope will furnish me with a grade B scoop. Not something wholly unexpected, but in this time of general-election fever, a nugget that will sizzle at the top of the front page of the influential newspaper that pays me to make mischief. So on this windy wet evening in early March, I am pedalling south-west down Shaftesbury Avenue, past Formica-furnished Chinese restaurants and all-night supermarkets, rainwater cascading down my cycle helmet, blurring my contact lenses. The English winter is blowing itself out with a cathartic storm that is sweeping the pavements clean. Commuters struggle with umbrellas, black cabs’ headlights are the mournful eyes of the hounds of Andersen’s Tinder Box.

I swerve left to avoid the mirrored surface of a water-filled pothole, right around the stationary 38 bus. Fiennes and Binoche are snogging on the side for The English Patient. I catch the driver’s eye. It’s a superstitious thing I do, giving thanks that he didn’t swing out and flatten me. He stares, just for a second. He’s wondering why on earth I would be out here under these curtains of water. I only half notice the rain because I am plotting how to land my mackerel; a story about the new darling of British politics, the prince of hope, Labour’s immaculately groomed and smooth young leader, Johnny Todd.