Net Zero. The Stranger’s Bar. And a three-line whip
Ned wobbled
a little as he crossed the Lobby. But he managed a bow to the Speaker’s chair
as he entered the chamber and made his way safely to his usual seat. From this
he looked down on the orderly scalp of the Shadow Environment Minister, whose
hair had been coiffed with precision for tonight’s debate; it had, like her
staff, learned to do as it was told.
“Old Ned
Fiddler looking a bit unsteady,” a young MP had muttered back in the lobby.
“Does he hit the sauce often?”
 |
Sir Thomas More (Hans Holbein the Younger) |
“Never did
much,” said the lobby correspondent with him. “Too busy shagging research
assistants. But I think the new party leadership is getting to him.”
It was. One
of the Whips had called into his office in Portcullis House that morning to
discuss the Environment debate for later.
“We’re a
little anxious about you, Ned,” he said. “We need to land some punches on the
government tonight. Need to show all those Reform voters that we don’t like Net
Zero either. Are you going to speak?”
“If I’m
called,” said Ned.
“You see,
when it comes to Net Zero, you’ve been a little…” The whip looked up at the
ceiling and down again. “A little unsound, if I may say so. We were a
little concerned after the select committee… at your comments on wind energy
for example. A little too approving. Our voters do not want these ugly things
in their back yards.”
“You would
prefer me to tilt at windmills?” asked Ned.
“I beg your
pardon?”
“Never
mind. Fear not, I am sure I shan’t disappoint you.” He picked up a sheaf of
notes and waved it at the whip, who had, he noted, cut himself shaving. “I have
written a paean to fossil fuels that will warm the cockles of your heart.”
“Splendid.”
The whip got up to go. In the doorway, he turned. “We realise of course that
your seat is a little vulnerable to Reform. You may wish to be a little surer
of your place in the Lords. Should anything untoward happen at the neck
selection. After all, it’s a three-line whip.”
“Fear not,”
said Ned, and added quietly:
“And, as
time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad
gravity. A man for all seasons.”
“I beg your
pardon?”
“It was written
in 1520, of Sir Thomas More.”
“Oh.” The
whip looked confused. ”Well, I’m sure we can rely on you.”
He went. Ned regarded his retreating back with distaste. Over thirty years in the House, he thought, and I’m expected to endure threats from these smarmy little creeps. He looked again at his notes, in which he had collated all the threats to birdlife from wind turbines and bemoaned the loss of farmland to solar panels. He thought for a moment. Then he picked up the wad of papers and dropped it in the bin. Next he opened his desk draw and took out a very old brown envelope from which he drew several sheets of foolscap paper, yellow with age. He placed them in a clear plastic folder.
Then he went to the Stranger’s Bar and had two
gin and tonics and a Glenlivet.
*** *** ***
“Mister
FIDDLER!”
He swayed
slightly as he rose to his feet.
“Thank you,
Madam Deputy Speaker.” He looked round the chamber. “I need not long detain you …Bustards!”
 |
| Trevor Littlewood/Wikimedia Commons |
He paused
for a moment, then grasped the yellowed sheet of foolscap. “I should like,
Madam Deputy Speaker, to read briefly from the diary of my great-uncle
Christopher. He writes, on a day in June:
I have been
thinking of the seasons and their immutability, which is a comfort in these
times; one knows, doesn’t one, that in England, some morning in late February
or the start of March, one will step out and feel the wind cold, harsh even,
but not so raw as it was; and the sky will be a sort of washed blue with bright
white clouds scudding across it, bisected by branches that are still bare but
somehow not as barren as before. One knows then that it is early Spring. Then
some weeks later that the buds arrive, the hawthorn breaks out and the trees
are suddenly a very vivid green that you won’t see later in the summer, when
they are duller, jaded.
We’re in
that vivid time now; the sky’s a deep blue, not the livid grey-white of August,
and the fields are coming alive – I can see them quite well beyond the
perimeter fence, stretching across the Lincolnshire Wolds with their gentle folds
and hedgerows. The blossoms are everywhere. I woke quite late today – we landed
at four last night, and then there was debriefing and breakfast – when I got up
I opened the window of my quarters and the world outside looked exactly like
early June. Then just now the chaps were bombing up and some clot miss-set a
circuit and let a 4,000-pound cookie drop from a bomb bay onto the tarmac. It
didn’t go off, or we wouldn’t be here. I could hear the maniacal laughter of
the crew and I thought, the world is in flames from Singapore to the Channel
coast, and we have just been near-blown to eternity; yet the seasons feel
exactly as they should, and there is something we cannot destroy, and that
comforts me.
Ned lowered
the page. “I read today that the Woodland Trust have detected changes in the
seasons. Nothing has brought the reality of climate change home to me quite as
that has done.” Two or three members began to rise, but he shook his head. “No,
I shall not give way. Madam Deputy Speaker, I realise that my great-uncle could
not now be comforted by the immutability of the seasons, as he wrote that he was
in that dark time – a week or so before his death on active service. That is a
reality almost beyond my grasp. Am I to deny that reality today because if I do
not, a few thousand votes may go to fools?
“Madam
Deputy Speaker, I have been a member of my Party for fifty years and a member
of this House for thirty. But tonight I must defy the whip. I cannot vote
against the Government motion and, for all its flaws, I commend it to the
House.”
A wave of
noise broke over him; cries of “Oh! Oh!” and “For shame!” and “Bravo!”. He did
not hear them; he left the chamber and crossed the lobby, only dimly aware of
the two or three lobby correspondents striding to keep up with him. They fell
back, but one of them called out: “Is your career over?” And another called:
“What season is it now, Ned!”
He stopped and thought for a moment. “I think,” he said, “that it’s early spring.”
More flash fiction from Mike:
