VIII. Richard #2
‘If you’re honest with yourself, that is,’ Mickey says.
‘And this podcast is all about honesty and vulnerability and showing up as your truest, authenticest, deepest self. So let’s try again, bro.
How are you really, given that over the last three months, you lost your job after watching porn on your office computer – I mean, sure, we all love a bit of OnlyFans, mate, but time and place, yeah? ’
In the background, the Joshes snigger.
‘Then your marriage ended, didn’t it? And you – Dick Take – became a national joke. That must have felt so … well, so fucking mad. How did you cope?’
Hearing it all so baldly stated under the unforgiving heat of the spotlight is a strangely emotional experience. Richard is horrified to find his eyes moistening.
On the kitchen island, a camera swivels and hums. Richard can imagine it zooming in to focus on his shiny, wobbling face in unforgiving HD.
He’s watched the podcast trailers Mickey’s team puts together: short, sharp clips of guests in various states of emotional breakdown saying a series of unrelated things, spliced with library images of prison cells and sad-eyed kids in abandoned playgrounds.
Gary told him it didn’t matter if he cried; that it would, in fact, ‘show your human side’ – as if he possessed another, more noticeable, un-human side.
But Richard knew it would look pathetic if he cried about his career.
He needed to save the tears for talking about his childhood battles with hay fever which, when you thought about it, was more or less the same as asthma and served to explain his passion for clean energy. The tears recede.
‘Yes, well, ha – when you put it like that, Mickey, it does sound like a lot, doesn’t it?’ Richard says.
‘Yeah, mate, it does.’
‘But I’ve been very lucky with the support of friends and family and, of course, the most important people – the voters.
You know, Mickey, most people in this country are very understanding and compassionate individuals.
If you own up to your mistakes, if you hold your hands up and say, “Look guys, I got this wrong,” then most people, I’ve found, get it.
They get it. Look, I mean, I’m human, Mickey. I’m not perfect.’
‘Me neither, bro!’
‘I made an error of judgement and I paid the price. But who among us hasn’t done something they regret in the heat of the moment? And what I’ve really tried to do over the last few months is to try and rebuild the trust of the British public. I’ve gone out there and—’
‘So is that why you went on a reality TV show?’
Richard nods, fully in his stride now.
‘Yeah, exactly. Look …’ He fans out his hands to push the point home.
‘Politics and politicians are increasingly disconnected from real life. I wanted to get out of the metropolitan Westminster media bubble and get my message across directly to the people who count, you know? People like you, Mickey. People like your listeners. The ones who might not engage with politicians because they feel we don’t listen, we don’t care, or whatever.
’ His hands now make puppet shapes, as if to denote the boring blah-blah-blah of the Houses of Parliament.
Richard is pleased with the effectiveness.
Well done, hands! he thinks. ‘TV is a great way of doing that. As is your podcast, Mickey. It’s why I so admire what you do. ’
Richard laughs softly in a way he hopes is suitably ingratiating.
In truth, he hated every second of filming Shit Happens!
The producers had set up a series of games in which participants could win tokens to exchange for food.
Night after night, Richard had been voted by the public to do the challenges.
He had to clean the wastewater filters and patch up the walls of an ancient septic tank, all while scrabbling on the stinking ground for plastic stars that would mean he and his cast-mates could eat one extra tin of baked beans that evening.
His fellow contestants had watched him struggle, holding their noses against the faecal stench and whooping with laughter.
After filming ended, it had taken days to rid himself of the smell of sewage.
It still lingered sometimes in his nostrils, assailing him when he least expected it.
He’d be waiting for the microwave to ping with his beef stroganoff and – wham!
– he’d gag on a sudden sensory memory of a swollen turd stuck in a section of uninspected piping underneath a pensioner’s bathroom in Shadwell.
Still, it had been worth it in the end. He’d emerged as the runner-up of Shit Happens!
and after three long weeks on their TV screens, he’d become so familiar to the viewing public that their attitude shifted.
He now had over 700,000 followers on TikTok, several offers for other TV shows and people on the street no longer shouted abuse at him. Instead, they asked for selfies.
‘And now you’ve given your backing for Ben Fitzmaurice’s leadership bid,’ Mickey is saying, reading directly from the document in his notebook that has clearly been prepared for him by one of the Joshes. ‘Why are you doing that?’
Richard gives the usual spiel: he’s backing Ben Fitzmaurice because of his vision for the country and because he believes Ben is the only man who can deliver for Britain and so on.
He watches as Mickey glazes over and wonders what it would be like if he told the truth, which is that he was so unbelievably grateful to Ben for reinvigorating his political career that it was like asking someone suffering a cardiac attack why they were backing the use of defibrillator pads.
He had been stunned when Ben requested to speak to him privately at the funeral, taking him into his study after the service and pouring him a whisky, before laying out his plans.
‘I think we’d have good synergy,’ Ben had said, leaning on the mantelpiece which, Richard couldn’t help but notice, had the Fitzmaurice coat of arms carved into the stone.
‘I can provide the continuity, the bridge to Edward’s team but also the vision for the future.
And I have a certain appeal with the old buffers, as you know. ’
It was true. Although he’d voted to remain part of the European Union, Ben had somehow managed to stay onside with the core blue-rinse brigade: the battle-axes who organised village fairs and the retired colonels who disliked foreigners.
He also had a substantial following among middle-aged finance types who resented having to pay too much tax but who liked to be liberal-minded when it served them.
These lot were pro-gay marriage but anti-woke.
They accepted global warming as scientific fact but still wanted to take long-haul flights without being made to feel bad about it.
They were obsessed with bin-collection schedules, stamp duty and inheritance tax.
They loved Ben, but he lacked traction with the younger generation – and he knew it.
‘So that’s where you come in, Richard. I confess, I was suspicious of your going on that TV show, but I can see now that it was a stroke of genius.’
A puff of pride settled snugly under Richard’s solar plexus.
‘My kids loved it. You’ve got a following now. And I think the pair of us together, with you as my number two, could be dynamite. What do you say?’
Yes, was what he’d said, with an immediacy that, on reflection, was somewhat unbecoming.
He couldn’t help it. Richard was ecstatic.
Weeks before, he had feared his political life was over.
Hannah had left him. His ego had been crushed like an empty Coke can in the fist of the nation.
But now, this! Rising from the ashes of that humiliation!
The chance to scale political heights! To write his name in the history books!
It was all he’d ever wanted. (That, and children of his own, but the children didn’t seem as important now.)
Everything had moved with great speed. The campaign funds, he was told, would largely be provided by Ben’s old school friend turned finance guy, Andrew Jarvis.
‘He’s my mate from way back,’ Ben said when they met a week later in his Soho private members’ club. ‘We can trust him.’
‘Yes, I met him at Felicity’s funeral, I believe. He was quite difficult to read, if I’m honest. Rather a fey character. Glasses, fair hair.’
Ben looked confused.
‘Oh, ha! No, that was Martin. Martin Gilmour. That’s … we were close but … it’s a long story.’
Ben twisted the cap off a bottle of sparkling water, unleashing a slow fizzing sound.
‘You don’t need to worry about Martin. He’s onside.’
It was a strange thing to say, given that Richard hadn’t been worried about Martin being offside. He pushed the thought away.
When Richard met Jarvis, he encountered a man who reminded him of all the school bullies who’d ever crossed his path.
Jarvis regarded Richard with minimal interest and directed all his comments to Ben.
Richard wasn’t surprised to learn that, at school, Ben had been head boy and Jarvis his deputy.
They had a brief discussion about how the campaign would be strategised and then, just as Ben was bringing the meeting to a close, Richard asked – as mildly as he could – what role there would be for him in any future Fitzmaurice cabinet. Ben and Jarvis exchanged glances.
‘Bit premature, don’t you think?’ Jarvis said.
Richard smiled inoffensively.
‘No, I don’t think so.’ He made a point of holding Jarvis’s gaze. He knew that this was the moment when he held the most bargaining power. Richard prided himself on being a decent bloke, but that didn’t mean he was a fool.
‘What would you like?’ Ben asked, one eyebrow cocked.
‘Chancellor.’
Jarvis actually laughed. Rude, Richard thought. Ben leaned back in his chair.
‘Not Home Sec?’ Ben asked.
Richard imagined protracted disputes with the Metropolitan Police and the slow handclap of a Women’s Institute.
He thinks of flights to Rwanda containing asylum-seekers and eggs thrown by street protestors.
You truly didn’t know how much an egg could hurt until you’d had one hurled at your forehead.
‘No.’
‘Foreign?’
There was a certain gravitas to this idea.
He lost himself in a brief but distinct reverie of photo opportunities with military personnel, and handshakes with dignitaries at important international conferences.
Plus, of course, the chance to bring peace to a conflict-scarred part of the world, riven by war for many decades until Richard Take came on the scene to mastermind a seemingly impossible truce …
‘You’ve promised foreign to Gilly,’ Jarvis’s voice cut through.
‘Ah yes, of course. OK then, chancellor it is.’
And that was that.
The three of them had decided to announce Ben’s leadership bid at the V&A charity gala.
It had gone down very well with the assembled crowd, who’d greeted the idea of Ben Fitzmaurice as their future prime minister with warm applause.
There had been no mention of Richard as chancellor, of course.
That wasn’t the done thing. But Richard knew and he held on to this knowledge like a child protecting a delicious secret.
Back in the Battersea flat, Mickey Minton’s eyelids are stuttering.
Richard brings his political spiel to a close as swiftly as he is able without seeming like a lightweight.
He feels a pressure against his ankle and then the snuffle of a small dog and a warm, seeping moisture leaking into his sock.
The unmistakable tang of canine urine drifts upwards.
Richard tries to ignore it.
‘I wanna talk to you about your childhood …’ Mickey says.
‘My parents are wonderful people …’
‘But first a word from our sponsors.’
Mickey turns over a page in his notebook and reads tonelessly from a script.
‘I work out five days a week because physical health is part of my mental health.’
Unconsciously, Richard rests a hand on his stomach, stretching the black merino into a gentle undulation. He really should get back to the gym.
‘But I need to get my body prepped for the gym,’ Mickey recites.
‘So that’s why I drink PRO-TEN, an easy-to-make shake containing all your protein and ten thousand key nutrients, minerals, vitamins and probiotics to ensure your muscles get the fuel they need and your gut gets the healthy diet it deserves.
Listeners of Talking the Mickey get twenty per cent off their first order of PRO-TEN by using the code TTM at checkout … ’
By the time they walk out of Battersea Power Station, Richard is drained and his sock is still wet. The recording took four hours, which Josh 1 assured them would be cut down to ninety minutes.
‘Which part do you think they’ll cut?’ Richard asks Gary.
‘Probably the political bit.’
‘Oh.’
Gary gives a phlegmy cough.
‘That sounds nasty,’ Richard says.
Gary waves his concern away, then continues to cough for a few more seconds before bending over to spit a viscous beige-green substance onto the pavement.
‘Nah, it’s normal,’ he says, straightening back up. ‘You back to the office then?’
Richard nods. He’s got a Zoom call with an organic soil lobbying group and then drinks in the Strangers’ Bar with the chair of the 1922 Committee. They walk to the tube together, stopped only once by a young mother pushing a pram for a selfie. At the top of the escalator, Gary turns to Richard.
‘Did you ever think of running for the leadership yourself?’
‘No,’ he replies, startled.
He says it instinctively, without having to think. It has never once crossed Richard’s mind.
Until now.