This Honourable House by Edwina Currie Read Free Book Online Page A

Heathrow? The matching ‘his and hers’ luggage in brown leather. The linen suits, stylishly crumpled after the long flight. Benedict would have to be reminded to shave before the plane landed. The light tan, the result of doggedly nagging her husband to strip off. His fair skin, he protested mildly, disliked strong sun. A honeymoon on the Scottish moorlands might have been more in his line, but that would have left him even paler than usual and would have marked him permanently as lacking trendiness. One Prince Charles was enough. It would have marred the overall package, and that would never do.
    She leaned on one elbow and gazed down at her sleeping spouse. He shifted position again, and snatches of unintelligible words escaped his lips. That was what had disturbed her sleep.
    Her efforts to spruce him up were mostly greeted with mild objections, but after a short while, when she quietly explained the changes she proposed – only small matters, the sort of trivia that weighed with other people but not with them – he acquiesced, normally with good grace. He was not accustomed to so much attention being paid to the impression he made. He had spent far too much time in the company of other young Turks engrossed in politics. Intellectual, eager and committed they might be, anxious to put across the issues, but their notions of what was convincing dress and behaviour in public left much to be desired.
    For modern politics was about more than issues, as Benedict was ruefully willing to accept. A substantial part of what the electorate liked was image , pure and simple, but its creation required skills as complex as any astronaut’s. In the ten-second burst he might get on the evening TV news, as big an impact as possible had to be made. The eye registered before the ear, and often only a garbled half-sentence emerged after the editing. Sometimes they did not broadcast his words at all, merely a voiceover from the presenter as Benedict mouthed silently, helpless. Never mind the issues; the audience would notice his tie, the colour of his shirt, his manner, the lift of an eyebrow, and make snap judgments on that.
    The new Prime Minister had grasped that essential fact before many others in his party. His hair had been cut shorter and kept that way. The suits had become de rigueur , but standard, non-threatening . He was never seen without a plain shirt and sober tie – no pinstripes or loud colours – except in the company of his young children, when instead he sported a knitted sweater. Always . The message that he was a loving and responsible father for his own kids and thus to be trusted by the whole nation was communicated subliminally by Fair Isle patterns, corduroy trousers and a shy,embarrassed smile. Even cynics were full of admiration.
    To everyone’s astonishment he had even managed to bolster his support for family values by putting his own wife in the family way. For the fifth time, which did seem a mite excessive. Downing Street, which had harboured Ted Heath’s grand piano and the tinkle of Margaret Thatcher’s Sevres porcelain, would thrill to the sound of a gurgling baby. The nation’s grandmothers sighed with pleasure and the poll ratings jumped accordingly.
    Previous opposition leaders had turned up their noses at image-makers, to their and their party’s detriment. One had appeared at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day in a scruffy, unfastened Duffel coat and no hat. A noted pacifist, he had meant no disrespect to the dead, but television viewers were appalled. Such a man could never be put in charge of the nation’s security. He was a loser.
    The Welshman who followed him had ginger hair, a high colour and freckles. In themselves they were not a gross handicap, but he was vain, and tried to hide his baldness by combing long strands of hair from one ear across to the other. Caught in an unkind breeze at the seaside, his Brylcreemed locks took flight. The resulting photos emphasised, as nothing else