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emotions on both sides didn’t bubble over. A coach with a dozen more was parked around the corner in Tufton Street. Appear, don’t interfere, was the instruction.
    The computers were now forecasting a majority of twenty-eight. Two of the cheerleaders broke away from their work to engage in an earnest discussion as to whether this constituted an adequate working majority. They concluded that it probably was and returned to their task, but spirits were flagging, the early enthusiasm increasingly deflated with concern, and they decided to save their effort until Henry Collingridge arrived.
    Inside the building, Charles Collingridge was getting increasingly drunk. One of the senior members of the Party had put him in the Chairman’s office with a comfortable chair where he could sit beneath a portrait of his brother, and somehow Charlie had found a bottle. His capillaried face was covered in perspiration, his eyes were liquid and bloodshot. “A good man, brother Hal. A great Prime Minister,” he was babbling. There was no denying the alcoholic lisp that had begun to take control of his voice as he repeated the familiar family history. “Could have taken over the family business, you know, made it one of the country’s truly great companies, but he always preferred politics. Mind you, manufacturing bath fittings was never my cup of tea, either, but it kept Father happy. D’you know they even import the ruddy stuff from Poland nowadays? Or is it Romania…?”
    He interrupted his own monologue by knocking what was left of his glass of whiskey over his trousers. Amidst the fluster of apologies the Party Chairman, Lord Williams, took the opportunity to move well out of range. His wise old eyes revealed none of it but he resented having to extend hospitality to the Prime Minister’s brother. Charlie Collingridge wasn’t a bad man, never that, but he was a weak man who was becoming a bloody nuisance on a regular basis, and Williams liked to run a tight ship. Yet the aging apparatchik was an experienced navigator and knew there was little point in trying to throw the admiral’s brother overboard. He had once raised the problem directly with the Prime Minister, tried to discuss the increasing rumors and the growing number of snide references to his brother in the gossip columns. As one of the few men left who had been a prominent sailor even in the pre-Thatcher days, he had the seniority, and some would argue even the responsibility, to do so. But it had been to no avail.
    “I spend half my time spilling blood, that’s the job I do,” the Prime Minister had pleaded. “Please don’t ask me to spill my own brother’s.”
    The Prime Minister had vowed he would get Charlie to watch his behavior, or rather that he would watch Charlie’s behavior himself, but of course he never had the time, not to babysit. And he knew Charlie would promise anything even while he became increasingly incapable of delivering. Henry wouldn’t moralize or be angry, he knew it was always the other members of the family who suffered most from the pressures of politics. In part it was his fault. Williams understood that, too, for hadn’t he gone through three marriages since he’d first arrived in Westminster nearly forty years ago? There was always plenty of collateral damage; politics left a trail of pain and tortured families in its wake. Williams watched Collingridge stumble from the room and felt a twinge of sorrow, but quickly stifled it. Emotion was no basis on which to run a Party.
    Michael Samuel, the Secretary of State for the Environment and one of the newest and most telegenic members of the Cabinet, came over to greet the old statesman. He was young enough to be the Chairman’s son and he was something of a protégé; he’d been given his first major step up the greasy ministerial pole by Williams when, as a young Member of Parliament and on Williams’s recommendation, he’d been made a Parliamentary Private Secretary. It was the