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his guest that morning, give himself the opportunity to find out the lad's name. And if it made him still later at the BBC, what did it matter? The war would wait. That was official.
     
    Brendan Bracken was one of those figures who could be described as many things, but mostly he was outrageous. He would also, soon, become one of the most powerful men in the country.
    Bracken was a fantasist. He was also the Member of Parliament for North Paddington. He was Irish by birth but claimed to be an orphan from Australia where his parents had been killed in a bush fire. In fact, his father had been a stonemason and also a member of the Republican Brotherhood, an illegal Irish nationalist organization on whose behalf he would go round blowing up Anglo-Irish walls and buildings.The following day he would appear cheerfully on the doorstep and offer to repair them. Perhaps he passed on to his son the capacity for vivid imagination.
    Bracken went through life lying about his origins, about his education—at times he would suggest he had gone to Oxford University—and even about his parentage. When he attached himself to Winston Churchill and worked his way up to become the elder man's indispensable right arm, rumors began to circulate that he was Churchill's illegitimate son. He did nothing to discourage these rumors, and perhaps even started them.
    Bracken did more than invent the world around him, he invented many worlds and seemed to be able to move guilelessly from one to another. People knew it was largely nonsense, but the brashness and energy he devoted to his fantasies persuaded others to go along with them. It was so much easier than calling his bluff. By October 1938 he was thirty-seven years of age with a safe parliamentary seat and was being driven around in his own custom-built Bentley. Still he had trouble being taken seriously.
    Yet he wanted so desperately to be taken seriously. Which was why, when he entered the Members' Lobby beside the great oak doors leading to the chamber of the House of Commons and was greeted by Duff Cooper, he was deeply confused. For Duffie had been part of the team. Cooper had been Churchill's drinking partner, dining companion, and intimate colleague in the battle against Chamberlain and appeasement. It had been an awesome team, one of them inside the Cabinet, the other rampaging freely outside, but now it was all unraveling. Cooper, Churchill's last great ally inside the corridors of power, was gone. Churchill was despondent. Whichever way Bracken looked at it and turned it over in his mind, Chamberlain had won.
    “Brendan,” Cooper greeted him, taking him by the arm. “At last a friendly face. Beginning to feel about as popular as Dr. Crippen standing here.”
    “Hello, Duffie. Glad I've been able to find you. Wanted you to know that we're all behind you.”
    “Ah, words of comfort. Good, because that's what I'd like. Would you come and sit beside me on the benches while I make my speech? You know, moral support. Someone to lean on when the old legs go a little wobbly.”
    Instead of replying, Bracken produced a large handkerchief and with some care blew his nose. He was always complaining of sinus trouble. And it gave him time to manufacture his response.
    “Be honored to, Duffie—but you know that's not possible. Got to be on duty beside Winston.”
    Churchill always took the same place on the green leather benches of the House, on the front row just a few feet along from where Government ministers themselves sat. Resignation speeches, by tradition, were made from farther back.
    “But surely on this one occasion…” Cooper began to urge. A thread of steel had wrapped itself around his smile.
    “Duffie, you know what Winston's like.”
    “My God, it's like being abandoned on a desert island.”
    Before he could continue his protest they were interrupted by a penetrating American voice with a distinctive Boston Irish twang.
    “Ah, the man of the moment. Not changed your mind, I