Andrew Marr has many talents, but on this reading he is no novelist. The idea for Head of State, so the acknowledgments tell us, was given to Marr by Lord Chadlington, né Peter Selwyn Gummer, president of David Cameron’s Witney constituency association and PR adviser to the government. The term “poisoned chalice” comes to mind. The story is a highly improbable account, set in 2017, of shenanigans in Downing Street as a referendum on continued membership of the EU is about to take place. It opens with the death of a young investigative reporter. Very inconveniently, the prime minister dies a few days before the election, unleashing a frenzy in the pro-Europe party, a frenzy which is closely followed by a tsunami of preposterous tosh. Quite apart from the absurdities of the plot, the book is stuffed with cliche and wincingly poor characterisation. Tenses are muddled, the voice wavers, becoming from time to time the voice of Marr giving us the heads up; the weather is frequently invoked for no obvious reason, unless it is because Marr thinks notes on the weather are a posh novelistic trope.
The least probable event in the book is the attempt by the prime minister’s team to hide the fact that the PM has died in order to keep up the pressure on the opposition right up to the election, after which the PM’s death will be announced. This will lead to a triumph in the referendum. What a cunning plan. For some reason his closest supporters in Downing Street have the PM’s head and hands cut off. Presumably they are hoping to dispose of the body, but it is hard to imagine how a headless and hand-less corpse could be explained away, even by the smooth accomplices of the now headless PM. The body is carried through a secret tunnel from Downing Street to an island in St James’s Park. The hands are left in a cupboard. Rory Bremner is enlisted to record fake announcements from the PM, whose head is to be used for computer-generated speeches.
All this is supposed to be satirical but it has little or no resemblance to life as we know it, without which satire is impossible. Just as I was trying hard to become interested in the advertised state-of-the-nation-satirical-political novel, it suddenly turned thriller, and pretty daft thriller at that: the prime minister’s senior private secretary is murdered because he threatens to blow the whistle; two other people from the political classes are hit on the head, one with a wrench and the other, if I remember clearly, with the butt of a gun. The young woman who was hit on the head with a wrench, Jen Lewis, is the daughter of Myfanwy Davies-Jones, who is, I think, supposed to evoke Molly Parkin. Various grandees such as historian Lord Briskett and the mysterious gay fixer and strategist Alois Haydn pop up. Haydn, who is bankrupt, decides that, although he is the chief adviser of the yes camp and the architect of the conspiracy, he will leak what has happened to the opposition and at the same time short Britain, making himself many millions when the markets crash. So this becomes a financial fraud novel as well. Haydn’s Indian partner leaves him in disgust, perhaps to demonstrate that there is some decency and sense in this world.
If only there was some sense in this novel.
Justin Cartwright’s latest novel is Lion Heart. He was an adviser to both David Steel and Roy Jenkins.
