Political Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

generation, than anything more sinister. Jemima was reminded of the lines of Byron in Don Juan which always irritated her (although naturally she adored Byron): Man's love is of man's life a thing apart "Tis woman's whole existence.
    Very much not true of Jemima Shore: look how well she had taken Ned's vanishing! She was now prepared quite happily to devote her evening to reading the Swain Diary with scarcely a thought for the reprobate. But perhaps the lines were true of Imogen Swain and Burgo Smyth.
    "You see, he was the great love of my life." The words spoken in that forlorn house came back to her. What had happened to Imogen Swain since the time of her affair nearly thirty years ago? She had not remarried but she had brought up two daughters: one a rising actress and the other married to an MP success stories of a sort if you liked. But Imogen Swain did not seem to enjoy very warm relations with them, if the sharp daughterly voice on the telephone was any clue. Jemima suddenly realised that the drawing-room had contained no recent photographs at all, not even one of her actress daughter at some moment of triumph. Weren't there any grandchildren? If so, they too were invisible. The daughters remained frozen in time as those dark sullen little girls, looking slightly reluctant in their pretty mother's arms.
    Burgo Smyth on the other hand had risen up high from being a bright young MP, Parliamentary Private Secretary (in other words dogs body) to the Secretary of State for a ministry long since abolished (perhaps because of its fatal connection to the Faber Secrets Case). In spite of the cloud which that whole affair had undoubtedly cast on his earlier career, Burgo Smyth had emerged as a junior minister in the new Conservative government of 1970. No doubt his strongly pro-European views had been helpful at that juncture. No doubt Burgo Smyth's particular kind of charismatic charm had been helpful too, as it always would be or had been at least until the present time.
    Nowadays Burgo Smyth, white haired, well preserved, elegantly tailored, manners as perfect as his suits, was surely the epitome of the British Foreign Secretary: unshakably courteous in the face of his country's enemies, implacably tough in his country's interests. Yet as a young man in the early sixties Burgo had exuded an air of vulnerability which appealed to Tory ladies of all ages. It went with a youthful English male's untidiness set off by his heavy build, his broad shoulders and the thick black hair which to a martinet's eye was never quite short enough.
    How someone so handsome and so ruthless, for in Jemima's opinion no politician rose to the top without ruthlessness could really be vulnerable was another matter. As ever in politics, image was more important than reality. The Tory ladies, so vital to the party, had believed Burgo Smyth to be vulnerable, in need of loving care. That fact had probably saved him when their menfolk had been inclined secretly to hold his remarkable good looks against him Those eyelashes! Unsuitable in any male over the age of five! From the press cuttings, Jemima had learned that Burgo Smyth had once been nicknamed the Tories' Elvis, an image he certainly did not suggest today.
    She pondered once more on the Faber Secrets Case, or the Faber Mystery as it was popularly termed. The Faber Secrets Case could surely be ranked with the Profumo Affair, in terms of the damage to the Tory government of the early sixties. As a result the administration had to endure an embarrassing trial in early 1964. Maybe it was already moribund. Yet the unpleasant mixture of double-dealing and hypocrisy which the trial of Franklyn Faber had revealed, contributed strongly to the government's defeat in the autumn of that year, quite apart from the dramatic ending of the case itself.
    Of course this Tory defeat was not a disaster for everyone. Various people had had their careers helped by that particular election, not just Harold Wilson, the