The Mummyfesto (30 page)

When I’d spoken to the researcher on the phone he’d given me a Paxmanesque grilling, I presume to try to establish whether I was a complete fruitloop or actually had something useful to contribute. I hoped the fact that I was here meant it was the latter, but I still wasn’t entirely sure.

I looked up at the large TV screen. The ten o’clock news was just about to finish. I didn’t understand why they hadn’t come to get me. Maybe they’d forgotten all about me. I’d go down in the history as the ‘nearly woman’, the one who would have been elected had she not been left sitting in a foyer with a cup of coffee while the big debate took place without her.

‘Hi.’ The bubbly young woman who had got me the coffee poked her head back round the door. ‘Do you want to come through now?’

I was ushered into what could only be described as a large cupboard. In it were a stool, a television camera and a rail of jazzy ties.

‘They’re the weatherman’s,’ the woman (whose name was Lisa or Laura, I couldn’t quite remember) said. ‘This is where he usually does his weather reports.’

‘Right,’ I said, perching myself rather precariously on the stool. I remembered Jackie saying that such things were designed for men with small arses and made a mental note to add ‘
stools for women
’ to the mummyfesto.

I looked around for a TV monitor but couldn’t find one. ‘How do I see what’s going on?’ I asked.

‘We’ve found it’s best not to have a monitor,’ she said. ‘It’s too distracting for the guests. If you just look directly into the camera that’ll be great.’

I nodded. So although to the nation I’d be taking part in a television debate, actually I’d be playing blind man’s buff in a glorified broom cupboard. I understood now why the people in the link-ups on
Newsnight
always looked so dazed and confused. They also tended to have a live TV feed of some iconic national monument behind them. Presumably to make the viewer think, ‘Ah, the Acropolis, it must be Athens.’ I wondered if they’d have live pictures of someone throwing up outside a Leeds nightclub behind me.

‘I’ll just fix the earpiece in. They can be a bit fiddly, but try not to touch it once it’s on, it doesn’t look good on screen.’ I now had a vision of myself blind and partially deaf going into battle with Paxman. I half expected them to give me a gobstopper as well, just for good measure.

I glanced up and caught her looking at my nose-stud. Presumably they didn’t have many of those on
Newsnight
.
For a second I thought she was going to ask me to take it out in case in interfered with the sound quality.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘You’re all set. The producer will speak to you in a moment just to check the sound levels and when the red light comes on we’re on air.’

I nodded and sat there, probably looking as if I were about to go to the gallows, as that was what I felt like. The producer did indeed speak into my ear, telling me they were going to have the main story of the day from the Leveson Inquiry and then come to the ‘Is there an alternative to mainstream politics?’ debate, which is when Jeremy would come to me.

I sat there rigid as Paxman introduced us. I wasn’t sure whether to smile, do that nodding acknowledgement thing or stare straight ahead and try to look serious and intelligent. I tried a combination of all three and suspected I looked as if I had something wrong with me.

The Health Secretary was in the studio, representing the government and mainstream politics, they also had a young man from UK Uncut, whom they introduced only by his first name – he being clearly too radical to have a surname – as well as a professor of politics from Warwick University. And me, the token northerner, sitting in a glorified broom cupboard awaiting public humiliation on national TV.

‘Is mainstream politics already dead or merely in need of lifesaving surgery?’ I heard Paxman ask in my earpiece. I panicked. I had no idea if he was talking to me or not. For all I knew my face could be live on screen, the nation
waiting with baited breath for me to open my mouth and say something. Ideally something mildly intelligent.

‘I think it’s already—’ I started. But before I could go any further I heard them cut me off straight away and the politics professor answered instead. They hadn’t been waiting for me at all. Which meant they now thought I was some jibbering idiot, butting in when it wasn’t her turn, as well as a token crazy, nose-studded woman.

I listened as the debate in the studio intensified, not daring to say anything in case I was cut off again.

Finally, Paxman brought me in. ‘So, Sam Farnell, why the hell should anyone take the Lollipop Party seriously?’ The intonation in his voice as he said the ‘Lollipop Party’ made it sound like something out of an Enid Blyton story.

‘Because we are the only party who put children and families at the heart of everything we do, hence the name, which, incidentally, was chosen by my seven-year-old son, Zach. We don’t just pay lip-service to the putting-children-first thing, you see, we actually practise what we preach.’

‘But with policies which include selling off the Houses of Parliament to set up some tin-pot regional parliaments across the UK, and letting a bunch of online mums who are more used to debating potty-training scrutinise government policy, you’re clearly not going to be seen as a credible political force, are you?’

‘Not compared with a London-centric system in which women are woefully under-represented and which excludes MPs from outside the capital from being with their children during the week, you mean. And where a bunch of
unelected peers gets to veto the wishes of the electorate. Compared to that, I think we look damn credible, to be honest.’

‘But how can you seriously expect people to vote for you when you’ve got no political experience whatsoever?’

‘For that very reason,’ I said. ‘How often do you hear people say that all politicians are as bad as each other? There are forty-six million registered voters in the UK, you know and yet only twenty-six million of them voted for one of the three main parties at the last general election. That tells me that twenty million people out there are sick of politicians. Well, we’re not politicians, that’s the whole point. We are normal people who care about the same things they do and we’re not in it for greed, or ego, or personal gain. We’re simply doing it to try to make this country a better place for our families. For everyone’s families.’

‘It’s all very well saying that,’ said Paxman, ‘but the reason normal people aren’t running the country is because they don’t have the expertise. What are your economic credentials for example?’

‘Our households are all solvent,’ I said. ‘Despite the difficult economic climate, we are not in debt. Whereas successive governments have been.’

‘She’s got a point, hasn’t she?’ Paxman said, addressing the Health Secretary. ‘The current system of government is anachronistic, out of touch with the modern electorate and regarded by them as a downright failure.’

‘What we have in this country,’ he replied, ‘is a
democratic system that has served us well for centuries. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?’

The guy from UK Uncut proceeded to tell Paxman exactly why the current system was broken. Even the politics professor admitted I had a point. I could tell by the tone in the Health Secretary’s voice that he was clearly getting rattled.

‘It’s all very well coming up with radical reforms and crazy policies, but in the real world someone’s got to pay for them and we happen to have been left with a huge amount of debt and a financial mess to clean up. We’re taking the responsible course of action by making that our priority. That’s real politics not playground politics.’

‘Oh it’s real politics,’ I said, not even waiting to be brought in. ‘And the victims of real politics are real children. Children like a little boy called James whose mum wrote to us this week. His major operation was cancelled with less than twenty-four hours’ notice because beds in the IT unit he was in have been cut from ten to four since you got in. Do you know what James said when his mum told him? He said “I’m not important, am I?” And he’s right you know. In your government’s Britain he’s not important. And nor are the children who come into the hospice where I work. Less than five per cent of our funding comes from your government and you’re still going to cut our grant next year. That’s why we came into politics and that’s why we won’t stop until things change. Because I can tell you that nothing is more important than a poorly or dying child. Absolutely nothing.’

There was a stunned silence at the other end of my earpiece. I put my arm down, realising I must have been jabbing my finger. I had an overwhelming sense that the Lollipop Party was not going to be belittled and ridiculed again.

The young woman was smiling as she took my earpiece off at the end.

‘Was I OK?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You were bloody brilliant. I would have paid to watch that. I really would.’

‘Thank you,’ I said easing myself down from the stool, ‘please make sure you vote for us then.’

‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I think I will.’

I turned my phone on in the taxi on the way home. Jackie had texted me to say I had ‘whipped their arses’ and Anna to say that both I and the Lollipop Party were trending on Twitter.

Rob grinned at me as I let myself in. ‘Well, turned out the crazy nose-studded, Hebden Bridge woman wasn’t so crazy after all.’

I smiled at him. ‘I’m just relieved to have survived, to be honest.’

‘There is one thing I need to pick you up on, though. I’m afraid our household isn’t actually solvent. We’ve gone a hundred quid overdrawn today. You’re all right though, I won’t tell the papers.’

I smiled at him again. A tired, apologetic smile this time. ‘We’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘I’m sure we’ll be able to get straight after the election.’

‘When we move to Downing Street, you mean?’ It was the way Rob said it which took me back. And the way he looked at me with such a serious face.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’m just concerned that your head is in cloud cuckoo land and at some point you’re going to come crashing back down to earth with a bump.’ I looked at him and shook my head.

‘No,’ I said. ‘This is massive. And I think it’s going to get even bigger.’

‘Bit like our overdraft,’ he replied.

‘I can’t stop this now. Even if I wanted to.’

Rob shrugged, as if he were already resigned to that fact. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s what worries me.’

I stared down at the darkish-red discharge and felt the familiar wrenching and tearing deep inside me. It was stupid really. We’d just had a diagnosis of unexplained infertility after four years of trying and failing to conceive and yet for some reason I was still left inconsolable by the arrival of my next period. I wondered if there would ever be a time when it didn’t have that effect on me, when its coming would be as predictable and unemotional as the passing of the seasons signalling another month crossed off on the calendar. Nothing more and nothing less than the relentless passage of time. Somehow, I doubted it ever would. Far more likely, I suspected, was that the monthly sense of loss would be with me right up to the point where there was no next period. When the loss was no longer temporary but a permanent ache, a constant grief that I would carry with me for the rest of my days.

I crept back into the bedroom. Paul had his eyes shut. I didn’t think for a minute he had gone back to sleep though. I thought he had chosen to shut them to avoid the situation. He would have guessed from the length of time I was in the bathroom. That and the inbuilt copy of my menstrual calendar which he no doubt carried around with him. He knew he was on a loser if he so much as opened his mouth. He didn’t feel it the way I did. We’d had the conversation enough times to establish that. And because he didn’t feel it that way there was nothing he could say or do to make it better or make me feel he understood, because he didn’t. I didn’t hate him for it. It wasn’t his fault. But sometimes I resented the fact that he got away so lightly. And it was hard to be OK about everything when you were resentful.

I slid back under the duvet next to him, knowing it would be only a matter of time before Alice woke and we were freed from this impasse.

‘I meant what I said. I think we should wait,’ said Paul, still with his eyes closed.

‘Wait for what?’ I asked, my eyes still fixed on the ceiling.

‘I think we shouldn’t make a decision about IVF until after election. It’s a massive decision. Standing in a general election is a massive thing to do too. And situation with your mum is getting harder day by day. We do one thing at a time. Get election out of way first. See how we both feel after that. No promises, mind. I still don’t want you to put yourself through it. I’m just saying let’s not make a decision now when so much is up in air.’

I lay there, still staring at the ceiling, hardly daring to breathe. He wasn’t saying yes, but neither was he saying no. Maybe it was just a delaying tactic. Maybe he was stalling for time. But the only thing that was worse than a tiny bit of hope was having no hope at all.

‘OK,’ I said. Paul opened one eye and turned his head to look at me.

‘What do you mean “OK”?’

‘Exactly that.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Paul, throwing the duvet back and swinging his legs out of bed.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Going to get diary to write it in: “Won argument without Jackie saying a word t’other way.”’

I smiled as he disappeared into the bathroom and stretched out on to his side of the bed, luxuriating in the extra space and starting to work out in my head exactly which day I was likely to be ovulating.