He excused himself and drifted off to the far corner of the room. He stood by himself, beneath one of the appalling portraits, half-hidden by a pillar.
Charlie never played.
The aim of the game was straightforward: to speak to the prime minister—by no means guaranteed simply be being on the invitation list and at Number 10. Exactly why they were all so keen to talk to him was less clear. The chit-chat was unlikely to yield anything resembling a genuine story, since the prime minister’s instinctive response to most questions was inwardly to think, “how and why is this person trying to destroy me?”, and to start gabbing about football. The most the players could realistically hope to pick up was some circumstantial detail that they could drop into an article, to make it look like they were in the inner circle: the colour of his tie, or the sudden greying of his hair, or some unjustified generalisation about his mood (“this week the prime minister seemed in better spirits than at any time since the referendum defeat”, etc). They would be able to tell their editors that they had spoken to him, and the editors might be pacified and impressed. But not very.
No, the real motive, for most of them, was self-respect. If they were going to come to these receptions—if they were going to do this strange, glamorous yet repetitive job, if they were going to be alive—they might as well act as if it mattered. There had to be a point to it, didn’t there? They were at a Christmas party in Downing Street, so they might as well grapple with the main man. Also, for most of them, the basic, childish thrill of it hadn’t worn off entirely, however long they’d been trailing him around, and despite everything they’d seen him do and fail to. He was still the prime minister, still anointed and invisibly shimmering with the balm of power.
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