She didn’t need to look his way to know the pout was in place, the rhetoric forthcoming.
‘Look, I understand your concern about the unwashed getting jiggy on the streets, but it’s a minor blip. The disturbances will die down – they always do – and on the smoke-blown landscape left behind, we’ll see one or two figures emerge who it’s wise to pay attention to. Look at You-Know-What. A minor figure, a local joke, never even managed to get elected, somehow positions himself as head of a party everyone wrote off as a bunch of small-minded xenophobes, and ten years later he’s changed history. This, these Yellow Jackets, who knows? Maybe they’re the start of something similar. Just another stage in our political evolution. Democracy is all very well, Diana, but nobody’s ever suggested it’s the be-all and end-all. Especially not the end-all. Harks back to ancient Greece, thank you, but where’s Greece now? Knocking on the back door, asking for scraps. That’s where its big idea got it.’
‘Thanks for the history lesson,’ Diana said. ‘But the big picture isn’t the only thing worrying me. No, what I find concerning is you telling me that this decision has apparently been made, and I’m here to take instruction. And that’s not how this works.’
‘You’ve been over-bureaucratised for too long. All those subcommittees and oversight boards, all that middle-fucking-management whose only purpose is to assert its own importance, because if anyone took a good hard look they’d see it doesn’t have any. Like it or not, that’s the world you’re coming from. Where the only decisions you’re allowed to make are either so piddlesome nobody else can be bothered with the paperwork, or so incendiary nobody wants to be caught near the fire. Sound familiar?’
‘Peter—’
‘No one’s trying to strong-arm you, Diana. It’s simply a matter of encouraging you to see things from a wider perspective, now you’re heading up a team with more diversified interests.’ He shook his head solemnly. ‘If I thought anyone was trying to hold you over a barrel, I’d be the first to stand in their way.’
This was a familiar trope. Theoretically, Judd was always ready to lie down in front of bulldozers for a principle, even if, in practice, he tended to be out of the room when the short straw was pulled.
‘Well you can let our angels know that their desires will not be considered. Not when I’m making operational decisions, or any other kind. And if any of them want to withdraw their support in light of that, they’re free to do so. Are we clear?’
‘As crystal. But bear in mind that if they do decide to withdraw their support, you’ll be back where you started from, rattling your cup in front of a panel of thwarted pygmies.’ He touched the knot of his tie with an index finger. ‘Always supposing you weather any bad publicity arising.’
‘Say that again?’
‘I’m simply pointing out that when you disappoint rich and powerful men, they let their displeasure be known. But I’m sure it won’t come to that. One small favour, Diana. Allow the Yellow Vest campaign to reach its natural end without attempting to discredit those spearheading it. Where could be the harm?’
‘Have a good evening, Peter.’
She was halfway across the Millennium Bridge before she remembered she’d failed to reaffix the bird-shit transfer. But then, that was the thing about shit, real or fake: once you’d begun spreading it about, it never ended up precisely where you wanted it.
Most great ideas, or a lot of them anyway, were thought at the time to be rubbish, and you were reckoned an idiot for having them.
This was true of stupid ideas too.
Telling them apart was the tricky bit.
So a couple of years ago, when Struan Loy had his brainwave, there’d been no shortage of naysayers telling him he was dipshit crazy. But he’d had the strength of character to rise above that, to recognise the brilliance of his own invention, and to refuse to kowtow to the carping of mediocrities, so here he was, living in a shipping container, cooking past-their-sell-by sausages on a camping stove, and wondering whether that scrabbling he could hear was another rat or a Madagascan spider. These containers had been all over the world, so exotic spiders couldn’t be ruled out.
At the time, though, it had been a great idea.
