The Speechwriter, Martin McKenzie-Murray [distant reading TXT] 📗

knowledge to paper, he accelerated modernity and touched Shakespeare. Who am I to scorn this aristocrat for ignoring his wife so that he might reclusively muse on his erections?

My problem, besides lengthy incarceration and the shiv, is that I’m impatient to tell you how I got here, but unsure how to tell it. Where do I begin? There was a time when my job as a speechwriter was making clear the crowded desires of my bosses. I was a landscaper, assuming custody of the wild and overgrown ambitions of my masters, and pruning them into artful coherence. At least, that was the idea.

But I’m no longer a speechwriter. Instead, I’m a memoirist and infamous criminal, and telling my story seems infinitely harder. ‘I am myself the matter of my book’ — but who the fuck am I? And which of fate’s farts blew me to Sunshine?

Or are those awful winds self-made?

A portrait of the criminal as a young politician

If you want to know the truth, I do feel like going into all that David Copperfield crap. The crap about the lousy childhood and my parents’ jobs. The crap about how my father couldn’t climax without the Book of Revelations, and how my mother once decorated the Christmas tree with pretzels and the bladders of goon casks. I don’t know why Holden was so bored by it.

I’m not blaming my parents, it’s just that it all starts with them. My interest in speechwriting derived from my father’s love of Churchill, which itself derived from a unique and sentimental madness. You see, my father was convinced that he was conceived during Britain’s ‘Finest Hour’. He didn’t mean this like Churchill did, as a galvanising rhetorical gesture. No, my father had precisely calculated the crest of British virtue: it arrived between 20.00 and 21.00 GMT on September 15, 1940.

This, my father said, was the most important hour in the whole of the Battle of Britain — and thus the most important hour in the history of the United Kingdom. It was the time when the Royal Air Force had most decisively repelled the Luftwaffe, and all the Queen’s subjects were joined in a spirit of noble defiance. In this doubly pregnant moment, my father’s soul — then flickering to life in a zygotic speck — fed hungrily on the ether of national valour.

‘I was a blessed foetus,’ my father would say. ‘My destiny was pledged by history and the stars.’*

[* Garry wants me to record here that he’s unsurprised that the story of my childhood — and so early in its telling — is already ‘stranger than a truck-driving sub-atomic particle’. When I told him that I’d never heard that phrase before, he accused me of being ‘a sheltered cunt’ and told me that it’s very common where he’s from. I said that it didn’t sound like Australian idiom at all, that it lacked sense and the distinctive rhythm of our idiom, and that it was probably the result of some fascinating corruption, the origins of which it might be interesting to explore together. Garry confiscated my pen and paper for three days.]

What my father failed to mention was that he was conceived many miles from the bombs on a bed inherited from the Earl of Gloucester, and to a family notorious for its avoidance of military service. I might have humoured my father’s origin myth if, during the Blitz, his folks had fucked amongst the fearful, sheltering crowds in the Tube. But they didn’t. My father was Baron George Beaverbrook II, third child of Lord and Lady Beaverbrook, and they’d fornicated stoically in a Tudor mansion.

My father was obsessed with the RAF. And this wasn’t just eccentric sentimentality — the Air Force was the gilded carriage that would take him to 10 Downing Street. He had a plan: become an air cadet, distinguish himself in combat, enjoy rapid promotion, popularly reform the air force, become a high-profile MP, and then, after adroitly managing the Defence portfolio, be sworn in as Prime Minister. Already baptised by history, my father thought his ascension to Churchill’s old job was as simple as conceiving a plan.

He got as far as air cadet. The reason for his dismissal was never clear to me, but I once heard that he’d mistakenly engaged a cloud in a dogfight. Whatever the reason, his parents’ influence was sufficient to obscure it — and secure his commercial pilot’s licence.

Which is where Mum comes in. She was an Australian air hostess for British Airways while my father was flying their 747s. Apparently, my mother was quite the bombshell, before her vivacity was revealed as alcoholism.

I was an accident and my father was feckless, but my mother’s pregnancy still aroused some sense of obligation in him. He capitulated and moved to Australia. It was the beginning of the end for him, and right until his death he exuded an air of sour astonishment. He was incapable of accepting that he had condemned himself to the common class in a hot and distant satellite of the Motherland.

My own political awakening came on Christmas Day, 1991. I was ten. We were in Winston, my father’s second-hand Jaguar, and driving to my uncle’s house for lunch. Santa had given me a leather-bound copy of Churchill’s speeches, which I was pleased with, even if I was surprised by how closely it hewed to my father’s interests.

I had woken to this gift, but also to gastro, and while sitting in the back seat reading aloud from my book, I could feel its tide violently returning. ‘‘‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood —’” Urrrrgghhhhhhh …’

‘I’m warning you, Toby,’ my mother said. ‘Do not shit the car.’

‘I won’t,’ I lied. It was already happening.

‘Don’t you dare excrete on that book,’ my father said, panicked. ‘Those words are sacred, Toby.’

‘I won’t,’ I lied. The book, and much of the leather upholstery, was now conspicuously soiled.

‘I