THE black door opened magically as Charlie Butler approached, the doorman concealing himself behind it as it swung back. Charlie switched off his mobile phone and deposited it in the wooden rack. He climbed the stairs, passing the portraits of the forgotten or reviled or (less often) venerated prime ministers. Flunkies steered him through the smaller state rooms, with their uncomfortable-looking furniture, and into the large reception room that overlooked the garden.

This was where the assembled lobby journalists were to play the latest round of their unofficial game. At least, most of them would be playing. A handful were exempt; Charlie Butler was one of them.

The prime minister wasn't there yet, but the spin doctors were mingling in their obscurely menacing way. Alan Cormack was talking to a harmless, bespectacled reporter from a struggling red top; Cormack threw back his head to laugh, swivelling his eyes as he brought his chin down to see who else he should be bullying. There were plates of mince pies on the side tables, and a couple of half-hearted sprigs of mistletoe above the doors. The waiters were circulating with the questionable Downing Street wine, lubricating that special bonhomie shared by journalists on the same beat, with their collegial but nakedly limited co-operation.

When Cormack saw Charlie he cut short his conversation with the bespectacled man and came over to talk to him. Charlie was from the Post: the biggest-selling tabloid in the country, and the evil empire's flagship title. The bespectacled man understood.

“Evening, squire.”

“Evening, Alan.” Cormack had been a journalist himself, until the prime minister had spotted his talent for intellectual thuggery, fished him out of the tabloid swamp and made him his creature; Cormack's gratitude, and his loyalty, were boundless. Charlie could see his premature bald patch reflected in the gilt mirror on the wall, the skin of his scalp reddened by the warmth of the party and the wine.

“How's the handicap? There's an 18-holer in Dubai now apparently. We might have time in between the pressers if you're coming on that trip to the Arab League summit next month.”

“Not sure yet. Clashes with the other lot's conference. He coming up?”

“He'll be up. Bollocking the health secretary I think.”

A veteran from a broadsheet that had recently been bought by a Ukrainian oligarch came over and interrupted them. He was one of those fruity Fleet Street types who put on a permanently high-camp tone in lieu of humour.

“Dear boys,” he said. “Hell-oooo.”

Charlie scanned the room. The woman from the preachy daily and the man from the Post's broadsheet stablemate, who everyone knew were having an affair, were chatting to each other at an ostentatiously safe distance. Most of the rest were positioning themselves for the game.

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.

Charlie sipped his wine. “Twats”, he thought. “You twats.”

He was sweating into his suit (they should turn the central heating down). It was an expensive suit, which he'd bought the year before for an executive jamboree in New York. He rehearsed the question he was planning to ask the PM about soldiers' pensions, which, according to his source in the Ministry of Defence, were about to be cut. Then he thought: Where were they all, these overprivileged pricks, when I was writing up local council meetings in Wolverhampton and chasing fire engines? Where were they when I was turning out half a dozen Nibs in an hour? Fucking Nibs. “News in briefs”: dead cats in the local swimming pool, pigs who'd escaped the abattoir, teachers suspended for groping their pupils. Nibs. Doorsteps. Death knocks—when he'd half wanted the poor bereaved bastards to slam the doors in his face so he wouldn't have to go through with it. At least, he'd wanted that to begin with.

Death knocks. Phone hacks.


That's what Charlie had been doing in his 20s and early 30s, when he'd served his time on the locals before moving to London and the dream job on the Post. It was called journalism. Most of the rest of this mob had pissed away three or four years at whichever Brideshead-style Oxbridge college they'd blagged or bribed their way into, drinking yards of ale and buggering each other. He knew he should have got over this stuff by now—he was nudging 40—but he just couldn't. Instead it somehow got worse.

The prime minister, too, Charlie thought. Different sort of twat, but a twat all the same.

From his retreat he watched a small posse forming around the genial workaholic from Sky news, a scruffy man from one of the Scottish papers and a couple of lost-looking foreign correspondents. Charlie knew what they were up to.

The game had an awkward rule. Although the goal was to talk to the prime minister, most of the players had to wait for him to talk to them. They couldn't just approach him, slap him on the back and ask him who he thought should win “The X Factor”. The seigniorial regime of Downing Street meant that they had to wait for Cormack to steer the PM over. Cormack would grip his arm and occasionally his collar, as if the prime minister were a hostage being forced to smile by an armed kidnapper, and deliver him to the most powerful hacks at the party, bypassing the nobodies.

Anyone who wasn't on Cormack's A-list, which was most of them, had to figure out what the prime minister's movements were likely to be, where he was going to stop and talk, and try to get there first. Success took planning and timing and a certain amount of guile.

There were goalhangers, mostly novices, who hung around shamelessly by the door. But generally the prime minister, who was built like a cruiserweight, just barged pass, leaving them humiliated and mouthing questions in his wake. In any case, the reception room had more than one entrance, which he sometimes took advantage of when he wanted to avoid people. Or the hacks could attach themselves to one of the Downing Street policy team; but apart from Cormack, the prime minister mostly avoided them, too. You never knew, you might get lucky, an adviser might have half a glass of sour Merlot too many and let slip that, truth be told, the PM disagreed with the Americans about Afghanistan, or was about to “resign” the home secretary. But generally the underlings were a waste of time.

The soundest bet was to stick to one of Cormack's favourites and gatecrash the conversation. It was best to gravitate towards them early, before the prime minister got there, so the ulterior motive wasn't insultingly obvious. The blue chip broadcasters were the most popular targets—someone like the amiable but overworked political guru from the BBC, who knew exactly what the leeches were up to but bore it more or less patiently, or his opposite number from ITN, who didn't. Or the man from Sky.

There was a minor commotion over by the door Charlie had come in through. He looked over and saw a small boy in a party suit standing all alone, except for a hand holding his and belonging to an adult who was otherwise out of sight. It was one of the prime minister's kids. Five or six years old, he must have been: Charlie recognised him from the more select get-together Number 10 had thrown the Christmas before for its extra special friends in the press.

The other hand wasn't the child's mother's or his nanny's. It was a man's hand—a spin doctor's hand. As Charlie watched, the hand let go of the boy's and pushed him gently on the back and into the room. The boy stumbled about, apparently looking for his father. Then a voice in the other room said “Not yet, he's not in there yet”, louder than it probably meant to, and a woman came in and retrieved the child.

Charlie smiled. Officially the prime minister never used his kids in photo ops or political stunts. Absolutely never. But if one of them happened to wander cutely into a drinks party…Charlie decided not to write up this vignette immediately—Cormack would go berserk. He'd save it up for when the PM was on his way down, and it would no longer matter how angry they were.

It must be nearly time. The journalists had taken their places. The bigwig from the socialist rag who was secretly a Tory, and the columnist from the reactionary one who was a closet leftie, stood together by the window overlooking the garden, hoping that their combined allure would be enough. The tweeters thought lovingly of their surrendered BlackBerries. The bronzed faces of the broadcasters stood out against their white shirts. Apart from the reporters from the evening free-sheet (for whom it was already too late) and the men from the political weeklies (for whom it was too early), they half-worried about their deadlines. Everyone reminded themselves not to drink any more. Especially not the atrocious mulled wine.

The prime minister came in through the other door, avoiding the goalhangers. Cormack immediately went across and ushered him over to the kingpin from the BBC; the gaggle of lesser hacks around him were the game's instant winners. Cormack and the prime minister stood back to back while they schmoozed and scowled, looking like those cornered Cavaliers who were killed with a single bullet during the civil war.

Charlie couldn't hear the conversation but he recognised its rhythm and could see the prime minister's lips move. He was saying “Good to see you” as he shook hands, which was how he always greeted everyone, maybe even his wife, because it covered him whether he was supposed to know the person or not. There was the small-talk part, and then the journalists each got to ask their one-shot questions, about tuition fees or the deficit or the local elections. There was always a beat before the prime minister answered, as he tried to work out where the trap might be.

Cormack took his arm and led him across the room to a duo from the country's second-biggest tabloid—a mid-market monster that the politicians feared almost as much as the Post—plus two wire reporters who had perceptively joined them. While the prime minister equivocated, Cormack saw Charlie standing in the corner and nodded at him. Charlie raised his glass and sipped his wine. Just a sip.

The very first time he'd come to one of these dos, with his predecessor as the paper's political editor, the old guy had explained it all to him. All prime ministers think the Post can swing elections, he'd said; they think that we decide their fate. Maybe we can't, maybe it's just a superstition, but that's what they believe. Plus there was the other thing, he'd said, perhaps it was even the main thing: the question of what we know about them. What we've got on them. They know there's probably stuff that we're holding back, from the phone hacks or wherever, but they don't know what it is. We need to act like we can destroy them whenever we want to—the long hard way at the elections, or the short, harder way on tomorrow's front page—and the more we act like that, the more they believe we could. That's why we do those out-of-the-blue hatchet jobs every now and then, like “The great euro sell-out” or “Burglars' best friend”, even when we're supposed to be backing him. To let him know we can. The message we need to send is: Watch it. Do what we say. Do what our boss says.

That was why Charlie didn't play. Never be the supplicant, that was the principle, always make sure it's the other way round. It was one of the perks of working for the evil empire: the prime minister could come to him. How he must hate it, Charlie thought, abasing himself before someone like me.

Cormack, on the other hand, was OK. They could never be close, not really, they could never be what most people would consider friends. But there could be and—Charlie reckoned—there was mutual respect, as well as the odd drinking session. Cormack gave Charlie advance notice about policy U-turns and impending reshuffles. The rest of the lobby pack resented the favouritism, but Cormack evidently figured, and occasionally said, screw them, they need me, what are they going to do about it?

The broadsheet toff who'd interrupted them earlier ambled over, eating. “Paid for the mince pies himself, apparently,” he said, wiping his palms on his trousers, “so we couldn't say we'd scoffed at the taxpayer's expense.”

Charlie smiled, very slightly, and said nothing. He didn't look at the man but beyond him and across the room. After 30 seconds or so, the old sod shuffled off. Most of them knew not to bother Charlie when he secreted himself like this, in his lonely and demonstratively remote nooks.

Cormack shoved the prime minister towards the woman from ITN, who was standing beneath the chandelier. Above the party rumble Charlie could just about hear them discussing the rules for the televised leader debates at the next general election. A young guy, a new kid at one of the Sundays, had attached himself to the ITN crew, and his hands were shaking as he waited to put in his word. Charlie saw him cup both hands together to stop his drink from spilling.

Charlie was all by himself in the corner of the room. Cormack looked up and saw him again. Charlie looked at his watch; Cormack nodded.

Two minutes later he placed his hand in the small of the prime minister's back and began to guide him over.

“I need a drink,” thought Cormack, as they dodged a local radio reporter.

The prime minister thought, “Jesus Christ, I'm tired. I can scarcely keep my eyes open. I'm bloody tired. I want to see my kids.”

“Come to daddy,” thought Charlie.

Three paces away from him, the spin doctor whispered something to the prime minister. Charlie saw his face flinch, just for a second. Then his whitened teeth smiled.

He extended his hand and Charlie took it.

“Good to see you.”

“Hello, prime minister,” said Charlie.