The second instalment of my latest never-to-be-pursued novel, for anyone who remembers the first.

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Ricky Kellogg was a man on a mission.  At twenty-five, he was the youngest sub working on The Guardian on-line edition.  He wasn’t proud of the fact.  Coining google-friendly headlines and standfirsts and saving ungrateful colleagues from their own laziness and illiteracy was not exactly how he had imagined spending his working day at this point in his glittering career.

In fact, he had only been in the role for three months.  Career-wise, it might as well have been a retirement home.  What he wanted, what he never tired of telling his editor-in-chief Miles Waldron, or anyone else who would listen, was a move back to investigative journalism on the print edition. 

That had always been the plan.  That was why, as a sixteen year old fresh out of school, he had worked so hard to find a job – any job, just to get into the industry.  It was why he had done the same to get himself on the staff of a national.  But here he was, a fully-fledged, London-based pro with a good nose and some hardcore contacts in the right places.  When they finally started chasing internships, the middle-class boys and girls who had drifted through their gap year and a degree in Journalism or Politics & Economics, followed by an MA, were miffed to find that clever Ricky had been in paid employment all along and was burning up the word-strip ahead of them.  Or would be if he hadn’t been diverted into subbing.

“Look, Ricky,”  Waldron would explain with his customary patience and kindness, “you have to see this job as an opportunity, not a punishment.  It will give you the disciplined, methodical approach you need, and real insight into the digital and professional challenges of the job.  It will make you a better journalist.  Knuckle down for a year or so.  Make the most of what it has to offer.  Then we can talk about where you go from there.”

The truth was that as a reporter Ricky had demonstrated a regular unfamiliarity with deadlines.  He seemed to prefer saying nothing today if, with a bit more digging, more might be said tomorrow.  The kind interpretation was that he was a detail man, and a terrier when he had a good story by the throat.  The unkind one was that he was too focussed on the quality of his own output and not enough on the realities of newspaper publishing.

He also had a rebellious streak a mile wide, and hadn’t always done everything he was told.  Waldron would have been perfectly justified in handing him his P45 on more than one occasion.  Over the last four years, during which the Group had struggled without much success to find some profitability, he was obliged to do exactly that to fully two-thirds of his staff writers.

But an organ of the thinking left has to have some regard, at least, to equality issues, and Ricky was solidly working-class, state educated, and had a privilege-busting disability in the form of a mild club foot.  Even the BME journalists on the payroll couldn’t top that one.  He was also funny, popular and keen, and he had good reporter’s instincts.  So Waldron extended his paternalist protection to him and, with the last wave of redundancies, moved him to the security of subbing.

Ricky knew nothing of that, of course.  Subbing amounted to a giant rebuke to his journalistic ability.  He admired the boss as much as anyone.  But he was determined to prove him wrong, and to get back to the sharp end where he could interrogate the powerful in the best traditions of left-wing journalism – or right-wing journalism, if that’s what it would take to actually write again.  During these last three months he had tried to talk his way onto the slate at nearly all the mogul media.  It hadn’t worked.  He knew there was no future for him as a freelance or a stringer, either.  The truth was: he was trapped.  He needed The Guardian more than The Guardian needed him.  But, then, did it really need him at all?

Early one Friday afternoon in May the boss buzzed him and asked him to come immediately to his office.  Waldron was in the habit of leaving for his Wimborne house early on Fridays, and if he called for you like this it probably meant you’d be leaving late.

There was, though, another possible interpretation.  These days editorial meetings were held at the conference table in the centre of the newsroom, a dozen feet from Ricky’s desk.  But not this time.  It was disconcerting.  As he crossed the floor to Waldron’s office he furiously revisited his recent output, wondering which of the ingrates otherwise known as colleagues could be causing him this grief.

“You’ve a week’s holiday booked from Monday,” stated Waldron flatly, as he entered the room.

Ricky nodded assent and braced himself for what would come next.  He half-expected, “Well, don’t bother to come back.”  The swift despatch was always the kindest, and the boss did like to think of himself as a kind man.  But he didn’t say that.  He said, “Are you going away?”

“You don’t pay me enough, boss,” Ricky quipped, uncertain why Waldron had asked.

“Don’t push it,” Waldron joshed back.  He pushed a plain manilla envelope across his desk.  “Well, in that case I’ve got a little job for you.  If you don’t mind giving up a couple of days sofa time.  None of our esteemed competitors has this yet.  It’s for both editions.  House rate will apply.  Travel if you want, but you will pay for it yourself.”

Ricky opened the envelope and peeked at the contents as Waldron spoke.  Several typed sheets and some photographs peeked back.

“There’s this historian at Oxford,” Waldron continued, almost as though he was telling a joke.  “My old college, as a matter of fact.  He has completely taken leave of his senses and is trying to drag the British government to the Hague to stand trial for the genocide of white people.  It’s delicious.  Anyway, I want eight hundred words for Wednesday’s run.  You don’t have to play it too straight.  I’m thinking, ‘Oxford don in white genocide shame’.  But you’re the sub.  You can sort that out.  Give the guy a proper smoking.  No need for subtlety.  Explode one under his college Principal, too.  Hopefully, you’ll get an unguarded reaction.  If that doesn’t work, try the Vice-Chancellor.  Then get the Oxford Union’s input - plenty of student lip, you know what they’re like.  Call the Attorney General’s press officer.  He will give you a statement.  And there’s a list there of London lawyers our man has tried to engage.  Ring round and see if one of them will say something unattributable but juicy.”

“It’s a reliable source, is it?” asked Ricky, slightly taken aback not just that his editor should turn to him, but at his sudden and surprising conversion to tabloid values.

“We won’t be draining the fact-checking budget, if that’s what you mean.”

“So is it one of his Oxford chums?”

“It’s a London source, and it’s unimpeachable.”

“Someone inside the legal profession?”

No reply meant no.

“Government, then?  Whitehall?

Nothing.  Ricky looked again at the top photograph.

“It’s not the spooks, is it?”  He was chancing his arm now.

Waldron changed the subject.  “I will brief Rufus for the online edition.  No need for you to talk to him or anyone else here until you’re done.”

Ricky persevered, “Tell me it’s not the spooks, boss!”

Waldron stared blankly back at him.

It was early evening.  Peter Upton had decided to eschew the public libraries in Oxford, where he might be recognised, and drive the eight miles to Woodstock instead.  Now he was seated at a creaking computer which made those in his own, hardly over-funded department seem positively state-of-the-art.  Still, it wasn’t connected directly with MI5, which couldn’t be said with complete confidence of the other computers he was using.

The Woodstock public library computers attracted a distinctly mixed clientele.  A victim of the modern urban age appeared beside Upton and sat down at the next terminal.  A wan creature in her early twenties, hair dyed blue-black and shaved into the nape of her neck, a metal ring through the middle of her lower lip, no tattoo visible but doubtless there must be one somewhere. 

She glanced sideways at his monitor.  He was aware and wary.  Since that conversation with Truscott-Brown at Balliol he had become prone to assess every stranger in his orbit, even one like this, for snooping potential.  What, after all, did the foot-soldiers of MI5 look like these days?  They weren’t helpfully ramrod-backed former NCOs or policemen with wooden personalities and an IQ of 104.

On the precautionary principle, also known as paranoia, he quickly cut Truscott-Brown’s name from the addressee window, and reduced the font-size of his text to the point where he had to lean forward to read it himself.

As requested, he had opened an anonymous mail account several days earlier, giving himself the user-name of Capite censi.  He had begun by sending Truscott-Brown his assessment of the form and progress of Veronica’s evidence-gathering, that being the current schwerpunckt.  Certainly, it was the matter of immediate concern to this Dunstan fellow.  But Truscott-Brown expressed absolutely no interest in it.  His focus, it emerged, was strategic.

“This isn’t a case of taking evidence to the prosecutor,” he wrote to Upton, ”it’s a case of taking the prosecutor to the evidence.  You must understand that, for him, this is a political and ethical journey as much as a legal and investigative one, and the moral temper and politics of all those involved on the plaintiff’s side will have a significant bearing.  You do not speak for victims of the kind he is accustomed to seeing.  Indeed, you speak for a demographic that, rightly or wrongly, has been very successfully associated with anything but victimhood.  You have to demonstrate your integrity or he won’t even contemplate expanding the ICC’s present interpretation of the Convention to accommodate this accusation.”

Then, like any courtroom lawyer looking for some injudicious witness testimony, he tendered five questions about Upton’s own character and motivation.  What, if any, were his present political affiliations?  Would he describe himself as strongly patriotic?  Would he say he had particularly traditionalist or reactionary sensibilities?  Did he harbour any canonical beliefs about the mono-ethnic England of the past?  Did he seek something from this process beyond retribution for those proven to have acted outside international law?

For Upton this whole line of questioning was misconceived, and revealed more about Truscott-Brown’s inner world than it ever would about his own.  Not only was the attitude of the Western liberal Establishment towards the white man ... the common man … not a reasonable basis for examining the latter’s victimhood, it was itself a factor, and a powerful one, in the creation of his victimhood.  It contained within itself a peculiar contempt for him, and the irrational and slavish, blanket assumption that his profoundly human love and preference for his own kind functioned as an active hatred for everyone else.  The nett effect was an official posture of neglect for his right to a place in this world.  Among certain elements it could and did sink as low as a malignant joy in his destruction.

Submitting to this tyranny … begging its leave to speak, as Truscott-Brown wanted, was quite the wrong way to go about things.  The liberal Establishment had to be set the challenge of intellectual and moral consistency.  It had to be made to live up to the principles of compassion and universality which it professed to hold so dear.  That was something which he, Upton, definitely sought “beyond retribution for those proven to have acted outside international law.”

Ricky was home in his Eltham flat, lounging on the sofa; a ready-meal in the oven, a cold bottle of Beck’s on the floor beside him.  He leafed through the contents of the envelope Waldron had given him.  There were nine items in all, including some very obvious surveillance photographs of two men and a woman, shot from distance.  Their surnames were printed across the top in black felt-tip.  The other documents were anonymous, loose A4 sheets, sparely typed in the same sans serif font.  But it was all there - the potted bios and quite a long list of contact details, a legal summary, and a four-page briefing which heavily emphasised this Oxford professor.

Apparently, the professor’s offence was to threaten the British Establishment in the form of sundry past and present prime and not-so-prime ministers with a trial at the Hague for doing away with the natives.  Apparently, this so alarmed said ministers, the spooks had had to be called in.  Ricky was impressed.

The briefing paper itself brought the word “Intelligence” into disrepute.  Larded with anti-racist terminology, just in case the reader was unable to draw the required inferences by himself, it was, frankly, a dog-whistle - the dog being all those urbane but morally outraged members of the London media class who existed in the mind of whoever wrote this.  In reality, the writer was confronted with Ricky and Ricky’s deep suspicions of said British Establishment.  Ricky wasn’t urbane and he didn’t live in a state of permanent moral outrage.  He was a bright, hard-nosed south London lad from a large, very white and proudly working-class family.  The chances that he would come running to perform all his best politically-correct tricks for MI5, or anybody for that matter, were about nil.

He would, of course, have to write something less than complimentary about the professor.  “Poor bastard”, Ricky said out loud.  He meant it.  It made no difference who the subject was or what he had or hadn’t done, character assassination in the press was an ugly, unprincipled business that no journalist worthy of the name could relish.  Why had the boss let himself and his paper be used in this way?  Was it really worth it just to take down one racist academic?

He took a swig of Beck’s and toyed with the conversational possibilities between Waldron and the Secret State.  Give or take a little subtlety, a little politesse, possibly something like:

Source to boss: We would appreciate The Guardian’s assistance with somebody who is a considerable concern to us.  We would like to expose his activity to public scrutiny, if you take my meaning?

Boss to source: You make yourself perfectly clear.  You want to use us as an extension of your own organisation.  You want us to salt this person’s well.

Source to Boss: You could put it that way.  If it is understood that we are on the same side.

Boss to source: The same side?  I am the editor of The Guardian.  I wouldn’t jump just like that for the ghost of John Scott, never mind people like you.

Source to boss: Mr Waldron, everybody jumps, as you put it, for people like us.  Because people like us can just as easily salt the well of people like you as anybody else?

Boss to source: Is that a threat?  Do you really think I will respond to threats.

Source to boss: It is a simple statement of fact.  It is not in your personal or professional interests to incur the displeasure of the state.  Someone of your experience of public life will surely understand that.

Boss to source:  Perhaps you didn’t hear me.  My newspaper has a long and proud tradition of principled opposition to over-mighty government.  Now, I don’t know what this “somebody of concern” has done.  But you’ve come knocking on the wrong door if you think we will do your dirty work for you.

Source to boss: Oh, I don’t think so.  You have momentarily forgotten your newspaper’s close and successful working relationship with the ministers and the ministries you would be helping.  The private ministerial briefings ... the departmental leaks … the advertising revenue.  And it’s not as though we are on opposite sides in this matter.  The somebody in question is an academic who has exposed himself as an extremist and a racist.  He doesn’t merit your protection.  Quite the contrary.  He merits exposure, which is all we are asking of you.

Boss silent.  Reflective.  Perhaps less recalcitrant.

Source continuing to boss: And it will be good copy that none of the other nationals will have and none would turn down.  Neither would you if one of your own news staff dug it up.  What’s the problem with sourcing it from us?  It’s just mutual assistance.

Boss silent.  Reflective.  But less reluctant again.  Perhaps even receptive.

OK, so that little drama could happen, Ricky concluded.  That, or something very like it, had happened.  The boss had caved.  But why did he then give the job to him?  Why not give it to one of the usual anti-racist attack-dogs - Mark Sands, for example, with his history of pretentiously academic “investigations” of the far right, or Naz Riley who churned out non-story after non-story about the new, progressive mixed-race Britain in which the evils and excesses of the colonial past are washed away?  Both would have jumped at it.

Obviously, the boss thought the story did not need that kind of treatment.  Obviously, the boss’s source, whoever it was, didn’t want an ideological hit-piece that would instantly be recognised as such.  The boss’s source wanted credibility.  Which just might mean that credibility was, in fact, an issue.

Ricky picked up the surveillance shot of the professor and took a good hard look.  Was this a picture of an extremist and a racist?  What was the real story?  Then an idle and subversive thought drifted into his mind.  There were two pieces that could be written here: the one the source was anticipating, and the story of a media assassination.  He would have to write the first one for Waldron, even though it made a stooge of the paper.  He was under no illusion about that.  But right then and there, with his feet up on the sofa, a bottle of beer in his hand, and no Establishment values for miles around, he began to think about researching the second.  It was, after all, the true Guardian story.

Upton decided not to answer Truscott-Brown’s unhelpful questions directly, but to do so within the wider intellectual context of the whole endeavour.

“I have to inform you, George” he typed, “that I derive my proposition not from personal or political preferences but from the second definite article as it appears in “the people of England” in the various coronation oaths from William and Mary 1688, and in The Bill of Rights of that year, and in the forty-two Representation of the People Acts which have graced the statute book over the last two centuries.

“You see, the whole question about the limits of government, on which so much of English history has turned, reduces to this: what does the “the” in “the People” signify?  Is it a civic “the”?  Does it merely imply a fluid collective of politically defined and geographically determined citizens?  Or is it anthropological?  Does it imply an extant people with genealogy and a history on the land; a people, therefore, defined in mentem communem not by law but by descent and a shared memory and knowledge of self?  Can politics define the people, or do the people define the politics?

“Rash and illiberal as it may seem, I find conclusively for the latter.

“Of course one must be careful here not to fall into poetic thinking about the virtues and values of this English self.  Such sentiment misses the point, and takes us into the racistic trap you so obviously fear.

“But by the same token, and regardless of our familiarity with them, we must also be impervious to the liberal sentiments which have attended English life, politics and law over the last three and a half centuries.  Those function in the liberal mind in quite the same unsatisfactory manner, and take us into a corresponding set of prejudices and presumptions that are no more relevant to the constitutional principle.

“Allow me to dwell on that thought a little.  The liberal paradigm, which you and, no doubt, the ICC prosecutor take for granted in the same way a goldfish takes for granted the water in its bowl, is merely another object of investigation to the historian.  Its waters do not issue from some fountain of eternal “self-evident” truths for us to accept uncritically.  Actually, it is silent on the human condition as such, treating of it only in the negative while it rushes off after answers to the fashionably post-Christian but obviously compelling questions of the individual and of universalism.

“Politics in the liberal paradigm addresses the shifting political sensitivities of the day.  It cannot address the permanent.  It cannot address the nature and identity of a people who possess genealogy and history.  It can only address the fluid collective of citizens.  À la Hegel, it can only address the problem of liberalism itself.”

It was just after 6.30 pm, and the evening was fine, the Dorset air warm and still.  Maryse, Miles Waldron’s latest experiment with marriage, her daughter Élodie, and a bottle of Gewürztraminer were waiting on the terrace.  Waldron put the finishing touches to three bowls of chicken soto, collected them up and, a little less languidly than usual, walked out through the morning room.

His mobile rang just as he was setting the food down on the table.  “Miles, it’s James,” said the voice on the other end of the line.  It was, in fact, James Calkin, Waldron’s publishing director on the Group Board.

“Miles,” Calkin continued, “there’s never a good time for this, and I’m going to come straight to the point.  The Group Board held an emergency meeting this morning, and ...”

“The Board?” Waldron protested, “I wasn’t informed there was a ...”

Calkin cut across him.  “We thought it best to convene without you present.  The Trust Board had met on Tuesday, and certain reservations about our financial stability were expressed.  It was felt that current editorial policy ...”

As Calkin spoke, despondency overtook Waldron.  He walked slowly back through the glazed doors and into the house, the mobile pressed hard to his hear.  “What are you trying to tell me, James?”  He already knew the answer to that question, of course.  But he damn well asked it anyway.

Calkin sighed the sigh of a man who never wanted this job in the first place; but here he was, and he had to get it done.  “Look,” he said, almost pleading, “the Group Board met to consider a resolution by the Trust ...”

“I am being sacked, is that what you’re saying?  And the business was done earlier this week but nobody thought to tell me until now?”

“Look … no, look …” Calkin whined.  Then he remembered to take refuge in the impersonal speech of the corporate manager he truly was, “It was agreed that the Group Board should be asked to vote on a new round of cost-cutting and other measures formulated to address current operational and strategic shortcomings which …

“Which you did not have the guts to discuss in my presence.”

“It wasn’t like … no, look ... you’re not making this any easier for either of us, you know.”

“Why would I do that, James?”

“Miles, believe me, it was a very difficult decision for all of us.”

“All of you?  So not one of you was on my side?  Et tu, James?”

“It wasn’t like that.  Believe me, the Board is hugely grateful for everything you have done down the years.  But we think you have done everything you can, Miles.  The view which prevailed is that new blood, new thinking is what the title needs now.”  There, he had said it at last.  He waited.

There was a deep, prolonged silence which Waldron punctured with a resigned sigh.  “Don’t you even want my view on who should succeed me?” he asked finally.

Calkin’s voice was lower, calmer.  The tension had left him.  “A decision was also reached on that this morning.  As a matter of fact my next call … well, you know.  If he and I agree terms, the appointment will be announced to staff on Monday morning.  We would like you to be there to anoint your successor.  We thought you would prefer your people to see you depart in that spirit.  Everyone is only too aware, Miles, of the great respect and affection in which you are ...”

“I’ll be in your office at 8.00am on Monday,” Waldron interjected, and cut him off.

“So history arrives at a bifurcation,” Upton typed, his two index fingers hammering away on the keyboard in pursuit of his advancing thesis, “in the idea, not of the fact, of what constitutes “the people”.  At this point, the idea of the “extant people with genealogy and a history on the land” gets parked, so to speak.  A new idea of “a fluid collective of politically defined and geographically determined citizens” takes over among the governing classes as they attend to the problem of liberalism.  Everything in the liberal worldview confirms that this new idea is perfectly valid or, if not valid exactly, at least virtuous, which is just as important.  It is enough.  Everybody professing the liberal worldview says so.

“Before you know where you are, the situation moves on from mere ideas to real-world events, real-world effects.  And then history is re-interpreted.  In particular, the history of the extant group is re-interpreted as proof for the new commons.  New truths are proclaimed.  Books are written.  Speeches are made.  Elections are held.  Laws are passed.  And no one suspects that there is anything wrong.

“But there is something wrong constitutionally.  The sovereign is not an idea.  It is the people.  It became the people along the way from Charles I standing on the scaffold outside the Banqueting House, and telling the crowd “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things”, and the taking of the royal oath by William and Mary in 1688, six years after Rousseau wrote Of the Social Contract.

“In that oath the monarchs swore to govern “the People of this Kingdome of England” according to the will of Parliament and to Law.  The authority of Parliament, however, was and is derived from its representative character.  The true sovereign power standing above it was and is the people.  Well, the people cannot be rendered non-sovereign by constitutional means.  It cannot become a subject.  It cannot be acted upon.  Its nature, its cohesive traits cannot be re-defined.  It cannot be changed for or into another people.  There is no power in the land with that competence, not the judiciary, not Law, not Parliament, not the Crown.  The person of the sovereign is inviolate, its power eternal.

“The liberal paradigm certainly does not licence the governing class’s renunciation of the “extant people with genealogy and a history on the land”, as the English people were known and understood both unto themselves and others.  It does not licence the switch to “a fluid collective of politically defined and geographically determined citizens”.  Nothing does, short of the express consent of the people, which, of course, has never been sought and never been forthcoming.  Nor will it ever be.”

There was a tap on Upton’s shoulder.  It was a librarian, a woman of about his years, thinning grey hair, anxious expression, one of Nature’s supplicants.  The creature next door with blue-black hair had gone.  Everybody had gone.  They were quite alone in the building.

“I’m very sorry to have to interrupt.  You were sitting so close to the monitor.  You seemed so absorbed.  I didn’t ... but it is quite late, and we normally close at 7.00pm on Fridays.”

“Good Lord,”  replied Upton, checking his watch, “is that the time.  I had no idea.  I am so sorry to have kept you like this.  I just need one moment, and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

He quickly re-focussed on the monitor and the keyboard, and rapped out, “There has been a usurpation, and it is now that its full scope and meaning is becoming clear.  My desire is to make an application to the ICC as a contribution to that clarifying process.  It is not a question of punishing anyone. It is a question of bringing the recondite and unobserved fully into the light.

“Best regards,

“Peter”