‘I wish,’ said Frank Bridges venomously, ‘that somebody would sort out the bloody cow once and for all.’
He picked up the chunky pint glass and downed the remains of his beer in a gulp. There were clucks of sympathy around him. To many of the thick-set, grizzled men seated at his table and nearby, Frank was the local hero. His successes were theirs, his worries grafted seamlessly on to their own. If Frank was upset, so were they.
The Right Honourable Frank Bridges, fifty years old, overweight, red-faced, crumple-suited and aggressive, should not have been upset. Indeed, he had considerable reason to be hugely pleased with his own situation, and with life in general. Newly elevated to the seat in the Cabinet he could once only have dreamed of, he was trusted by the public, envied by colleagues, and regarded with ragged affection by his constituents, who included the scruffy occupants of the Admiral Benbow, a run-down pub in a Bootle side-street near the now derelict docks.
Vic, Scouser, Bill the Fixer, Mad Max and others had truanted with him from the inner-city school where expectations were destroyed with the cane and sarcasm. As boys, they had scattered down alleys behind his stocky form, their pockets stuffed with illicit loot. But Frank had kept running, beyond the despair and hopelessness. None of the others had followed where he led. He had not gone to the dogs like them but had made something of himself. He had risen to the top, or close to it. Of Frank Bridges they were inordinately proud.
For Frank was a salt-of-the-earth type, the press generally agreed. A police sergeant had once challenged him to make a man of himself. Shamed, he had applied, with the sergeant’s gruff help, to join Liverpool police cadets; to his surprise and the ribbing of his mates he had been accepted. He had worked his way up through the byzantine networks of the force to national prominence, particularly during the bitter dock strike of 1982. In that prolonged struggle, he had contrived to become a solidly admired figure. While speaking in the same strong Merseyside accent as the militant strikers and displaying an understated, dignified disdain for the government of Margaret Thatcher, he had contrived to prevent conflict and bloodshed even as the nation’s trade was brought to a standstill. His erstwhile comrade Arthur Scargill had asked him how he had managed such a feat. Frank had begun to confess that he did not know that chance had played its part. Then he had thought better of it and suggested vaguely that working with the system was better than trying to destroy it, that politics might achieve more than the picket line. Scargill’s derision convinced him. Soon afterwards Frank offered himself as a parliamentary candidate. He had represented the Dockside division of the seaport ever since
