Children of the Master. Andrew Marr

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       The Early Life of David Petrie

       If you want to survive in politics, you need to have deep roots. And if you don’t, you have to pretend to.

      The Master

      For a small country, Scotland is geographically complicated. Parts of Ayrshire, for instance, look like the Highlands, particularly when the cloud is low. Shaggy, dun-coloured moorlands are populated by shaggy, shitty-bottomed sheep, crowding across roads that weren’t resurfaced during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth. Just as in the Highlands you drive past grey, harled, barrack-like settlements of 1960s council housing, their desolate gardens fenced in with wire, and defeated Co-op stores, and scowling public houses with wired windows. But when the clouds lift, the absence of soaring mountains becomes apparent. Instead, weak riffs of sunlight show giant A’s of steel and collections of industrial buildings. For this was once mining country, with conical bings like the burial mounds of ancient Strathclyde kings – and even now, years after Margaret Thatcher’s death, the rusting steel sheds and the pervasive layer of coal dust haven’t gone.

      So this is a country where it’s easy to answer the question: why do folk get involved in politics? If you relied on the papers, you’d think it was pure greed, with a pinch of vanity; and you’d be wrong. In David Petrie’s Ayrshire, being Labour was like going to Mass, like learning to drink half-and-halfs, like supporting Kilmarnock, and like not hitting your women. It was what a proper, decent, grown man did. The folk memory of the miners’ strike, the poll tax, the closure of Ravenscraig, was transmitted almost wordlessly, father to son, mother to daughter. And if a man needed any more explanation, the pudgy, braying faces on television – though Blair, mind you, was as bad as a Tory – rammed the lesson home. There were sides. Us, and them. Them, us. Chrissakes, pal, what more did you need to know?

      It wasn’t like that now, though. The Labour folk had been split and scattered by the 2014 independence referendum. These days, the Nats were better organised, strutting through the streets, ‘Yes’ badges all over the place, cocky as you like. A Saltire flew over the council chambers. But it wasn’t always so. Back then, being Labour was bleeding obvious. The system, the whole bloody world, was set up to screw the working classes. The working classes had no choice but to fight back. Only the odd funny-looking Tory, in tartan trews maybe, or Presbyterian minister, or some kind of Orangeman, didn’t get it. Davie Petrie had known this all his life.

      Later on, when he was famous, everybody got Petrie’s story subtly wrong. Wikipedia, the BBC website, profiles in both the Spectator and the New Statesman and a hurriedly-written biography by a rising young journalist, all missed what really mattered. Yet nobody would ever be able to say that Davie himself had lied about his own background. The public story, the official story, was all boot-strappy and hard graft: David Petrie had grown up in a working-class family in a village south of Glasgow, joining the trade union movement early and working his way up through scholarships to create his own building company, paying top-dollar wages to his boys, handing over chunks of his profits to local causes. It was a story of Catholic self-improvement, of the importance of family, the story of a clean-limbed hero. No university drinking clubs; no wealthy, behind-the-scenes patrons; just a simple, passionate, moderate, justice-loving man of the streets.

      And a lot of that was true; but it was a sunny painting without shadows or dark corners – so much so, that the truth was a lie. There had been little that was decent or working-class about David Petrie’s early life. He had been born in a privately owned bungalow in an Ayrshire village to an alcoholic local builder, a formidable bully, and his long-suffering, though in fact highly intelligent, wife.

      Later on, David Petrie would be famous as a kind of survivor, like the sole cavalryman making it back from the Khyber Pass, all his comrades lying slaughtered in pools of their own blood. That is, he was a rare Scottish Labour MP after the Nationalists had poured down the mountainsides in 2015. Somehow, like a burr, he’d clung on. As Scottish voices had begun to disappear from London public life, Petrie’s Ayrshire tones were still being heard in Parliament and on the BBC, an almost reassuring reminder of times that had gone. ‘I feel like a dinosaur, to be honest, woken up to find the mammals have taken over,’ he’d once said on Breakfast News. But like the dinosaurs, there was something unshakeably tough, almost stony, about the man.

      David’s first memories were of fear and pain. His father’s head was out of focus, a blur of grey and red; but his hands and feet were close. Knuckles, the signet ring, the smell of shoe polish, a boot in the arse, a giant hand scrunching his jumper and lifting him up. Bellow, skelp. Sometimes, when the gate slammed and he heard Da’s feet come up the steps, he filled his pants and trousers with hot pee. Then he was disgusted with himself, and almost welcomed the belting. It was an old, weathered black СКАЧАТЬ