BOOK REVIEW: ‘Head of State’

OPINION:

HEAD OF STATE

By Andrew Marr

Overlook, $27.95, 384 pages

Sophisticated cynicism is the coin of the realm for distinguished British journalists like Andrew Marr, who has a reputation as an editor, a BBC political commentator and a historian. This is a dark and shining example of his talent as a satirist.

At a time when global journalism is staggering under the impact of the Internet, he has contributed a scathing, darkly funny book that makes it clear that he knows where the political bodies are buried — especially within the decorous boundaries of the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street in London.

In fact, one of the bodies is that of the PM, which is how the prime minister is referred to throughout the book in the author’s deft twist that leaves both the prime minister and the king unidentified except by titles. This is a veteran and popular PM even when he is being reprimanded by the king for failing to show up for the royal weekly chat at Buckingham Palace and getting away with it. In fact the querulous monarch calls the PM and finds himself being gently lectured about the current crisis over the European Union and British participation in it, the danger of a run on the banks and wasn’t it rather petty to be fussing over protocol at such a time?

Political strategist Lord Briskett, who has been announced by the PM as the official historian for the great European referendum, revels in his reputation as a wicked political gossip with unparalleled access to power. He has great admiration for the prime minister who is bleakly aware of the decline of European nations and the importance of the impending referendum on the European Union. Briskett rates the PM as a remarkable man who can “take any situation he’s in, turn it round, step out of it and look at it from the outside. He can think like the opposition and understand exactly what they’re thinking. He is completely unsentimental.”

Meantime, secluded in his office listening to the band of the Grenadier Guards tuning up for another rehearsal, the PM rumples his famous mane of hair, puts his head down on his desk, and quietly dies.

When he is found, you can almost hear the trumpets playing as the last act in his distinguished career begins in the shape of a marvelously shocking plot to delay his official demise for political reasons that he certainly would have understood. His devoted staff gathers around the corpse with its wrinkled, elfin face to decide what to do.

Possibly only in Britain would it be possible for them to do what they do, which wreathes the plot in the most macabre humor. Mr. Marr notes, apparently speaking from experience, that 10 Downing Street is a “small cramped village with lifts and back stairs and a large permanent staff constantly bringing news from Moscow, the latest polling information, coffee, clean towels and freshly polished shoes.” In the prime minister’s inner circle there is Jason Latimer, the foreign secretary and possibly his heir, a man whose long golden hair falls over his high-ridged forehead. There is Nelson Fraser, the communications secretary, who wears an Ancient Hunting Tadger kilt complete with a sporran that was a gift from Vladimir Putin. And there is Amanda Andrews, the PM’s keeper of the gate, who does not scream although her cheeks are wet when she finds the body of the prime minister. She immediately takes the position that they simply mustn’t have it. It is too inconvenient politically for him to be dead.

So they assess their chances of not announcing the PM’s death, what to do with his corpse and how to do it. And they do, in a manic, classically British caper that involves getting a sinister group to wrap his body in a battered futon and cut off his head with a ceremonial sword because he is too tall to fit into the futon. That, of course, raises the question of how to do something dignified with his head.

The book is a dignified romp through the most unlikely of political circumstances, with murders, assorted betrayals and the impression that nothing is really going to change because it’s such a good story when it does come out. Most delightful are Mr. Marr’s insider tidbits about how the government runs and the dismal aesthetics of daily newspapers. “All are the same,” writes Mr. Marr, “filthy beige walls, desolate expanses of cluttered desks behind which wise old sacks of human indolence order the young and stupid about.”

He has two monstrous female characters — Olivia Kite, who is likely to be the next prime minister, and Myfanwy, who lives up to her peculiar name. Both are almost caricatures of themselves. But Mr. Marr is at his most viperish when he pokes wicked fun at what he is most familiar with — the British way of life.

• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.