Head of State: The Bestselling Brexit Thriller

Virtual Reality

Reptiles

Old Flames, Flickering

On the Verge

Over to Olivia

Enter, a Bear

Jen Blows It

Speaking Plainly

12. Wednesday, 20 September: Referendum Day Minus One

Phoebus Awakes: A Pageant

Death in the Morning?

Turbulence

The Second Message

A Dénouement

Female Wrestling

But Where is Ned?

Marshmalice

It Isn’t Over

13. Thursday, 21 September: Referendum Day

The Rise of Lord Croaker

The Nation Decides

14. Friday, 22 September: Referendum Day Plus One

The Birth of a Free Nation?

Epilogue: Monday, 9 October

About the Author

Also by Andrew Marr

About the Publisher

The people of Britain will vote on a definitive ‘in or out’ question on the country’s membership of the European Union in a referendum to be held on Thursday, 21 September, the prime minister told the House of Commons yesterday.

‘This will settle the question for a generation to come, and fix the course of this great nation for our children and our grandchildren,’ he told the cheering backbenches of the ‘grand coalition’.

The announcement follows many delays and disappointments for those campaigning for such a referendum, a matter which the PM said could not be delayed ‘for more than a few months, for all our sakes’.

The prime minister, who was in Hanover last week to put the final touches to his agreement with the German chancellor for a looser, more market-friendly EU, assured the Commons that he would be campaigning unequivocally for a ‘Yes’ vote.

Leading the ‘No’ campaign from the opposition benches, Mrs Olivia Kite, who was until recently serving under the PM as home secretary, promised a ‘no holds barred, passionate, honest and patriotic campaign’ to persuade Britain finally to sever its ties with what she called the ‘soft, corrupting dictatorship’ of Brussels.

Polling for this newspaper suggests a close vote in three months’ time, with the character and leadership abilities of the prime minister a major factor for swing voters.

National Courier, London, Thursday, 22 June 2017

1 (#u61eb7640-faac-5919-abbe-e426e34d64c6)

Cock of the Walk (#ulink_69b7eba6-cce4-54f7-bc4a-f475e7ad0aa5)

A dirty wind gusted. There were just three days to go before the referendum that would settle Britain’s destiny. The Golden Cockerel swung proudly from the balcony on the top floor of one of the City of London’s most repellent buildings. Even among the swollen glass spikes, cheese graters and vegetables crowding the capital’s horizon in 2017, this pastrami-and-lemon-coloured confection from the boom of the 1980s stood out – vile colours, ill-judged proportions, cheap materials. Architecture is one of the most certain measures of cultural and social decline. Inside the abomination, the Cockerel restaurant offered a cold-eyed English catering executive’s idea of French peasant cooking. In recent years the ‘Cock’ had gained a certain notoriety, because its outside smoking terrace had become popular with City suicides.

A South Asian accountant, bullied at work, had thrown herself to her death after dinner. A City trader whose losses were about to be exposed had leapt the eight floors after a couple of Cock of the Walk martinis. The almost famous and thoroughly cuckolded president of the Society of Costermongers had made a witty speech to a gathering of his best friends, then vaulted over the guardrail into the traffic below, bouncing off the top of a passing bus before experiencing his last convulsions under the wheels of a kitchen-delivery lorry.

This Monday morning there lay, foetally curled in the grey half-light on the pavement below the Cockerel, the young constable’s first corpse. She took in a dark-blue jacket of a Portuguese cut, a pair of German designer jeans pulled down around his ankles, scuffed but new-looking English brogues, arranged at unlikely angles; and finally a mop of dark, curling hair nestling in a half-dried archipelago of blood. This was a youngish, once-handsome man. There’d be a worried girl somewhere this morning. Or maybe a boy. As the wailing police cars screeched to a halt and disgorged more officers, who pushed aside the ghouls and surrounded the body with tape, and then a plastic tent, the constable stared up at the jutting metal balcony and the gaudy metal bird, squeaking nastily in the wind.

Odd, she thought.

Inside the tent, green-uniformed ambulancemen were bending over the body. But you only needed to glance at the twisted figure to know that there was nothing to be done. In the dark, the body could have been a rough sleeper, ignored for hours.

She walked over and rattled the door of the Golden Cockerel, which led to the lobby, which led to the lift. It was locked. Everything was locked. Too early. Even the cleaners wouldn’t be in for an hour. So how had this happened? It was one thing for a drunken, despairing person to jump late at night, or even in the middle of a meal; but who would find their way into the Cockerel early on a Monday morning, and then jump? There were easier places – the bridges over the Thames, for one thing – all around.

It didn’t make sense.

Three hours later, as the body was swaying slightly, tightly tied down on a gurney in a fast-moving van, a mobile phone began ringing in the dead man’s pocket.

Ken Cooper, Upset (#ulink_0e9a8aa9-d037-5ac7-a911-d266af0da76c)

At the other end of the line was a heavily-built man sitting in the back of a chauffeured Mercedes which was stuck in traffic in central London. He was on his way to the offices of one of Britain’s once-great newspapers, the National Courier.

Ken Cooper hated being in the back seat. He hated the taste in his mouth of a wolfed breakfast and the smell of warm leather. He hated the nauseous feeling caused by reading all those newspapers while the driver listened to some funny-moronic DJ doing a funny-moronic phone-in with his – Ken’s – own readers. He hated the thought of the ill-tempered meeting with the marketing department weasels and circulation ferrets that would begin his office day.

How would it go?

‘Kevin’s done some more focus-group research, boss. There are too many older faces in the paper. We need good-looking young people. We need less politics. I’ve done some work, and you know our ideal story? Tasty rich kids being mugged for their Rolexes outside Annabel’s. We need more muggings and more tasty rich kids.’

Reptiles. Water rats. But you could hardly blame them. All the papers were the same these days, run by scuttling, nervous children. Ken was coming to hate the trade he’d always loved.