Put another way, it’s where they go to cry. Yet, all politics being imagery, they have to put on a brave face, which was exactly the position in which Ben Usher found himself. He had gathered his backbenchers for a Sunday ‘strategy session’, where he and other ministers would tell the flock how high and in which direction they were to jump in the run-up to the election. ‘This is war!’ he shouted, banging the podium at the end of the Long Gallery, which was heated almost to excess by the crush of bodies sitting in rows of seats laid out before him. There wasn’t much that was original in his conclusion; Clausewitz had long ago defined war as being a continuation of politics by other means, except modern elections didn’t really deserve to be dignified by such high-minded analysis. For Usher, elections came straight out of a spaghetti Western, with several gunmen confronting each other, eyes darting, buttocks clenched, knowing that for whoever lost, there would be no tomorrow.
