James Craig - London Calling

Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond, David Runciman

Good Manners and Bad Behaviour: The Unofficial Rules of Diplomacy , Candida Slater

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein

Decline to Fall: The Making of British Macro-Economic Policy and the 1976 IMF Crisis, Douglas Wass

Mr Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War, Tom Wheeler

The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria

Xavier reached over and picked the book from the very top of the pile. He would ask his wife to drop the rest of them off at the local Oxfam shop. Lilli wouldn’t be too happy about it, having to mix with the hoi polloi, but they had more than enough clutter here in the house already and it was better than just dumping them in the rubbish bin. Safer too. Their rubbish was regularly sifted by journalists and other cranks, looking for things to embarrass them with. The binning of Edgar’s selected books would be a serious gaffe.

The book he’d picked up was substantial, about half the size of a shoebox. It felt surprisingly good in his hand. He felt more thoughtful already, if not more energetic. Still lacking the energy to rouse himself from the table, he sat back and closed his eyes. The house was empty and the peace was luxurious.

Lilli had left for ‘work’ about an hour ago. For several years now, his wife had enjoyed a sinecure as ‘senior creative director’ for a luxury goods retailer, the kind of place that charged?200 for a cufflink box,?250 for an iPod case, and?1,000 for a handbag. Xavier had no idea what a ‘creative director’, senior or otherwise, actually did. The job had been secured for her by her father in Milan, in return for various, unspecified, favours done for the retailer’s chief executive. Privately, after a few drinks late one night, Walter Sarfatti had told his son-in-law that these ‘favours’ had helped keep the CEO out of prison. Xavier didn’t really believe that, though. As far as he could see, no one went to jail in Italy for white-collar crime. And if the slammer had beckoned, Walter would surely have got much more for his services than just a job for his daughter.

Whatever the ‘job’, however she got it, Xavier didn’t see the point of his wife going out to work. They certainly didn’t need the money. The net gain to the family finances, once you factored in the childcare costs and the amount Lilli spent on clothes and networking and so forth, was negligible. For all Xavier knew, it could easily be costing him money to send her out to work. He personally would rather let the kids have their mother around more often. But the job kept Lilli happy and that was the most important thing. An unhappy Lilli was not good. Not good indeed.

One problem created by their domestic arrangements was the constant turnover in the hired help. Full of enthusiasm and brio, they came from around the world, from China, from Turkey, from South Africa, from various places that Xavier had never even heard of, only to slink off months if not weeks later, crushed by the reality of trying to deal with the Sarfatti-Carlton brood. If anything, the rate of churn was accelerating. They had gone through three au pairs in the last nine months alone.

The current nanny was from Venezuela. She was called Yulexis, so Xavier had nicknamed her ‘Christmas’. She was almost two months into her stint and he hoped that she would last longer than the others, not least because she was only twenty-two, extremely hot (she had been a semi-finalist in the Miss Venezuela pageant, the year before coming to London) and took a very broad view of her job description. This meant that he was fucking her at every opportunity. Banging the nanny was, he knew, embarrassing, a total cliche, but he wasn’t about to give up his droit de seigneur just because of that consideration. If ‘Christmas’ lasted for six months to a year, that would be perfect. Any less than that and he would feel terribly frustrated (in various ways). Any longer, and she would go from being a bonus to becoming a liability.

He finally worked up the energy to rise from the table and head towards the front door. Standing in the hall was his Cannondale Super 6 Dura Ace Compact Road Bike. Costing more than four grand, it depressed the hell out of Xavier. His brother had talked him into cycling to the Commons as another grand statement, demonstrating the party’s vitality, as well as its ‘green’ credentials. When had everyone gone green? The whole eco-thing was so ubiquitous now that you forgot that only a very few years ago, no one had mentioned it at all, or had cared in the slightest about the melting ice caps or the fate of bloody polar bears. It was such a bore, and such a fraud. Xavier was sure that it was only a fad that couldn’t last. He certainly hoped so.

Whatever he hoped, he knew that all this green business wouldn’t fade this side of the election. So, in the meantime, he was stuck with the harsh reality that they had set the bar too high for him, bike-wise. Now every time he stepped into a car, even his much trumpeted hybrid, he faced cries of ‘ hypocrite! ’. The bike thing had become a complete liability, but Edgar insisted that he couldn’t give it up. Even though he was followed every morning by a chauffeur-driven limo containing his suits and papers, he still had to get on the bike. It was ridiculous that he couldn’t just jump in the back of the car and have a well-earned snooze or read the Sun. It wasn’t like the cycling image-wise was risk-free; there were several videos of him on YouTube breaking basic traffic laws and almost mowing down pedestrians. He had been dubbed ‘ The most dangerous thing on two wheels ’ and some joker had started an online petition to get him back in his car. Xavier had signed it himself, using twenty-five fake names, in a failed attempt to get Edgar to relent.

At one stage, almost inevitably, the bike had been stolen. Xavier had been ecstatic but to his horror, in defiance of statistical possibility, it had been found again. He couldn’t believe it; he owned the only bloody stolen bike in the whole of London ever to be safely returned to its rightful owner. It was just his rotten luck. Xavier dropped the book in his pannier, sticking a bulky fleece underneath, so that enough of the title was visible for the photo op. With gritted teeth, he grabbed the machine and pushed it towards the front door. It was light as a feather and an object of genuine beauty and craftsmanship, but the first thing he was going to do, after their election victory, was to throw the sodding thing under a bus and jump back into his official Jag.

Ian couldn’t believe his luck. Naked and sated, he stretched out on the bed and savoured the cool white crispness of the hotel sheets beneath him. Hooking up with people in chatrooms was, he knew from bitter experience, hit and miss at best. But tonight had been an epiphany. Closing his eyes, and grinning like an idiot, he recalled the gentle but insistent pressure of cool, unyielding enamel on tender flesh and the demented explosion that followed. His heart rate was only now beginning to return to something like normal. Looking down, he ran his left foot over the nine-inch ‘Heart of Glass’ ribbed dildo lying on the bed and felt a shiver of anticipation. But even here, even now, he was a pragmatist. He didn’t want to push his luck. There would be other times. For now, he told himself that he should be happy to let the mixture of endorphins and champagne bliss him out as he waited for sleep.

‘Turn over.’ He felt playful fingers on his warm, damp balls, and the cool, wet probing of a tongue on his penis.

‘I’m done,’ he croaked.

‘Turn over!’ The voice was half laughing, half ordering. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet.’