Zahawi et al
Prompt:
Generate a long piece (a work of creative non-fiction) about [politician] in 30 numbered, untitled parts.
Stylistic model: The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer.
Aim for accuracy, but try not to make it a fact-filled, chronological overview of his/her life in politics.
This will involve a great deal of online research.
THE CROSSING
A One-Act Drama in Prose
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
ZAHAWI — formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer (63 days), Vaccines Minister, Conservative Party Chairman; co-founder of YouGov; born in Baghdad
JENRICK — formerly Immigration Minister, Housing Secretary, Shadow Justice Secretary; Member of Parliament for Newark; educated at Cambridge and Christie's
BRAVERMAN — formerly Home Secretary (twice), Attorney General; barrister; born in Harrow to parents from Kenya and Mauritius; a Buddhist
CHORUS — moderate Conservative voters, assembled; inheritors of the broad church; keepers of garden centres and school catchment maps
A stage bare except for three lecterns arranged in a shallow arc. Behind them, a vast projection surface cycles slowly through English pastoral imagery: hedgerows, Cotswold stone, a village cricket match, a queue. The lighting suggests late afternoon, the hour when shadows lengthen and one begins to question the day's decisions.
The CHORUS enters in dribs and drabs, as people arrive at a poorly attended parish meeting. They settle uneasily, checking phones, exchanging half-nods of recognition.
CHORUS
We have come because we were summoned, or because we saw the notice, or because Dorothy mentioned it at the farm shop and one does like to keep informed.
We have come with our reasonable concerns and our reasonable doubts and our very reasonable assumption that reasonable people will, in the end, prevail.
We voted for stability. For gradual improvement. For someone who seemed competent on Question Time.
Now the reasonable people are shouting, and the competent people are on television saying extraordinary things, and the gradual improvement has become a rolling catastrophe, and we sit in our knocked-through kitchens wondering what exactly we voted for.
Was it this? Was it ever this?
We did not ask for revolution. We asked for the bins to be collected on schedule.
The three SPEAKERS enter from different directions, converging at their lecterns. They do not acknowledge one another at first. ZAHAWI adjusts his cuffs. JENRICK adopts a posture of sincere concern. BRAVERMAN carries herself with the coiled energy of someone who has been vindicated.
ZAHAWI
stepping forward, arms open, the gesture of a man who has nothing to hide and everything to explain
Let me tell you about journeys.
In 1978 I was a boy in Baghdad, and my grandfather was governor of the Central Bank, and my father was a businessman of some standing, and we were Kurds. Which is to say: we were people with a history, which is to say: we were people marked for erasure. Saddam was coming. You understand. One learns, in such circumstances, to read the direction of the wind.
So we came here. Nine years old, no English, wearing my cousin's hand-me-downs. Sussex. A preparatory school where the other boys could not pronounce my name and did not try. Nah-deem. Like something they might cough up.
I learned English. I learned Latin. I learned that this country would give you exactly what you earned, no more, no less, and that to complain of unfairness was to confess inadequacy. I learned to read the direction of the wind.
King's College School. UCL. Jeffrey Archer — yes, that Jeffrey Archer, and I see your faces, but a man takes his mentors where he finds them, and Jeffrey taught me that politics is a performance and wealth is a permission slip and failure is merely an interval between acts. I founded YouGov with another of his acolytes. We asked the people what they thought, and we sold the answers, and we became very rich, and if you are wondering how rich, the answer is: rich enough that HMRC took an interest, and I paid what was owed, plus penalties, nearly five million pounds, because I am, above all, a man who settles his accounts.
He pauses, as if this explains everything.
Was it careless? HMRC said so. Was it deliberate? HMRC said not. Was it embarrassing to be sacked as Party Chairman by Rishi Sunak while still warm from having backed Boris, then Liz, then Rishi in increasingly desperate succession? Yes. That was embarrassing. But embarrassment is not a fatal condition. I have been embarrassed before. I have been called worse things than tax avoider.
In 2015 I said Nigel Farage was a racist. I said his comments were the sort of thing Goebbels would be proud of. I said I would be frightened to live in a country he ran.
He smiles — the smile of a man who has been caught out and has decided to find it charming.
Good on you for digging out tweets from eleven years ago.
The wind has changed direction. I have read it. I have read it with the same instinct that got my family out of Baghdad before the worst, the same instinct that has guided me through five Prime Ministers and three sackings and one ethics investigation and onto this stage, before you, explaining that Britain is drinking at the last chance saloon, that nothing works, that the country I came to as a refugee — the country that gave me everything — is now fundamentally broken.
And if Nigel Farage is the only man willing to fix it, then I stand beside him. Because I know a thing or two about broken countries. I know how quickly they break, and how slowly they mend, and how essential it is to be on the right side of the fracture.
He steps back.
CHORUS
He speaks of journeys. As if we hadn't all been on journeys. As if the journey to Waitrose in the new traffic calming scheme wasn't its own small odyssey.
He speaks of reading the wind. We have read the wind. The wind says there will be frost tonight and we should cover the tender seedlings.
He speaks of broken countries, and we think: is it broken? The GP surgery is strained but functioning. The potholes are worse but present. The school is Good with Outstanding Features. The neighbour's extension remains an eyesore but within planning regulations.
Perhaps we do not know what broken means. Perhaps we have been protected from knowing.
Or perhaps he is selling us something, as he sold YouGov, as he sold his shares through Gibraltar, as he sells himself now in this new livery, and the only question is whether we are buying.
JENRICK
moving to the lectern with the controlled physicality of someone who has had media training
I am not going to tell you about journeys. I am going to tell you about clarity.
When I was first elected — Newark, 2014, a by-election occasioned by the resignation of a colleague over lobbying allegations, one learns not to dwell on the ironies — I was what you might call moderate. Cameronite. Compassionate conservatism with a small 'c' and a PowerPoint presentation. I voted Remain. I supported the European project. I used to holiday in Provence.
My colleagues called me Robert Generic. Did you know that? They thought I stood for nothing in particular. A smooth-faced lawyer with a townhouse in Westminster and a listed manor in Herefordshire and a wife who was eight years my senior and considerably more formidable, and they thought: here is a man who will do as he is told and rise without trace.
They were wrong about the trace.
He pauses, recalibrating.
I became Housing Secretary under Boris. I unlocked planning applications. I sat at dinners with developers. There was an incident involving Richard Desmond — the publisher, the property man — and a one-billion-pound scheme in east London, and I approved it rather more quickly than I should have, and two weeks later he donated to the Party, and none of this was connected, and all of it looked terrible, and I survived. I survived because Boris needed survivors. Because the ship was taking on water and anyone still bailing was promoted to First Mate.
Then I went to the Home Office, as Immigration Minister, and I saw.
I saw the boats. I saw the processing centres. I saw the murals.
His voice sharpens.
Do you know about the murals? In Dover. In a reception centre for child migrants. Some well-meaning functionary had commissioned murals on the walls. Disney characters. Mickey Mouse. Cartoon animals. Designed to welcome. Designed to make children who had crossed the Channel in dinghies, who had paid smugglers, who had been coached to claim asylum — designed to make these children feel at home.
I ordered them painted over.
He lets this land.
Not because I am cruel. Because clarity is kindness. Because the message we were sending — come, the cartoons await, the welcome mat is out — was the cruelest message of all. It was an invitation to drown. To pay criminals. To collapse the distinction between refugee and economic migrant until the word meant nothing, until anyone who set foot on British soil could claim sanctuary, until we were running an open-door policy by accident, by squeamishness, by Disney mural.
I resigned from the Sunak government because the Rwanda plan did not go far enough. I ran for leader against Kemi Badenoch and lost. I served as her Shadow Justice Secretary while openly plotting her downfall, which is to say: while openly believing the party needed different leadership, which is to say: while being honest about my ambitions in a profession that punishes honesty.
She sacked me. She said she had irrefutable evidence I was planning to defect. She released my resignation speech to journalists before I could deliver it. Hours later, I delivered it anyway.
Farage was right. I used to say I would put Reform out of business. I used to say I would send him back to retirement. But the Conservative Party is over. Over as a national party. Over as the principal opposition. Over as anything other than a holding company for failed ambitions and inherited furniture.
And I was not going to stand in a collapsing building arguing about the paint colour.
CHORUS
He tells us he painted over the cartoons. He tells us this as if we should admire it. Mickey Mouse, effaced. What cruelty is this, dressed up as clarity?
And yet. And yet.
We have seen the boats. We have seen the coverage. We have felt the uncomfortable sensation of sympathy curdling into suspicion, of wondering whether our kindness is being exploited, of thinking thoughts we do not repeat at dinner parties.
He speaks to that part of us. The part we shush.
Is it clarity? Or is it permission? Permission to think the ungenerous thought, to say the unsayable thing, to abandon the pretence that we are all muddling through together when clearly we are not, clearly someone is winning and someone is losing and we had better be very sure which side we're on.
The cartoons were for children.
But children grow up.
BRAVERMAN
stepping forward with the controlled intensity of a barrister delivering closing arguments
I feel like I have come home.
She lets the word sit: home.
Do you know what it is to be a daughter of immigrants who calls for the strictest immigration controls? Do you know what it is to be called hypocrite, race traitor, coconut, by the very people who claim to speak for tolerance? I know. I have received the letters. I have read the tweets. I have sat in studios opposite presenters who cannot quite believe what they are hearing, who look at my face and see my mother from Mauritius and my father from Kenya via Goa and cannot understand how I can say what I say.
Let me explain.
My parents came here legally. They worked. They integrated. They did not pitch tents in public squares and demand to be housed. They did not arrive on small boats claiming asylum and then disappear into the grey economy. They did not join grooming gangs. They did not hold, as certain communities hold, cultural values at odds with British values.
She pauses, daring objection.
You flinch. I see it. You have been trained to flinch, as a dog is trained to heel. You have been told that certain observations are forbidden, that to name a pattern is to be a bigot, that to speak of invasion — yes, I used that word, and I meant it — is to stoke hatred.
But what is happening on our southern coast is an invasion. Not by armies, but by dinghies. Not organised by generals, but by criminal gangs. And the result is the same: the erosion of sovereignty, the collapse of control, the steady replacement of the country we knew with something we never voted for.
I was Attorney General. I was Home Secretary. Twice. Sacked once for using personal email — a technical breach, a moment of carelessness, I was reinstated within six days. Sacked again for telling the truth about policing, about the double standards applied to right-wing protesters and pro-Palestinian mobs, about the selective blindness of our institutions.
They said I had mental health problems. The Conservatives. My former party. When I announced my defection, they issued a statement saying they had done everything they could to look after my mental health. As if disagreement were illness. As if clarity were madness.
Her voice rises.
I am not mad. I am not unwell. I am not having a nervous breakdown, as Kemi Badenoch apparently believes. I am simply saying what millions of people are thinking, what they say to each other in private, what they cannot say in public because the machinery of social disapproval has become so efficient that honesty itself is a diagnosis.
I stood for leader in 2022. Came sixth. Stood again in 2024. Could not muster enough support to get on the ballot. They did not want what I was selling. The parliamentary party, with its One Nation remnants and its modernising instincts and its absolute terror of being called nasty.
But Nigel wanted me. Nigel has been courting me for a year. And I resisted, because loyalty, because hope, because surely the Conservative Party could be saved from within.
It cannot.
It has left the building. And so have I.
She steps back, but does not retreat.
CHORUS
She speaks of home. As if home were a destination and not a condition. As if home were not also the place one is afraid to leave.
She speaks of her parents, who came legally, who integrated, who worked. And we think of our own parents, our own journeys, the Irish grandmother who was not quite accepted, the Polish mechanic who anglicised his name.
We were all immigrants once. Or our parents were. Or their parents.
And now we are gatekeepers. Drawing the line where it suits us. Raising the drawbridge behind.
Is it hypocrisy? Or is it simply what every generation does: pulling up the ladder, protecting the gains, calling it national interest because the alternative is admitting we are frightened?
She says she is not mad. We did not think she was. We thought she was ambitious, which is different, and perhaps more dangerous.
The three SPEAKERS turn to face one another for the first time. An acknowledgment. A coalition of convenience.
ZAHAWI
We come to you not as defectors but as guides.
JENRICK
We have read the direction of the wind.
BRAVERMAN
We have seen what is coming.
ZAHAWI
You have doubts. That is natural. You have spent your lives in a broad church, and we are asking you to leave.
JENRICK
But the church is collapsing. The roof has fallen in. The organ plays only discordant notes.
BRAVERMAN
And there is another building, newly constructed, where the pews are full and the hymns are sung with conviction.
ZAHAWI
Come with us.
JENRICK
What have you got to lose?
BRAVERMAN
Only the pretence that things are fine. Only the comfort of believing that this can be fixed from within. Only the illusion that moderation is a virtue rather than a failure of nerve.
CHORUS
They offer us clarity. They offer us conviction. They offer us the relief of not having to think too hard, of knowing which side we are on, of replacing the exhausting work of nuance with the simple energy of certainty.
And we are tired. We admit it. We are tired of defending positions we do not quite hold, of apologising for governments we did not quite support, of explaining that it's complicated to people who want simple answers.
Perhaps it isn't complicated. Perhaps we made it complicated to avoid admitting the obvious.
Or perhaps they are selling us something again, as they have always sold us something, and we will wake tomorrow in the same country with the same problems and different people to blame.
We do not know.
We do not know.
We have come because we were summoned, or because we saw the notice, or because Dorothy mentioned it, and now we must decide, and the decision will define us, and we are not sure we want to be defined.
The light is fading. The shadows lengthen.
Somewhere, a dog barks. A car alarm sounds. The ordinary noises of an ordinary evening in an ordinary country that may or may not be broken.
We will sleep on it.
We will ask Derek what he thinks.
We will wait and see.
The SPEAKERS stand motionless at their lecterns. The CHORUS disperses, slowly, murmuring to one another. The projection cycles on: hedgerows, Cotswold stone, a village cricket match, a queue.
Blackout.
END
