Division Bells Read online

  Division Bells

  by

  Iona Datt Sharma

  Division Bells © 2020 Iona Datt Sharma

  Cover design © 2020 Lodestar Author Services

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Contents

  Division Bells Division Bells

  Second reading

  Committee

  Consideration on report from committee

  Third reading

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Division Bells

  by

  Iona Datt Sharma

  Division Bells

  “In both Houses, the principal stages of bills are: first reading, second reading, committee, consideration on report from committee, and third reading.”

  —Erskine May, “Treatise on the law, privileges, proceedings and usage of Parliament” (25th edition, 2019)

  Second reading

  In a sense it was all the fault of the Department for Regional Infrastructure and Development, and in another sense it was Diggory's fault for pouring half a cup of coffee into Ari's briefing pack. In a third, very real, sense it was just another consequence of anthropogenic climate change. The wonk from Regional Infrastructure had come by the previous night to say, Ari, darling, your department's going to have to speak to its own Bill clauses, and Ari had sworn at a number of inanimate objects and got to it. He'd enjoyed himself, in a masochistic sort of way. It was what the job was about, at an essential level: distilling a raft of policy and legislative issues into a tight fifteen pages with a tricolour scheme and judicious use of eighteen-point font. Energy and Efficiency had fifteen clauses in the Bill, concerning funding, technical specifics and operation of new wind farms. By the end of the night, Ari knew how to pronounce ‘praseodymium' and ‘Darrieus turbine' and felt that for once he had a grasp of an issue before it had had a chance to blow up excitingly in his face.

  Then the Committee for the Order of Business and Legislation switched the order of proceedings, Diggory fumbled his latte all over Ari's three-colour indicative scheme, and the minister's private secretary rang to say she wanted advance briefing before she had to go to the dispatch box and could Ari please, for the love of God, hurry the fuck up.

  "Sir," said parliamentary security at the College Green gate, "I understand the urgency, but you've got to come through security the same as everyone else. Short of making you strip naked in public in October—"

  "We'll do it," Ari said, instantly. Diggory squeaked. "Look, I'm a departmental official, I'm supposed to be in a briefing right now. Diggory's no trouble to anyone, he's only twelve."

  Diggory, who was twenty-two, looked outraged.

  "Jesus Christ," the security guard said. He took Ari by the hand like a wayward toddler and led him and Diggory past the public queue, to the peers-and-MPs-only fast track. "Belt, watch, shoes, pass."

  "Just to be sure," Diggory said, "you're not actually making us take off all our clothes?"

  "Not that we wouldn't enjoy that," the security guard said, gesturing at his two colleagues, "but no. Get on with it, you'll miss your proceeding."

  Even the kid didn't need telling twice. He and Ari threw their coffee-soaked papers and electronics through the scanners, grabbed their belts and watches without putting them back on and sprinted into St Stephen's Hall. Yaz, the minister's private secretary, was waiting at the top of the steps, the red light through the stained glass offsetting her rage nicely.

  "That's right, Ari, carry your watch rather than look at it, that helps," she snapped. "And if either of you loses your trousers between here and the Residence Room, I will have you both strung up by the balls, I swear to God."

  No one lost their trousers on their way to the Residence Room – which was just as well; the BBC's political editor was in the upper gallery and looked up with interest at a pack of sprinting officials – but Ari paused at the threshold. Take two breaths, Lil said inside his head, a calming trick from playing reels and strathspeys. He opened the door.

  The minister looked up from her phone. "Oh, how exciting," she said mildly. "It's my department. I wondered if I still had one."

  "I apologise, minister," Ari said. "We had trouble with security."

  "Never mind that," the minister said. "Sit down there. Good man. Now someone tell me something about these damn-fool Regulations."

  "Clauses, minister," Eilidh said, and Ari started paying attention to the world around him rather than to the Northern Infrastructure Bill. The Residence Room, rich and plush with its seventeenth-century tapestries, was familiar; so was Diggory, Ari's policy assistant as of six not-very-competent weeks ago; so was Yaz, who had been the minister's private secretary for all her tenure at Energy and Efficiency. Eilidh, Ari's assigned departmental lawyer, had got here on time and had apparently been managing to make small talk with the minister while they waited. Ari made a mental note to buy her a sugary drink with cream.

  The stranger was sitting opposite Ari, scruffy but composed. Dark eyes, an amused, almost sneering, expression, a bright red scarf that clashed horribly with ginger hair. Ron Weasley without the freckles or humility. Ari had been a departmental civil servant his entire working life and knew what he was looking at. "Spad?"

  "Special adviser, please," the minister said, also amused. "This is Julian Elwin. Jules, this is a whole bunch of people from my department."

  "Hi," Diggory said awkwardly; Eilidh muttered something; Yaz knew everyone without being introduced.

  Ari wasn't feeling inclined towards niceties. "Are you here for the briefing, Mr Elwin? Do you have some sort of expertise in respect of wind farms?"

  "Wind farms, yes!" the minister said. "How terribly thrilling they are. Could someone tell me something about them before the heat death of the universe? You, Ari. Talk."

  "The Northern Infrastructure Bill," Ari said hesitantly, "is a cross-departmental bill covering a number of issues related to infrastructure, procurement, transport and climate change."

  It was the first sentence of his briefing, recited verbatim, and it made him feel better. So, strangely, did the ticking clock. What with lattes and security and the general vagaries of the British political system, he now only had fifteen minutes to bring the minister up to speed on the policy area before she brought the legislation to the House of Lords.

  It took him ten of the fifteen minutes to talk through the Bill: that it was being brought by the Department of Regional Infrastructure as a whole but sprawled over so many topics that each subject area would need to be covered separately; that their department, Energy and Efficiency, would be covering the wind farms; and that the minister – Ari's minister, Baroness MacKay of Forth and Rosyth – would need to handle the relevant portion for the second reading debates.

  "Thank you, Ari," the minister said when he was done, and Ari exhaled in relief and glanced at the watch that was still in his hand. Three minutes or so before they'd need to head down. "And thank you for the briefing pack, which contrary to what Yaz may have told you, I have read. A question on page twelve, please, about the different legislative scrutiny at the second reading."

  The spad said, "What's the second reading?"

  He was half-smiling as he said it. Ari was caught on the hop, speechless. Before he could say something incredulous about how someone who didn't know what a second reading was could be sitting in this room, with these people, at this time, Diggory piped up. "It
's when they go through the Bill in the House and then all the peers discuss it. After they've gone through it all and debated it goes to the committees."

  He was clearly delighted to have a question he could answer. The minister shuffled her papers. "On page twelve," she said.

  Yaz's phone buzzed and the annunciator screen flipped over. "We're up," Ari said. "Diggory, you know what to do?"

  Diggory nodded. He didn't – no one who hadn't done it really knew, and this was Diggory's first time – but he'd had the training, such as it was. The spad caught Ari's eye and smiled as they filed out of the room. Ari didn't smile back.

  The Lords Chamber was as full as it ever got. It was a Christmas-tree bill, hung with all sorts of ornaments – renewable energy, funding for social enterprise, something exceptionally dull about the Settle-Carlisle Railway – and every element of it was the pet issue of some peer or other. The minister approached the dispatch box with her usual easy confidence, while her officials – Ari, Diggory and Eilidh, plus Yaz – trundled into the box, a narrow space that barely fit all of them with only a tiny ledge for their papers. The minister was at the front of the government benches, with the assembled rows of peers opposite her and to her right, leaning forwards from their red leather pews. The box was set back against the wall, a short distance behind the minister and nominally invisible. For a horrible moment, Ari had thought the spad was coming with them, but he had peeled away from the group in the hall and headed up to the public gallery. Ari had watched him go, his attention caught by the spad's measured, unhurried way of moving, as though the halls of power were passé to him.

  "My lords, it is a pleasure to speak to these provisions of the Bill," the minister said, and Ari felt the quiet rush of adrenaline. He'd done a dozen of these sorts of debates during his career, each one different, heady with tradition and the great matters of state. Something deep inside him thrilled to it, every time.

  Diggory was obviously sweating, murmuring provisions of the Bill under his breath. Ari thought he would either be baptised by this, tempered by it, or sink.

  In theory, the procedure was simple. The minister spoke uninterrupted to start, giving an opening speech outlining the principles of the Bill clauses and what the government hoped to achieve. From Ari's previous experience, she would take what he had written and ad lib happily off the basic gist of the thing. Then she would yield to the other peers in the chamber: some with pre-prepared questions, some with reasonable ad hoc comment, some here to have some fun at the government's expense. The minister usually quite enjoyed it. Every question that came in would need to be answered by Ari and Diggory and checked for legal accuracy by Eilidh, before being handed down to the minister by way of the parliamentary clerk.

  "Remember," Ari whispered to Diggory, "get the question down, note the peer asking, I'll do the answer, Eilidh's always the last person to touch it. Yaz gives it to the clerk to carry down. Got it?"

  Diggory nodded, shaking. The minister finished her closing speech. Baroness Carlyle of the Opposition bench stood up and said, "I'm grateful to the minister for her cogent explanation of the intent of the Bill clauses and we welcome the government's commitment to renewable energy."

  You're welcome, Ari thought, now ask your question. When it came, at the end of a prepared speech that was less excoriating than Ari had expected, it was: will the wind farm create jobs?

  The minister could do that one in her sleep. Ari scribbled some statistics down just in case, Eilidh ticked to clear it and the minister turned it into a smooth, eloquent I'm-so-grateful-to-the-noble-lady-for-asking.

  Another question on the heels of the first. Does the government care to comment on the significant quantity of delegated powers in this Bill?

  Diggory looked shellshocked at the pace required but managed to write something in the available thirty seconds. Eilidh amended it slightly. The minister took the sheets from the clerk and kept on talking as though she'd studied the subject all her life rather than for a single morning. Why has this taken so long? What is the long-term strategic purpose of this Bill? Has the government economic service been consulted? Has the minister any intentions of renationalising the grid? Does the government have any comment on divergent European policy?

  They were in the rhythm of it now, Diggory handling the questions, Ari the answers, Eilidh checking, Yaz passing on, the minister spinning it all into gold. Ari risked a glance upwards, burning five precious seconds. The spad was peering down from the front of the public gallery, hands on the railing, mouth open. Good, Ari thought viciously. Be impressed at what you could never do.

  Then Lord Millais of Arnfield stood up and said, "Is the minister unconcerned about Opposition Amendment Eleven?"

  Ari handed over the answer about replacements for European subsidies and looked wildly at Eilidh; Eilidh stared blankly back. On Ari's left, Diggory had realised that this wasn't the usual controlled panic but something over and above it. "What's—" he began.

  "We don't know," Ari whispered back. The parliamentary clerk had gone down to the dispatch box, dropped off Ari's previous note, and was coming up for the next answer.

  Eilidh held Ari's gaze a second more, then bent her head and began scribbling. Ari dared hope she had a plan. The minister was reaching the end of the previous answer, her crisp diction starting to peter out for lack of notes. She turned her head to Ari, itself a faux pas: MPs and peers were supposed to keep up the fiction that the officials in the box were invisible. Ari met her eyes and gestured to Eilidh. One more minute.

  Eilidh held up her sheet of paper. She'd had about ninety seconds – a lifetime in box terms – and had produced three full sentences, then crossed them all out in hard pencil. One word remained: WRITE.

  "Fuck," Ari said under his breath. He took the note from Eilidh and handed it to Yaz for the parliamentary clerk.

  The minister glanced at the note and said smoothly, "In response to the noble lord, Lord Millais, I note his question and I will be happy to write out to the noble lord in order to give it the detailed consideration it warrants."

  "If I may interrupt the minister, whose lack of immediate comment on such a significant and unprecedented point," Millais began, but the minister was a pro and charged right on.

  "Turning to the noble lady Baroness Carrington's question, on the details of the Darrieus turbine specification, it is of course state of the art, and while I am not au fait with the ins and outs of the technological wizardry involved—"

  Diggory, bless his eager heart, had fielded that one while Ari had been preoccupied. Eilidh had cleared it without even looking at it, but Ari didn't care about that, letting the technical detail wash over him. The specifications question was the last, save for a couple of procedural ones the minister could do without help. She cobbled together a short closing speech on the wind farm clauses taken as a whole – the Regional Infrastructure minister would take care of the closing speech summing up the entirety of the Bill – and finally yielded to the next department.

  Out in the corridor, Ari leaned against the wall, trying again to reach for calm. Counting breaths, like Lil had taught him, while the adrenaline drained away, leaving him light-headed and thirsty. Traditionally, officials didn't eat or drink before going into the box. "All right," he said, after a moment. "What the hell is Opposition Amendment Eleven?"

  "I should know," Eilidh said, still sounding panicky. "I did know at one point. I thought I advised."

  "It doesn't matter if you did or not," Ari said, the words coming out more harshly than he'd meant. "What I mean is, we probably ignored you like we always do."

  She managed a watery smile and threw her papers down on an ornate wooden table, trying to flick through them quickly. "It's here," she said, looking up from the briefing pack. "Page twelve, Opposition Amendment Eleven. It's the same as section four of the Act. Ari, didn't you write this yesterday? Why don't either of us remember it?"

  "Pages eleven to fifteen is a standard insert," Ari said, mentally kicking hi
mself for not rereading it. "We did it six months ago after the last Withdrawal Act, it goes in every briefing pack."

  He'd been leaning over her shoulder to see, but thought better of it, leading the way down the corridor back into St Stephen's Hall. They shouldn't be having this post-mortem in the House of Lords where there might be a journalist behind any corner.

  "Tomorrow," Ari said, as they gathered their discarded scarves and coats. "Ten o'clock, meeting to discuss it, me, Eilidh, possibly Prashant? Also the Regional Infrastructure Bill manager, maybe Susanna"—the more senior civil servant Ari reported to—"and you too, Diggory. Set it up, please."

  Diggory made a dutiful note on his phone. Something was stirring at the back of Ari's mind, struggling to bring itself into view. The heavy door opened on the other side of the hallway and the spad came down from the staircase to the public gallery. The arc of light coming down from the roof made him look less like Ron Weasley and more like a passing vision from Titian.

  Ari stared at him, and the thought landed in his mind like a chunk of granite.

  Page twelve, the minister had said. It was the question she had been going to ask before the spad had pointlessly interrupted, before they'd run out of time.

  "Chaps." That was the minister, having emerged from the chamber via a pause to gossip with her fellow peers. "I understand I'm writing to that bastard Millais about Opposition something-something-or-other?"

  "Yes, minister," Ari said, cringing. "I'll draft a letter for you to sign."

  "Thank you." She gestured for Ari to walk with her, waiting until they were out of earshot of the spad and the other officials before speaking. "Ari. Don't get me ambushed like that again."

  She didn't wait for him to reply, heading on towards her next order of business for the day, with Yaz scurrying after her to tell her what it was. The spad followed them, with another smile at Ari as he went.