In the library of Boodle’s Gentlemen’s Club, Robert Molloy and John Gallacher meet for the last time. They sit close together, their voices low, mindful that their final transaction should not be overheard.
That these men, each marked by the three Establishment stigmas – Working Class, Scottish, Catholic – are members of this club at all, the most storied in London, measures how far they have travelled together. For decades there had been no part of British life they couldn’t touch, and what they touched, they shaped as it pleased them.
Pals from childhood who had shared little more than a tenement close, an outside toilet and a gifted mind, today, 70 years on, they have business to settle. The wood panelling that now encloses them serves as their confessional, and is the only witness to what follows.
Prologue
It had been a sore end to a great adventure: The summer of 1958, two young men, newly graduated, following the whiff of excitement to the Big Smoke and the jazz clubs of Soho. All the world was there, the centre of a universe of possibility.
She was well-to-do, beautiful, and to them, utterly exotic. Precious English porcelain; drop her and she might smash. John caught her eye and she caught his full attention over a fevered fortnight. Of course, it was she who did the dropping. Bored of him all too soon, she moved onto Robert, then the next one.
Despite the bruising, chiefly John’s simmering resentment, the boys’ friendship survived the episode. As did, they much later found out, the child: a baby girl adopted by a Vicar and his wife from Oxfordshire, the adoption quietly arranged by Lord Kesteven, a vain endeavour to save the reputation of his youngest daughter.
In following years, the friends walked different paths. John Gallacher got into the newspaper business, at first the Glasgow Evening News, then the Express, then the call in 1971 to Fleet Street and The Sun. He had proven to be a fine father to Murdoch’s new baby, and assumed responsibility for the other titles in the News Corp family in due course.
Robert Molloy’s career meanwhile had progressed purposefully through the ranks of the World Bank via assorted Latin American defaults and a Masters at Stanford. A 5 year stint on the board of the US Securities and Exchange Commission raised his star above the horizon at the dawn of deregulation, and in 1990 he was appointed Governor of the Bank of England.
With their paths converging again in London, a renewed partnership flourished: One holding the reins of the UK economy, the other running the media empire that sustained it. Between them, and for the next 20 years, Molloy and Gallacher had decided economic policy over a quiet drink and then ensured that the right Prime Minister was on hand to implement it. The success of their joint enterprise had been as spectacular as it was unseen.
The Present Day
Gallacher hands across a sealed file. In it is the DNA analysis that confirms the identity of the father. It had taken him years to tie together the loose threads of the story, and at one point he had four of his best hacks on it. Now, at last, the answer.
Molloy breaks the seal on the file, removes the duplicate documents, and hands one set back to Gallacher. Together they read the detail. A frown gathers, a nod is returned. The penny drops in clattering silence.
“Well, well, Robert. Congratulations. After all these years of adopting Prime Ministers, you’ve finally fathered one. Do you want to break the news to Mrs May yourself, or shall I share it with my readers first?
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s (poor) imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, real or corporate, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Some Old Hat 