"Brookmyre, Christopher - Boiling A Frog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

instead, and resolved to apply the qualities and principles
she had inherited from him to that. In doing so she earned
her father's pride by garnering a fierce reputation as both a
campaigning reporter and an impassioned commentator.
It was only after his death in 1993 that she felt moved to
enter the arena he had made his own. She took two months'
unpaid leave after the funeral, during which time the idea
of carrying on the family name in the Party gradually took
root. This epiphany, she believed, was a symbiosis of her
deeply felt desire to honour him and the removal of his
shadow from that door she'd previously been unable to
walk through.
As his nickname suggested, Uncle Joe Doyle was about
as 'Old Labour' as 'Old Labour' ever got, but as his death
predated the very concept of Old and New in the party,
his association had no negative repercussions for Elspeth's
career. He had not hung around long enough to become an
inconvenient anachronism, so his reputation survived the
zeal of the revisionists and thus served his daughter as she
was sure he would have wished.
She occasionally had to field jibes from left-wing traditionalists as to
what her father would have thought of
certain policies she was peddling, but these were cheap
shots that reflected most unflatteringly on those who made
them. Or at least, they did by the time Elspeth was finished
with them. She countered that she knew him a lot better
than they ever had, and that it insulted his political intellect
to suggest he would apply the values and policies of his
heyday to a landscape that had seen quarter-of-a-century
of change.
With her father's name and her journalistic reputation
behind her, the announcement of her new-found political
Iaspirations was greeted with welcoming enthusiasm by the
Party in Scotland. The 'New Generation' card seemed to
them an attractive ticket: the traditional past and modern future of Labour
conveniently encapsulated. Being
the media-savvy New Labour daughter of an Old Labour
legend very quickly marked her out for big things.
So why, despite wihning the true-blue Glasgow South-
wood seat (albeit in May '97's Tory wipe-out) in what was
supposed to be a cannon-fodder trial run; despite then
successfully standing for the Nettleston and Provanhill
seat in the' '99 Scottish elections; and despite delivering
on everything that had been asked of her, was there still
no place for her at the top table?
Quite simply, it was a question of faith.
Elspeth Doyle had grown up in a house where two things
were absolutely sacred: the Labour Party and the Catholic
Church. There was no point asking in what order, because
at the time they had seemed two sides of the same thing.