Head of State by Andrew Marr

Author:Andrew Marr [Andrew Marr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

8

Tuesday, 19 September

Referendum Day Minus Two

The Campaign

What a man. What a leader. Over the weekend, as Whitehall insiders knew, the prime minister had been working flat out in Number 10, talking to bankers across Europe about the possible consequences of a ‘No’ vote. Yet now, exhausted as he must be, he was finding time for a succession of media broadcasts and flying visits to far-flung regions.

And on it went, the scattering of chaff. On Tuesday morning the PM trounced the cantankerous Welsh presenter of the Today programme, being perhaps a little funnier than usual in the process, but also entirely in command of the arguments in the final run-up to the vote. Some listeners, concentrating unusually hard, thought they detected a literary exuberance in his use of words like ‘sapient’, ‘pharisaical’ and ‘prelapsarian’ that they hadn’t noticed before, although hardly anyone thought it worth mentioning, even across a kitchen table or on Witter.

Back in Downing Street, however, there remained the huge problem of visibility. Digitally, it turned out that there was a surprising amount that could be done. A couple of computer wizards in a windowless basement studio in Old Compton Street – if wizards can look too young to shave – had subjected the PM’s head to an advanced scanning process, and the resulting computerised images had been stored on a USB drive and were being digitally manipulated by an aged goth who had been installed in the by-now rank and airless Treasury dining room.

Dame Cecily was padding impatiently around this genius of computer animation, seemingly oblivious to his numerous tattoos and piercings. She made him feel nervous, but he got on with his work, playing about with an increasingly realistic simulation of the prime minister’s face. Using 3D digital mapping the PM’s head was spliced into footage from old press conferences and election hustings. The resulting images gave a convincing impression that he had been out and about at a succession of events in the Birmingham area. He was glimpsed only in flashes, never in close-up, but no one looking at the footage would doubt that the PM had been present.

Dame Cecily’s team used old video clips, stored in the private office archives, of the prime minister seen at a distance or from behind, and overdubbed them with Rory Bremner’s vocal mimicry. The PM appeared to be haranguing a crowd, just out of vision, about that morning’s headlines (PM ‘DISTRACTED’ BY WIFE’S ANGER). They had a stroke of luck when a burst of heavy rain lashed Downing Street, meaning that Bremner, wearing a wig and one of the prime minister’s trademark pinstripe suits, could carry a big umbrella which hid him from the single TV camera stationed there as he climbed into the back of his official car before being driven off at high speed.

For added security, on Sunday afternoon some of the PLS personnel had been relocated to the COBRA emergency room – the secure committee room used for major government crises. From there a small convoy of limousines with motorcycle outriders was easy enough to fix.

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