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People deceived by bad actors do wicked things for good reasons. —Bryan Appleyard
As the PM’s enforcer, Sparrow wasn’t as high profile as his predecessor had been—it would have been challenging to maintain that level of unpopularity without barbecuing an infant on live television—but those in the know recognised him as a homegrown Napoleon: nasty, British and short.
Sociopathy had long been recognised as a handy attribute in politics. Only recently had it been considered worth boasting about.
Keyboards were weaponised, trolls emerged from under bridges, and somewhere along the way free elections turned into free-for-alls, as if democracy were a shaggy dog story to which a joke president was the punchline. All those decades of the arms race, and it turned out there was no greater damage you could inflict on a state than ensure it was led by an idiot. Somewhere, someone, probably, was laughing.
Waterproof, in a word. A form of anonymised rendition. This wasn’t about returning bad actors to the wings; it was about removing them from the cast list altogether. Records were sealed. Names erased. And the subjects never saw daylight again. Even today they’d be alive somewhere, some of them, living out what was left of their span in unwindowed cells in black prisons in eastern Europe. Cells the size of phone booths.
Anyone who thought power was about anything other than settling scores hadn’t been paying attention.
The things that didn’t kill you made you stronger, apparently, though that was a lie; truth was, too many things left you still alive but broken and disturbed, and it was better not to experience them.
What people failed to realise was, success didn’t depend on coherent strategy—coherent strategy left you nailed to one course of action, and at the mercy of events. But once you grasped that there were some problems nobody would ever solve, your options widened. Chaos became an alternative, a fertile ground out of which new possibilities arose . .
Every national panic permitted a government to lace its boots tighter, which was why every government needed a visionary unafraid to sow chaos.
