Union Jack. V. McDermid L.

giggled again. Lindsay had a feeling she was going to become very fed up of that giggle by the end of the week. ‘You’re not kidding. By the way, how’s Ian? Has he recovered from discovering the new love of Laura’s life?’

      While she enjoyed the sharp savour of gossip about people she either disliked or knew only by reputation, Lindsay was less keen to dissect the private life of a friend as close as Ian. ‘He seems fine,’ she said stiffly.

      Either Siobhan didn’t notice, or else she was in investigative journalist mode. ‘He must have been pretty demoralised to find he’d been replaced by a golden retriever. I thought at first it must be a guide dog. I mean, there must have been something wrong with her eyesight, fancying Ian enough to have lived with him all these years.’

      ‘That’s the trouble with you feature writers,’ Lindsay said. ‘You’re all so superficial. Image, image, image, that’s all that excites you. It takes a news reporter to penetrate below the surface and discover the truth.’ It was an old argument, but none the less attractive. It had the advantage of shifting the conversation away from Ian, and it kept the two women occupied until the end of the order paper.

      ‘Coming for a drink?’ Siobhan asked as they shuffled their papers together.

      ‘Tom Jack’s speaking at a fringe meeting,’ Lindsay replied, thinking that answered the question.

      Siobhan looked horrified, then her face relaxed into a grin. ‘I keep forgetting it’s your first time,’ she said patronisingly. ‘I bet you still think fringe meetings are a vital part of conference business.’

      ‘They aren’t?’

      ‘They’re a distraction from the serious business of drinking and socialising,’ Siobhan told her. ‘Come on, let’s go and have a hair of the dog. Whoops, remind me not to say that to Ian!’ She giggled.

      ‘Thanks, but no thanks. He’s talking about how workforces cope when they get bought up by media buccaneers. Since we’re still reeling from being taken over by Carnegie Wilson, I feel obliged to go and see what Union Jack’s got to say for himself. God knows, he’s said little enough at the meetings in the office.’

      Siobhan winked. ‘Say no more. I can read between the lines. You want to find out what he’s not been telling you guys, then you can slip a banana skin under the sexist pig at your next meeting.’

      Before Lindsay could deny it, Siobhan had slipped away. With a sigh, Lindsay headed for the committee room. She still felt she had a duty to the colleagues she was supposed to represent. Like the rest of them, Lindsay was worried about her future following their recent invasion by the New Zealand media tycoon. As well as being the senior JU official at Nation Newspapers, Union Jack headed the loose federation of the seven different unions represented there. If anyone could speak from experience about the implications of takeovers, it was him.

      The meeting had attracted a large crowd, unlike the previous lunchtime’s meeting where six women had gathered to hear a talk on ‘Media Language and Gender Bias’. Not surprisingly, more journalists were concerned about potential damage to their pay packets than about the pursuit of equality. By the time Lindsay arrived, all the seats in the small committee room were taken. She slipped down the side of the room and leaned against the wall near the front. Union Jack leaned against the edge of a table facing the room. Shanti Gupta, one of the two candidates running for JU vice-president, was already introducing the meeting, her strong voice rising above the desultory chatter of the audience.

      ‘Brothers and sisters, I don’t need to remind you of the dangers we face at the hands of asset strippers and fast-buck merchants who pin their dreams of profit to the rise of new technology at the expense of the health and welfare of their workers,’ she said, scarcely pausing for breath.

      ‘Tom Jack, the National Executive member for national newspapers, has recently had firsthand experience of negotiating with one of the new breed of newspaper proprietors, the profit pirates, the men who care more about the bottom line on their balance sheets than they do about their readers. We can all learn from the experiences of Nation Newspapers, and there’s no one better equipped to teach us than Tom.’ Shanti stepped back and gestured towards Union Jack. ‘Over to you, Tom,’ she said, sitting down behind the table.

      Tom Jack pushed himself upright and fixed the audience with his burning brown eyes. His thick brown hair was brushed back from his high forehead, and his full beard almost obscured the collar of his Tattersall-check shirt and the knot of his tweed tie. He looked slowly round the room, as if committing every face to memory, slotting them into his mental filing cabinet till he was ready to take them out, scrutinise them, temper them in the fire and lead them to glory like some irresistible nineteenth-century zealot. He thrust one hand into the pocket of his moleskin trousers, and started to speak. His voice was deep, intense and unmistakably Yorkshire.

      ‘Colleagues,’ he intoned. ‘We’re facing the biggest threat to our journalistic livelihoods that I can remember. I know you’ve heard that before, and probably from me, but nevertheless, I’m not a man given to crying wolf. Shanti here has raised the spectre of new technology, and I’m here to tell you that the combination of Tory government policies, new technology and proprietors who understand nothing of the proud traditions of British newspapers could mean the end of our working world as we have known it. All the benefits we have struggled to bring our members could be lost like that’ – he snapped his fingers like the crack of ice hitting gin – ‘unless we pick our ground carefully and fight to win.’

      The speech continued in predictable vein. The audience were exhorted to hold firm to their hard-won agreements on pay, conditions, and redundancy; to stand up to their new proprietors and show them who really ran the newspapers; and not to concede so much as a matchstick of dead wood to new technology. The rounds of spontaneous applause that greeted Union Jack’s cries to arms astonished Lindsay. It was a long way away from the stony silence that he’d had to face when he returned to office meetings with news of yet more concessions that Carnegie Wilson’s henchmen had wrung out of him. It was easy to see there weren’t many Daily Nation staff members at the meeting.

      With an unobtrusive glance at his watch, Tom Jack wound up. ‘At the end of the day, we’re the ones with the ink in our veins. We know how newspapers work. Carnegie Wilson made his millions out of butchering sheep, and he’s found out the hard way that we’re no lambs to the slaughter. Carnegie Wilson and his like have to bow the knee to us, because without us, newspapers can’t exist. We have to remember, colleagues. They’ll never invent a machine that can knock on doors or comfort a grieving widow. They’ll never invent a machine that can persuade governments to change the law. Whatever the Carnegie Wilsons of this world would like to think their fancy computers can do, we have to remind them again and again, day in and day out, that without us, they have nothing to show for their millions of pounds of investments.’

      It was a rousing finish, and some people even stood as they applauded Union Jack. Lindsay looked around and noticed with interest that Ian Ross and a handful of other Daily Nation journalists had not joined in the frenzy of applause. Tom held his hands up in the air, accepting the plaudits. As the applause continued, she remembered a rumour Ian had mentioned in the car. The JU’s long-serving National Newspaper Officer had suffered his second major heart attack the day before conference began. The word was he would be offered early retirement and the obvious man to step into his shoes was Tom Jack. He’d filled every significant post open to part-time lay officials. There was nowhere left for his ambition to go unless he moved into a full-time paid official’s job that could lead one day to the top job of them all – general secretary. Lindsay wondered if she’d just heard the first speech in an election campaign.

      Tom sat down next to Shanti, who patted him on the shoulder as the applause finally died away. ‘I know some of you may have questions for Tom,’ she said. ‘We have ten minutes left …’

      A couple of the audience had clearly been primed with questions that managed to make Tom look even more statesmanlike than his speech already had. Disgruntled, Lindsay pushed herself away from the wall and stuck her hand up. Shanti nodded to her, after a quick glance at