Dennis Gimball
Who they are
The MP who carried Brexit out of a one-issue party and into the mainstream, and the man the Prime Minister spends the first half of the book worrying about. He left his old party “with supreme reluctance” to front the campaign (C02), and by the time of Abbotsfield he has a column in the papers, a wife who writes it, and a constituency meeting booked in Slough at which he means to announce his return.
He is the story’s political weather rather than its plot. After the massacre he attacks Claude Whelan in Parliament as unfit for purpose (C01); he and Dodie Gimball spend an evening rehearsing a speech and a column that will accuse Zafar Jaffrey of terrorist connections through his bagman Tyson Bowman (C03). The Prime Minister reads the mood off him: if Gimball comes back, the First Desk falls with him (C02).
What they want
Number Ten, or the appearance of it — and once Claude Whelan shows him the photograph, martyrdom. Whelan’s warning in the Gimballs’ mews flat (C06) offers him silence in exchange for dropping the speech; Gimball decides to defy the threat and cast himself as a martyr instead. In the Slough alley he nearly reverses that, telling himself he will confess a private truth rather than be blackmailed, then talks himself out of it and resolves to do as Whelan wants (C07). He is dead before the decision can cost or save him.
Book 5 — London Rules
- C01 — Lambasts the Service in the House; his attack is the reason Whelan is on notice.
- C02 — Offstage, as the PM weighs his return to the fold and the threat to Whelan’s job.
- C03 — At home in Chelsea, rehearsing the speech and Dodie’s column against Jaffrey, and planning to announce his return.
- C06 — Warned off by Whelan with the Dancing Bear photograph; alone in his garden he chooses defiance and martyrdom.
- C07 — In Slough for the meeting, keeping “their powder dry”; slips out for a cigarette, argues himself out of confessing, and is confronted by a tattooed man in the alley behind the scaffolding.
- C08 — Named dead on social media before any official confirmation; the tattooed man becomes the Service’s convenient scapegoat.
Open questions
Who killed him. The text gives a tattooed man in the alley and, later, An saying his death served the plan “although they did not kill him” (C08). Zafar Jaffrey questions Tyson Bowman about “a confrontation with Gimball” and decides Tyson must disappear (C10), which is either a confession or a man clearing up someone else’s mess. The book does not settle it, and the wiki should not either.
Related
Dodie Gimball · Zafar Jaffrey · Tyson Bowman · Claude Whelan · The Watering Hole Paper