This is an excerpt from the hilarious novel, Tony Blair: The Wilderness Years, by Ian Duncan Smith. You can download Tony Blair: The Wilderness Years for free.

McKong invited me to look at my new office. I followed Paterson and McKong across the gravel to the door of a drab, scruffy shed. I looked up at the flapping tarpaulin roof. McKong opened the door. I peered inside. There was a filthy sink in one corner. An encrusted tap hissed. An old desk was pushed up to a dirty window, and there was a bench full of old wire, dried concrete, broken brushes and empty cans. I was suddenly nostalgic for my cramped Westminster office.

The shed smelt earthy as though the wood was rotting. It wasn't an office at all. It wasn't even a proper lab. It wasn't what anyone would expect a lab to look like.There were no boffins in white coats filling test tubes. I was not going to be doing that kind of filthy, demeaning work. How was I expected to test anything in such a poorly equipped lab? How was I going to turn a defeatist, what's-in-it-for-me society of whingers into a leading edge, cut-throat, modern meritocracy in such awful conditions? Paterson held out a broom for me. I stared at the broom.

Later on, I let the British Standard rod fall lightly to compact the first layer of wet concrete as instructed. I counted twenty-five tamps of the rod, as instructed. More concrete went in, and I tamped again. I hated that word. It was so the dullest word in history, a word that only existed in a glossary of like really, really old outmoded words, like walk, bicycle clip, Morris Minor and Jeremy Clarkson. You know, I counted twenty-five tamps, again and again like goody-two-shoes. I levelled the top with a wet trowel, exactly as instructed, exactly like the concrete in the runway, and not compressed with a pogo stick that behaved like a bucking bronco. I was being held back, both politically and creatively, and it hurt deeply.

Click Here for the British Standards Website

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