Valid Until
Andreea Vlaicu drafts the amendments, the position papers and the speeches that go out under the name of a Member of the European Parliament. She is very good at it. She is told so, at a fixed rate, in all seasons.
She is also an accredited parliamentary assistant, which means her employment ends automatically on the day her Member stops being a Member - on a date printed in the Treaty, in an election in which she cannot stand. Every five years the badge deactivates at midnight, and four hundred people go looking, in caf s within six hundred metres of the Place du Luxembourg, for somebody willing to accredit them.
Over nine years and two Members - one indifferent, one unbearably decent - Andreea learns exactly what the arrangement costs, what it buys, and where its ceiling is. She learns it from a promotion note that is entirely accurate and entirely damning. From a working group convened after a scandal, whose report she is asked to write. From a colleague on the seventh floor with no window, no ambition and a contract nobody can take from him.
And from a potted plant in the corner of the office, which has an inventory number, a condition assessment, and rights she does not.
Valid Until is a comedy of institutional manners about the machinery of European power - about a place where nothing is ever hidden, everything is written down, and the correctness does the concealing.
For readers of Jonathan Coe, Barbara Pym and John Lanchester. Set in a Brussels that no guidebook describes.
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