Head of State, page 11
The plotters remained closeted in the PM’s office until the last of the private secretaries had left for the night, and the cleaners had come and gone. It was a long wait, oiled by what remained of the prime minister’s private stock of malt whisky. Amanda raised a glass to ‘our leader’, and they solemnly drank to his memory. Then they set to work. There was a lot to do.
Jason Latimer had spent most of his adult life in government service. He had long grown accustomed to being swaddled by cars, secretaries and ambitious buffers between himself and the hard edges of everyday life, but he was neither cowardly nor squeamish. ‘I’ll start,’ he said. His brother-in-law was a moderately successful organic butcher in Leicester.
With Hammond taking the chest and Latimer the legs, the prime minister was carried through the back door of his office into the empty Cabinet Room. There they had to make their first difficult decision. Leaving the Cabinet Room and heading towards the front of the building would take them, via a left turn, into Number 11 and the PM’s private lift to the magnificent flat where he lived. That was the shortest and quickest route, but the chance of running into late-night staff was high.
So Hammond and Latimer took the long road. They left the Cabinet Room by the doors to the outside terrace and took the stone steps down into the garden. Keeping close to the wall to avoid being spotted from an upstairs window, they reached a small garden door opening onto a spiral staircase. This led them, after an exhausting struggle, directly up to the hallway of the flat. From there it was only a short distance to the kitchen, which like most of the apartment had been substantially remodelled in the time of David and Samantha Cameron.
Hammond unwrapped the PM and hoisted him onto the brushed-steel worktop beside the Britannia oven. It was large enough, just, to accommodate the body, with the head lolling over the sink. Latimer, expressionless, examined the wooden block containing an assortment of sharp kitchen knives, but none of them, he thought, was big enough. He started going through the drawers, where he found an electric carving knife that had been acquired during the Johnson era. He flicked the switch and turned purposefully towards the prime ministerial neck.
Purposeful or not, he seemed exhausted as well as white-faced when he returned to the rest of the cabal in the office downstairs half an hour later. Light pink speckles decorated his white shirt, the sleeves of which had been rolled up above his elbows. He seemed to have aged a decade since they had last seen him.
‘It’s mostly done,’ he said. ‘Beastly work, but I suppose doctors do that sort of thing all the time. The hands were easy enough; they’re in the freezer, behind a family bag of McCain’s oven chips – he was a great chip-pincher, the old man – so watch it if anyone decides on a midnight feast later on. The head’s harder. It’s the spine. He was always known for his backbone, and now I can’t bloody well get through it. The knife just slides off. Any suggestions?’
The prime minister, had he been available, might have referred back to those eight blows needed for his eminent predecessor Oliver Cromwell. To her credit Amanda immediately leapt up and began scouring the premises for something that might do the job. But Number 10 Downing Street is not a museum, and headsmen’s axes were in short supply. There was a tiny chopper beside a fire extinguisher and a bucket of sand, but Amanda was on the verge of giving up when she noticed the fine gilded Arabian sword on the Cabinet Room mantelpiece.
Amanda’s father had been a rubber planter in Malaysia, and she was a resourceful woman. She headed upstairs, her skirt tucked into her knickers and the gold-handled weapon beneath her arm. A few minutes later she was back downstairs, a little pale but quite calm, carrying a heavily weighted Waitrose shopping bag in one hand.
‘All done, boys. He was a tough old bird, but I think he’d have seen the funny side.’
The chief whip stood up, stretched his arms and yawned immensely. ‘All we have to do now is honour our leader in the only way that would have meant anything to him – by winning this sodding vote and keeping this sodding country at least half relevant.’
‘Right. Now, who wants this?’ asked Amanda.
An Awfully Big Adventure
Haydn told the PLS executive everything – almost. They were men and women who had kept disgraceful and dangerous public secrets all their working lives, and they were hard to shock. Even so, the odd white eyebrow was raised as he explained not only the prime minister’s death, but the accelerating project of deception and game-playing that was taking place in Number 10 even as he spoke. He did not describe the decapitation and disposal of the body; that was not ‘need to know’. For their part, PLS were not inclined to trust a man like Alois Haydn. Admiral Jock Dalgety and Colonel Mike Patten went immediately to meet the foreign secretary and the chief whip in person, and to hear from their own mouths an edited version of the events of the past few hours.
Once the board of PLS had decided that participating in this exercise would not be traitorous, but rather that they would be attempting to fulfil the wishes of the best prime minister Britain had had for decades, they all snapped to attention and began planning. And there was a lot they could do. Five former members of the security services, led by Dame Cecily Morgan; three former permanent secretaries; two former ambassadors; a one-time head of the Met plus three senior staff; and a constellation of senior military brass (retired) now converged on Downing Street. They brought no secretaries, but a few technical specialists.
The chancellor of the exchequer was safely away in Wales with most of his team for the last frantic days of the referendum campaign. Just behind his office and private rooms is a short corridor which leads to a magnificent but seldom used dining room. It has an elaborate scalloped ceiling, and its walls are hung with modern abstract paintings; its spacious windows look out onto the Downing Street terrace and the garden beyond. Gordon Brown had held some surprisingly convivial suppers there, but during the David Cameron years it had been largely forgotten.
It was there that PLS set up shop. Flatscreen televisions, some of them linked to CCTV cameras in Downing Street and Whitehall, were arranged around the walls. Fat, ugly computers were perched on ornate old chairs and the magnificent dining table. Netting was set up to cover the windows. Jackets were pulled off and piled on the floor. Takeaway food cartons were emptied and discarded. Empty water bottles lay everywhere. On the same floor as the prime minister’s office, just on the other side of the Cabinet Room itself, this would be Misinformation Central.
Jock Dalgety had rapidly taken charge. ‘The first job, everybody, is damage limitation. We are all aboard a leaking ship, and bunging the holes has to start now. I want a full list of everyone who has access to this building, and I want it tonight. Get me the full roster of Downing Street staff and everyone in the Cabinet Office. I want the prime minister’s electronic diary up on a screen at all times. Apart from us, the following people have access to this room: Amanda Andrews, Nelson Fraser, Jason Latimer, that Haydn fellow, Sergeant Hammond, and Ronnie Ashe. Other than that, absolutely nobody else. Is that clear? Miss Andrews is organising security passes for you all. Pick them up before you leave tomorrow morning.’
The leathery admiral glared around the room at the tousled, wrinkled, grey-headed men and women, all of whom stared straight back at him, bright-eyed and flushed, fully expecting that they would shortly be having the time of their lives.
‘It’s going to get pretty bloody smelly in here. And we’re none of us spring chickens. But I expect you to stay in this building for as many hours as humanly possible, until the job is done. The chancellor is away for a few days, thank God. Keep away from his flat, but there are sofas next door and washrooms along the corridor.’ He opened a thick leather file and leafed through it before continuing.
‘Here is our cover story, straight from Mr Haydn himself. A consortium of major British banks and finance houses have presented the government with an ultimatum should the country vote to leave the EU. Unless they are granted extremely generous tax breaks, every one of them will decamp for Paris, Frankfurt or Amsterdam. Between them they contribute something like 15 per cent of the UK’s corporate taxation, so without them the country would go bust.
‘This is potentially a major national crisis, but it cannot be discussed publicly, because that could unfairly bias the referendum vote. It may seem Quixotic, but that is the prime minister’s personal wish. We have been brought in as the negotiating team. Some of you are former Treasury people, and others without a financial background must pretend to be ex-City men and women. Because both France and Germany would be involved if these institutions moved their headquarters overseas, those of you from the foreign services will handle the continental connections. Others of you will gather information from our foreign partners, as you have been doing all your working lives. Some of you are here to keep the Americans happy.
‘All this is boring enough and serious enough to convince most of the people in this building that ordinary business has been suspended. And remember, nobody who is not a member of this organisation has the right to question any of you about our activities. We are all here for the late prime minister, and nobody else. Any questions? No? Then, ladies and gentlemen, it’s action stations.’
All around the room, heads were already bowed over telephones and computer keyboards as one-time spooks and former Met officers began to go through the confidential Downing Street address book. Most of the prime minister’s political team were discreetly told to stay at home until the current crisis was resolved. Private secretaries dealing with individual government departments were given urgent research work to get on with, and told to deliver it to the foreign secretary personally.
That was the soft stuff. By midnight the process of hacking phones and personal computers to check for gossip, or the very first shreds of information which might rapidly turn into gossip, had begun. These defensive measures were essential, but they could not be allowed to take up too much time before the process of active deception started. And that was where Dame Cecily came into her own. The media needed a strong alternative tale. She and a clever young man from Shoreditch had already set up a series of bogus Witter accounts to create the illusion of a news-making domestic argument between the prime minister and his estranged wife. It would provide bad publicity, but of a useful sort. As Dame Cecily always said, ‘In London, if you’re going to create a red herring, better make it stink like hell.’
Soon Witter was alive with breathless reports that the PM’s wife had called him a fat, self-obsessed, libidinous pig, and that someone had replied on his behalf that he had spent far too many years married to a raddled old cow who was shagging her way around West London. That should catch the morning radio programmes, and would make the papers in due course. It was possible that some journalist would contact the prime minister’s wife in person and get a considerable flea in his ear. But it was also possible, these days, that none of them would bother. Anyway, everyone would be looking in the wrong direction.
Meanwhile the young man from Shoreditch, ground zero of Britain’s high-tech community, had been in touch with some academics in the United States who were working on 3D facial mapping and animation. He wore an unappealing pair of red jeans, and his head was shaved at the sides with a long flop of hair on the top, making him resemble the hero of Tintin Goes Clubbing; but he had spent five years at GCHQ, and was a family friend of Dame Cecily’s. His speciality was a branch of computer graphics originally designed to improve facial recognition from CCTV cameras and currently being trialled on the London Underground.
As the prime minister’s head was readily available, Tintin reported, the laser mapping of his features should be easy. ‘Every pimple, every wrinkle, I promise you. It’s a painstaking business, but we have the kit at University College. My guys at Berkeley and MIT say that turning that into a credible animated face – I’ve told them it’s for a Tom Cruise movie – is a lot harder, but it’s doable. So I’ve gone closer to home. Where’s the leading edge in computer animation in the world just now? Better than Hollywood, better than Japan? No, not Shoreditch – it’s just down the road in Soho.’
Dame Cecily pulled her spectacles off her nose and waggled them at him. ‘You’re not seriously suggesting, Harry, that we can create an animated prime minister good enough to fool the public? I know I’m just an old duck these days, but I simply don’t believe it.’
‘Well, Baroness, we have access to the very best laser-mapping techniques in the world. We’ve got the cameras, we’ve got state-of-the-art software, and the best of the Americans have been working with us for several years. Last but not least, we’re surrounded by the very top private-sector computer-animation people. Some of the best games on the internet were created in Soho; even the big US film studios go there now. All I’m saying is that if we put the two together, we might get something very interesting.’
‘All right, Harry. I suspect you’re getting just a little over-enthusiastic, and I doubt that we’ll have the time anyway, but – very well, all hands to the pump. See what you can do. Money no object. Our budget is apparently “whatever it takes”.’
Expert though many of its members were in the dark arts, Professional Logistical Services usually tried, where possible, to avoid actually breaking the law. But some of the things the team now needed to turn to were plainly illegal. The recently-appointed chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, who had requested an urgent meeting with the PM, would have to be directly lied to. A notoriously pompous and nitpicking man, he might well cause trouble in due course. It was also thought that one of the Number 10 policemen on duty had guessed that something big was going on, and that he might have to be blackmailed to shut him up.
At this point Alois Haydn glided into the dining room. His pipistrelle hearing picked up fragments of conversation coming at him from every direction.
‘Well, get him out of bed then. There’s a crisis on. I know, but it’s what he’s paid for …’
‘If you even think of printing that kind of nonsense – no, even think about thinking of it – you’ll never work again. As it happens, I was talking about you to the DG just the other night …’
‘We’ve had a word with the master of his college, and between you and me poor Briskett has let the problem get out of hand. He’s been found in the most unseemly circumstances … We just don’t want him to embarrass himself at his age, so if you hear anything, here’s the number …’
‘No, you certainly can’t ask me what it’s about …’
‘Evan, darling, it’s been far too long. I need to call in that favour. Just something for the early-morning financial bulletin …’
‘One Margherita. One pepperoni. And the one with spinach …’
Alois came close to a thin smile. In his hands he was carrying a thick roll of paperwork. He pulled out a chair and hopped onto it. Then, after calling for everybody’s attention, he unrolled a handwritten note that, he grandly announced, was ‘your get-out-of-jail-free card, ladies and gentlemen – the Royal Prerogative’. This, he read out, had famously been defined by the constitutional guru Albert Venn Dicey as ‘the remaining portion of the Crown’s original authority … the residue of discretionary power left in the hands of the Crown, whether such power be in fact exercised by the king himself or by his ministers’. Haydn told the room that in matters of national security – and what could be more so than Britain’s place in the European Union? – the Royal Prerogative allowed a prime minister to waive various awkward legal restrictions concerning elections, privacy and so forth.
Baroness Tessie Fremantle, who had run the Treasury for nearly a decade, and had been in and out of Number 10 most of her adult life, had forgotten more constitutional law than the rest of them had ever known. In most arguments about British power, simply uttering the word ‘Dicey’ shut everyone up. Not Lady Fremantle.
‘Small problem, Mr Haydn. For all practical purposes, the Royal Prerogative can be invoked solely on the authority of the prime minister. My point is – and it is the reason we are here, after all – we don’t have a prime minister. No prime minister, not legal. Or am I missing something?’
Haydn allowed himself a small grimace of triumph, reached into the silk lining of his tightly cut jacket and pulled out an envelope.
‘But we do have the prime minister’s – the late prime minister’s – authority. I have a letter here, signed by him in his last hours, which completely covers everything we might have to do.’
Lady Fremantle scanned the letter. ‘Well, it does look like his signature, though I can’t imagine he actually wrote this himself. He had a much better understanding of history than to suppose that this was decent. It is his signature I suppose, Mr Haydn?’
‘As you can see.’
‘It is his signature?’
‘Indubitably,’ said Haydn, who had forged it himself only an hour earlier.
There would, inevitably, be a major parliamentary row in due course. But that worried nobody in the chancellor’s dining room that long night. Parliamentary rows almost always happen too late. Their function in the British system is the creaking and banging of the stable door.
The Great Escape
The rest of the prime minister was still lying upstairs, wrapped in a duvet and gaffer tape, seeping. How do you remove a body from Number 10 Downing Street without anybody noticing?
Immediately after Jock Dalgety’s opening speech, Sir Richard Greene KCB, former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, left the dining room and went to meet Jason Latimer by the narrow brick Tudor corridor connecting Number 10 to the Cabinet Office.
‘This way, foreign secretary,’ said Dickie, who was carrying a grubby photocopied architectural plan.
