Head of State, page 9
But he was not asleep, as some kind of instinct told her almost immediately. She pushed her fingers inside his shirt collar to feel for a pulse. Amanda did not scream; she was of the old school. She cried a little though, and her cheeks were still wet when Jason Latimer, the foreign secretary, walked in for a meeting that had been in the diary since the previous week. Many people assumed that Jason was the PM’s favoured heir apparent, although Amanda knew better. Even so, as he stood over the prime minister’s desk he shook his head with every appearance of genuine anger.
‘He can’t do this. Not now. He can’t go and bloody die on us. Not now, just when we need him most. Amanda, I absolutely forbid it.’
Latimer cracked his long fingers, arched his back for relief and plunged his hands through his long golden hair, which he then shook as if it were wet. A natural actor, he strode to the long window then turned around so that he was silhouetted above the slumped prime minister, like an angel of judgement.
‘This man was my friend. I will succeed him as prime minister, as you know very well. There is no place here for sentimentality or false emotion. I feel what I feel here’ – he smote his breast with apparent emotion – ‘but this is a moment for thinking’ – a long bony finger stabbed the high, ridged forehead over which his golden locks fell – ‘and a moment’s thought tells us … What does it tell us, Amanda?’
‘You tell me, foreign secretary,’ Amanda replied drily. ‘You’re the politician.’
Buttoning his jacket for effect, Latimer flung a hand towards the window.
‘Yes. I am. And my political instincts tell me that out there, where the millions are waiting, we simply cannot afford to lose our leader. I believe the party is ready for me, and that the country will be too. But this is the height of the battle, the furious flurry. Lose our king, and our forces will lose their heart. The people are with us – just – because they love this man. We have all followed him through so much. He has friends in Berlin, in Paris, in London. He has shouldered the burden’ – by now Latimer was enjoying the sound of his own voice rather more than Amanda was – ‘and if they out there know that the leader has fallen, I fear that the cause will fall too. Mrs Kite will plunge down on us like a … like a …’
‘A kite?’ Amanda offered.
‘Quite so.’
At that moment a new voice was heard. It was low, resonant and Scottish.
‘Or perhaps an Assyrian?’
Amanda and Latimer turned to see a tall man standing in the doorway that connected the PM’s office to the stuffy little room that housed his inner staff. That afternoon it was almost empty, apart from the usual dozen computers and the private secretary in charge of speechwriting, who could be seen peering into a hole in the wood-panelled wall. In a nice nostalgic touch, all the paperwork from the floor below, the real, highly secure hub of Number 10’s operations, arrived by dumb waiter, a device installed in Edwardian times, presumably to deliver tongue sandwiches or veal cutlets, but now used for messages deemed too sensitive to appear on the Downing Street intranet.
The man who had joined them began to recite:
‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea …
‘The old man loved his Byron.’
The speaker was Nelson Fraser, the PM’s communications secretary, well known to the general public because he habitually affected traditional Scottish dress. Now he stood fondling his sporran and surveying the scene.
‘The foreign secretary in the prime minister’s inner sanctum, apparently playing to the upper tier at the Royal Opera House. Miss Andrews with a smear of mascara on her cheeks. Our great leader – well, prone. I am inclined to think the unthinkable. I always worried that he’d never make it through to retirement. Poor, lovely man. Isn’t it rather early, Latimer, to be calculating the political odds? But I suppose the old man would have expected nothing less. He might even have approved. And as it happens, I entirely concur with you on one subject. He can’t do this now. Take our leader out of the equation just a few days before the referendum and Olivia Kite will win the bloody thing. And once it’s done, it’s done. We’ll be out of the EU once and for all, now and forever. Which would be a bloody disaster. No, he can’t go and die on us. Dereliction of duty. For once, foreign secretary, I have to agree with you.’
Amanda dabbed her face, from which the colour had drained. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that we can keep the news of the prime minister’s death from the entire British public for long enough to get us through the referendum? That’s six days away. You know what this building’s like – 150 paranoid gossips squeezed together in a small ship in the middle of a hurricane. How could we possibly hide something like this?’
Fraser and Latimer both knew she was right. Number 10 Downing Street is a small, cramped village with lifts and back stairs, tiny offices slotted next to one another and a large permanent staff constantly bringing news from Moscow and clean towels, the latest polling information and coffee and sandwiches, telephone calls from Washington and freshly polished shoes for the prime minister. It’s a village in which everyone knows everyone else, everyone is jealous of each other, and there is only one truly valuable currency: proximity to the PM. Trying to hide his death would be harder than trying to hide the death of the Pope inside the Vatican.
But Amanda had only just got started. ‘And what happens then? What happens to those of us who kept the secret when we have to confess that we lied to the British public, and Parliament, and the king himself? Because this is going to come out. It’s just a question of when. There are the speeches, the interviews, the public occasions, all the times when the PM has to be seen and heard. They’ll string us up, one at a time, darling boys, from the lamp posts outside the Commons. I can feel the hemp around my darling neck. I can feel my long legs kicking.’
Jason Latimer, who had been standing over the prime minister, now moved away and sat down in his former leader’s favourite armchair, from which the PM had plotted strategy, sipping black coffee laced with whisky, with his closest ministers and advisers.
‘Amanda, think. Calm down. All we have to do is move the PM’s unfortunate death on by a few days, so we can announce it after the vote. It could be like Nelson at Trafalgar: death at the moment of victory, the commander on deck at the heart of the battle. Not a dry eye in the house. We just need to buy some time. It can’t be impossible. What we need above all is a cover story. I know it’s difficult, but Amanda, let me ask you: how many people know for sure where he actually is at any given time? Hardly anyone has unrestricted access to this office or to his apartment upstairs, and he has his private lift.’
Amanda was far away, wondering what it actually felt like to be hanged. She’d heard that men … But she was a resilient woman. Her mind picked up on what the foreign secretary was saying.
‘In one sense, Jason, we’re lucky. The darling referendum means we can virtually ignore Parliament. Almost everyone’s away. Most of the cabinet are out campaigning for one side or the other, and Whitehall’s pretty much at a standstill; the PM has no meetings scheduled with the Treasury or anyone else for the next few days. But I come back to my first point, which is that this place is the real danger. There are at least twenty people, from the diary secretary to the PM’s private detective to the key private secretaries, who could knock on that door at any time. The chief whip. Stately, plump, Sam Mulligan. Margaret with the tea. And so on. One of us could sit in the corridor outside and deflect them all for an hour or two, but not for much longer than that. You know how this place is, Nelson, better than anyone. Somebody’s bound to talk to the press or to some pet blogger. If we’re to have any chance at all we’re going to have to shut down the ordinary Downing Street routine somehow, with a cast-iron cover story. But how we do that is beyond me …’
‘Me too,’ confessed Jason Latimer.
Nelson Fraser ran his fingers thoughtfully along the hem of his kilt, an Ancient Hunting Tadger, one of the rarest tartans of all, with its moss greens, faded pinks and tea-stain stripes. His sporran had been a present from Vladimir Putin after a Moscow summit; it was made of genuine mammoth fur. On a close day it stank slightly of brimstone and treacle.
‘It’s beyond me too,’ he said finally. ‘Frankly, I think it would be beyond anyone. You’d need Beelzebub himself to pull this off. So that’s the fellow we need.’
‘Now I’ve heard everything,’ grunted the foreign secretary from his armchair. ‘Ever since Alastair Campbell, people have assumed that being skilled in the dark arts was an essential part of your job. But even I never guessed you had a hotline to Hades.’
‘Not quite. Not actually to Old Nick himself, but the next best thing. Who did the PM always turn to when there was something really difficult, something really dodgy, that needed doing?’
The Gamble
Amanda was staring at the crinkled, acrid bag of mammoth hair. Its smell was really quite something. ‘You’re not suggesting we tell Alois Haydn about this?’
‘Who the hell else could pull it off?’
When the prime minister had been alive, it was said that if he was alone in a room there was more political understanding and intelligence there than anywhere else in Western Europe. Now he was gone, but the three people left in his office had a lot of nous between them. Amanda Andrews had been his Girl Friday since way back in the bleak years of opposition. In her time she had arm-twisted, cajoled and entranced hundreds of MPs and thousands of lobbyists. Jason Latimer had held most of the great offices of state, as well as once being Britain’s Commissioner in Europe. In his youth he had worked for the Democratic party machine in Washington. Nelson Fraser understood the British media backwards, upside down and in its every changeable mood.
Even so, the three of them silently assented that this task was beyond them. The job of hiding the prime minister’s death convincingly enough, for long enough, was so dangerous, so fraught with risk, that they needed Alois Haydn.
It was Amanda who made the call.
‘We need you, Ally boy. I’m afraid the PM has had some kind of seizure.’
‘Tsk tsk. But I’m not a doctor, Amanda. Is it serious?’
‘Well …–ish. He is, in point of fact, dead. That’s why we need you. Can’t happen, you see, can it? Not from a political point of view.’
There was silence at the other end of the line. Amanda could sense that Haydn was weighing up this new situation, calculating just what it meant politically and personally. Finally he said, ‘Nooo, no it can’t, Amanda. Not at all, certainly not now. Dead dead?’
‘Dead dead. So put your thinking cap on.’
‘Reaching for it now. I’ll be with you in half an hour.’
The truth is that once we begin to ask ourselves how a thing can be done, we are already on the slope to doing it. How many madcap escapades, unlikely plots and criminal conspiracies have started with the theoretical question, ‘If I was going to, where would I start?’ Take a handful of experienced political operators, set them a challenge, and the mechanism has already started to tick. By the time Haydn arrived Fraser was sitting outside the PM’s door, keeping intruders at bay with a flimsy story about an urgent call to Washington.
Whatever people said about Alois Haydn – and they said a lot – nobody denied that he was a very fast thinker. He walked in, brushed the dead prime minister’s hair briefly with the back of his hand, then turned around.
‘This can only succeed if we do two things. We have to maintain the illusion that the PM is still alive, by which I mean that he must fulfil his engagements, and be heard and seen. Simultaneously, we have to find a way of preventing anyone from getting into this room or into his flat for the next five days. I’ve given this some thought already, and I can tell you that we’re going to need some serious, organised and professional assistance. Have any of you heard of PLS – or Professional Logistical Services, to give them their full name? None of you? I’m disappointed, but not very surprised. Anyway, those are the people we need.’
Fraser objected: ‘We can’t possibly widen the circle at this point. Certainly not to people we don’t know.’
Haydn gave a thin smile. ‘First, as you will discover, you do know a lot of them. Second, it’s already too late to try to keep this to ourselves. Sometimes longer walls are stronger walls, and as you’ll find, we couldn’t be dealing with a more discreet organisation. I’ve made a call already. Once I’ve explained the situation to them in person we’re going to need to bring them here, in house, but I promise you that nobody will even notice.’
If you leave the private secretaries’ antechamber to the PM’s office in Number 10 Downing Street and turn left, the first thing you come to is a rabbit warren of tiny offices, where the private secretaries do their real work. Then comes a corridor which leads, through a security door rather like an airlock on a submarine, to the larger bureaucracy of the Cabinet Office. Number 10 people can choose to pass through the Cabinet Office and to go anywhere in Whitehall from there, including – via a secret tunnel – to the Ministry of Defence. It is much harder for Cabinet Office staff to go the other way, as the electronic pass system is cleverly configured for mostly one-way traffic. There are other interesting places in that part of Number 10 too, from the police secure room where the CCTV cameras are monitored to a small cupboard containing the flags that are brought out and displayed when foreign dignitaries visit. But the most important room is the kitchen, where tea, coffee, biscuits and sandwiches are prepared. It was there that the foreign secretary now went, returning to the PM’s office bearing a tray.
The four people in the room had suddenly felt exhausted and famished. They sipped and munched in solemn silence. The full implications of what they were attempting were beginning to sink in. They planned to deceive the British people at the very time that they were taking a vitally important decision which would affect the future of the nation, and possibly that of the entire European continent. They were doing this, they all understood, because they had loved the former prime minister, and because they thought that a victory for Olivia Kite, and Britain’s exit from the European Union, would be a national catastrophe. But that didn’t alter the fact that what they were doing was treason. If they were found out they would be remembered for decades, perhaps for centuries, as villains. Yet each of them had private reasons for choosing to go ahead with the plan.
Jason Latimer wanted to be the next prime minister. If Olivia Kite won the referendum it would almost certainly be she who inherited the crown, and any hopes he had of Number 10 would be dashed. But if the deception worked and the PM ‘died’ at the moment of victory, Jason would be well placed to succeed him. That the PM had always cordially despised him no longer mattered.
Amanda Andrews, despite her provocative manner, was perhaps the most political person in the room. She had adored the PM, and was an ardent, Tuscany-soaked Europhile. But more important than any of that, she had a seething, almost uncontrollable hatred of Olivia Kite. In the days when Kite had had access to Number 10 the two women had experienced an instantaneous mutual antagonism. Amanda despised Olivia’s face, make-up, clothing, smell, shoes and accent. Olivia felt, if anything, slightly more strongly about Amanda. From the family kitchen to the boardroom such irrational antagonisms hedge us all, helping to shape our fate whether we succumb to them or try vainly to resist.
As for Nelson Fraser, he saw his moment in history arriving. Whether he emerged from it as a hero or a villain, it would provide the raw material for one of the greatest books on politics ever written. Also, being trapped in this building for several days of intense crisis management might well present him with a long-awaited opportunity of becoming considerably more intimate with Amanda Andrews.
And Alois Haydn … was Alois Haydn. He could no more turn down a conspiracy than the late Alan Clark MP could turn down a ‘filly’.
By the time the sandwiches had gone and the coffee pots had been emptied, Fraser had slipped out of the office and returned with a thin stack of small, typed pieces of card – the PM’s daily engagements, extracted from the electronic diary and normally carried in his top pocket. The process of preparing them was like reducing a good sauce. The raw material for the day arrived electronically: all the requests, routine meetings, hoped-for private engagements – everything from a birthday that must not be forgotten to the time set aside to prepare for a visit from the Portuguese prime minister. These were typed into the electronic diary in the secure private office one floor below. It was the private secretaries who, deciding that a newspaper editor must be disappointed, and juggling the conflicting demands of Parliament and the PM’s constituency chairman, assembled a daily briefing document. This, together with the red box that went up to the PM’s private apartment last thing each night, gave him everything he needed to get through the following day. From it were drawn the small pieces of card, the aides-memoire that Nelson Fraser was now flicking through.
‘Nothing in Parliament of course, thank Christ. There’s the Sunday-morning telly, but there’s a question mark against that already, so we can get out of that. That’s it for the weekend. Then there’s the audience with the king on Monday morning. And lots of campaigning – we’ve promised that he’ll visit Edgbaston and Wolverhampton in the early part of next week, and we have to fit the Bluewater shopping centre in somehow too. That’s what we have to deal with immediately. Could have been worse, I guess.’ Fraser was about to slip the cards into his sporran when he caught Amanda’s glare, and quickly placed them on the desk.
‘No souvenirs, Nelson.’
‘No souvenirs, Amanda.’
Jason Latimer was leafing through the PM’s daily briefing folder as if to the manner born. He pointed out that Buckingham Palace could hardly just be ignored. At the very least an emissary would have to be sent to see the king. He suggested that the only go-between who might work was the chief whip, Ronnie Ashe. ‘I know it must seem that we’re widening the circle all the time, but there simply aren’t enough of us in this plot yet to make it work. And after all, Ronnie was the PM’s closest friend, and he does know the king, as well as being a wise old bird. Besides which, attempting any deep skulduggery at Westminster without the chief whip would be as futile as trying to run a revolution without the secret police. All in favour?’
