The House of Cards Complete Trilogy

by Michael Dobbs

  Urquhart turned around to look for Drabble, but the press officer was across the street priming the cameramen. Urquhart was on his own.

  “Aren’t you going to open it then?” another pensioner inquired.

  To Urquhart’s mind the flap came away all too easily, the card slipped out in front of him.

  “We are for you, FU” was emblazoned in large red letters across the top. Across the bottom: “65 Today!”

  The group of pensioners applauded, while one who was no taller than the card itself opened it to reveal the message inside.

  “Welcome to the Pensioners’ Club,” it stated in gaudy script. “OAP Power!” The whole thing was decorated with crossed walking sticks.

  Urquhart’s eyes glazed like marble. Rarely had the photographers seen the Prime Minister’s smile so wide, yet so unmoving, as if a chisel had been taken to hack the feature across his face. The expression lingered as he was drawn across the street, more to lay his hands upon the wretched Drabble than to go through the ritual of bantering with the press.

  A chorus of “Happy Birthday!” mingled with shouts of “Any retirement announcement yet, Francis?” and “Will you be drawing your pension?” He nodded and shook his head in turn. The mood was jovial and Drabble enthusiastic; the fool had no idea what he’d done.

  “Are you too old for such a demanding job at sixty-five?” one pinched-faced woman inquired, thrusting a tape recorder at him.

  “Churchill didn’t seem to think so. He was sixty-five when he started.”

  “The American President is only forty-three,” another voice emerged from the scrum.

  “China’s is over ninety.”

  “So no discussions about retirement yet?”

  “Not this week, my diary is simply too full.”

  Their slings and arrows were resisted with apparent good humor; he even managed to produce a chuckle to indicate that he remained unpricked. Politics is perhaps the unkindest, least charitable form of ritualized abuse allowed within the law; the trick is to pretend it doesn’t hurt.

  “So what do you think of today’s poll?” It was Dicky Withers of the Daily Telegraph, an experienced hand known for concealing an acute instinct behind a deceptively friendly pint of draft Guinness.

  “The poll.”

  “Yes, the one we carried today.”

  Drabble began an unscheduled jig, bouncing from foot to foot as though testing hot coals. He hadn’t included the poll in his digest, or the intemperate editorial in the Mirror titled “It’s Time to Go.” Christ, it was the man’s birthday, one day of the year to celebrate, to relax a little. And it wasn’t that Drabble was an inveterate yes-man, simply that he found it easier to accept the arguments in favor of circumspection. All too frequently messengers who hurried to bring bad news from the battlefield were accused of desertion and shot.

  “Forty-three percent of your own party supporters think you should retire before the next election,” Withers elaborated.

  “Which means a substantial majority insisting that I stay on.”

  “And the most popular man to succeed you is Tom Makepeace. Would you like him to, when the time comes?”

  “My dear Dicky, when that time comes I’m sure that Tom will fight it out with many other hopefuls, including the bus driver.”

  “Makepeace = Bus Driver,” Withers scribbled, noting the uncomplimentary equivalence. “So you intend to go on, and on, and on?”

  “You might say that,” Urquhart began, “but I wish you wouldn’t. I’m enjoying a successful career and, though I’m not greedy for power, so long as I have my wits and my teeth and can be of service…”

  “What do you intend to do when eventually you retire, Mr. Urquhart?” Pinch Face was thrusting at him again.

  “Do?” The creases of forced bonhomie turned to a rivulet of uncertainty. “Do? Do? Why, be anguished and morose like the rest of them, I suppose. Now, you’ll excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. I have a Cabinet meeting to attend.”

  He turned and embarked upon what he hoped was a dignified retreat back across the street—like a lion regaining his den, Drabble decided, tail thrashing ominously. He declined to follow.

  Urquhart brushed into his wife as she was emerging from the lift to their private apartment. “Everything went well?” she inquired before she had noticed his eyes.

  “They say it’s time for a change, Mortima,” he spat, grinding his teeth. “So I’m going to give ’em change. Starting with that bloody fool of a press secretary.”

  ***

  “Astonishing,” Urquhart thought to himself as the Cabinet filed in around the great table, “how politicians come to resemble their constituencies.”

  Annita Burke, for instance, an unplanned Jewish suburb full of entangling one-way systems. Richard Grieve, a seedy run-down seafront (which he had once plastered with election posters stating “Grieve for Rushpool” and had somehow managed to live it down). Arthur Bollingbroke, a no-frills Northern workingmen’s club with a strong tang of Federation bitter. Colin Catchpole, the member for the City of Westminster, a ruddy face with the redbrick architectural style of the Cathedral, while other parts of his anatomy were rumored to linger in the backstreets of Soho. Geoffrey Booza-Pitt—yes, Geoffrey, an invented showman for the invented show town of New Spalden. Middle class and entirely manufactured, lacking in roots or history—at least any history Geoffrey wished to acknowledge. He had been born plain Master Pitt to an accountant father with a drinking problem; the schoolboy Geoff had invented an extended name and some mythical South African origin to explain away untidy gossip about his father that had been overheard by friends across a local coffee shop. And it had stuck, like so many other imaginative fictions about his origins and achievements. You could fool some of the people all of the time, and Geoffrey reckoned that was enough.

  Then there was Tom Makepeace, with the flat humor of the East Anglian fens, the stubbornness of its clays, and the moralizing tendencies of its Puritan past. He was an Old Etonian with a social conscience Urquhart ascribed to an overdeveloped sense of guilt, unearned privilege in search of unidentified purpose. The man had undoubted talent but was not from Urquhart’s mold, which is the reason he had been dispatched to the Foreign Office where his stubbornness and flat humor could bore for Britain and help fight the cause in the tedious councils of Brussels, and where his moralizing could do little harm.

  Urquhart’s Cabinet. “And few of you seem to be keeping your eye on the ball, if I may be frank.” The mood was all flint; Drabble had gone missing, the ghost of his folly not yet exorcized.

  “We must finish in ten minutes; I have to be at the Palace for the arrival of the Sultan of Oman.” He looked slowly around the long table. “I trust it will be rather more of a success than the start of the last state visit.”

  His gaze set upon Annita Burke, Secretary of State for the Environment. She was both Jew and female, which meant that the doors of power started off double-locked for her. She had stormed the drawbridge by sheer exuberance but now she sat rigid, head lowered. Something on her blotter appeared to have become of sudden importance, monopolizing her attention.

  “Yes, it was a great pity, Environment Secretary. Was it not?”

  Burke, the Cabinet’s sole female, raised her head defiantly but struggled for words. Had it been her fault? For months she had planned a great campaign to promote the virtues and dispel the tawdry myths surrounding the nation’s capital; from their corners and quiet tables in some of London’s finest restaurants the publicity men had examined the runes and pronounced; a press conference and brass band had been organized, a fleet of billboards assembled, and seven million leaflets printed for distribution around the city on launch day.

  “Making a Great City Greater.”

  What they had not foreseen—could not have foreseen, no matter how many slices of corn-fed chicken and loch-reared salmon they had s
acrificed—was that launch day would also coincide with the most catastrophic failure of London’s sewer system, a progressive collapse of an entire section of Victorian brickwork that had flooded the Underground and shorted the electrical control network. Points failure, and humor failure, too. A million angry commuter ants had erupted onto the streets, creating a gridlock that had extended beyond the city to all major feed roads. On one of those feed roads, the M4 from Heathrow Airport, had sat the newly arrived President of Mexico, expecting a forty-minute drive to the royal and political dignitaries already assembled for him at Buckingham Palace. But nothing had moved. The truck-borne poster hoardings had been stuck and defaced. Most of the leaflets had been dumped undelivered in backstreets. The press conference had been canceled; the brass band had not arrived. And neither had the Mexican President, for more than three hours.

  It was a day on which the dignity of the capital died, swept away in a torrent of anger and effluent. Failure required its scapegoat, and “Burke” fitted the tabloid headlines so well.

  “Great pity,” she concurred with Urquhart, her embarrassment exhumed. “The Ides were against us.”

  “And you’ve come up with a new idea for reestablishing our reputation for caring environmentalism. The Fresh Air Directive. Article 188.” He made it sound like a charge sheet.

  “Health & Safety at Work. Sensory pollution.”

  “Smells.”

  “Yes, if you like.”

  “And we’re against them, are we?”

  “The European Commission has proposed that all urban workplaces be monitored for excessive sensory pollution with a strict enforcement code for those sites that don’t meet the set standards.”

  “You know, there’s a curry shop at the end of my street…” Bollingbroke began in his usual homespun fashion, but Urquhart drove right through him.

  “Clean up or close down. And you approved of this.”

  “Wholeheartedly. Cleaner air, better environment. Honors our manifesto commitment and gives us a ready answer to those who claim we’ve been dragging our feet on Europe.” She tapped her pen on her blotter for emphasis, betraying her unease. He seemed in such acid humor.

  “Have you ever been to Burton-on-Trent, Environment Secretary?”

  “I visited for two days when I was sixteen, for a sixth-form symposium.” Her dark eyes flashed; she wasn’t going to let him patronize her.

  “And it hasn’t changed very much in the many years since. Still five breweries and a Marmite factory. On a hot summer’s day the High Street can be overpowering.”

  “Precisely the point, Prime Minister. If we don’t make them clean up their act they’ll not lift a finger themselves.”

  “But the entire town lives on beer and Marmite. Their jobs, their economy, breakfast and tea, I suppose. And far be it from me to remind you that the brewers are among the party’s staunchest corporate supporters.”

  The Environment Secretary became aware that the two Ministers seated on either side, though still in the same claret leather seats, had yet managed to distance themselves physically from her, as though fearful of getting caught by a ricochet.

  “And you’d close them down. Wipe the entire town off the map. My God, not even Göring was able to do that.”

  “This is a European proposal that we are obliged to…”

  “And how many towns will those ill-begotten French close down? In August the whole of Paris reeks when the water level drops. Small wonder they all flee to the seaside and abandon the city to the tourists.”

  “This is a collective decision arrived at after careful study in Brussels. Our future lies in Europe and its…”

  There she was, driving up her one-way street again, in the wrong direction. “Bugger Brussels.” He could no longer contain his contempt but he did not raise his voice, he must not seem to lose control. “It’s become nothing more than a bureaucratic brothel where the entire continent of Europe meets to screw each other for as much money as possible.”

  Bollingbroke was rapping his knuckles on the table in approval, tapping out his fealty. The curry shop could stay.

  “If you had spent as much time there as I have, Prime Minister, you would realize how”—she reached for a word, considered, weighed the consequences and compromised—“exaggerated that description is.” One day, one day soon, she promised herself, she would no longer hold back the strength of her views. She wouldn’t let herself be emasculated like most of the men around the table. She was the only woman, he daren’t fire her. Dare he? “This directive is about chemical plants and refineries and…”

  “And fish markets and florists’ shops! Environment Secretary, let me be clear. I am not going to have such Euro nonsense pushed through behind my back.”

  “Prime Minister, all the details were in a lengthy position paper I put to you two weeks before the Council of Ministers in Brussels approved the measure. I’m not sure what more I needed.”

  “Instinct. Political instinct,” Urquhart responded, but it was time to back off, move on. “I can’t be expected to take note of every tiny detail buried in a policy document,” he parried, but the effect was ruined as he fumbled for his reading glasses in order to locate the next item on the agenda.

  What motivated Makepeace to join the fray even he had trouble in identifying. He was by nature an intervener. A friend of Annita and strong supporter of Europe, he didn’t care for Urquhart’s arguments or attitude. Perhaps he felt that since he occupied one of the four great offices of state he was in a strong position to conciliate, lighten the atmosphere, pour oil on troubled waters.

  “Don’t worry, Prime Minister,” he offered lightheartedly as Urquhart adjusted his spectacles. “From now on we’ll have all Cabinet documents typed in double space.”

  The oil exploded. It was as if he had offered an accusation that Urquhart was—what? Too old? Too enfeebled for the job? Fading? To Urquhart, deep into humor failure, it sounded too much an echo of the demands for change. He rose with such sudden venom that his chair slid back on the carpet.

  “Don’t deceive yourself that one opinion poll gives you special privileges.”

  The air had chilled, grown exceptionally rarefied, thinned by rebuke. Makepeace was having difficulty breathing. A tableau of deep resentment had been drawn in the room, growing in definition for what seemed several political lifetimes. Slowly Makepeace also stood.

  “Prime Minister, believe me I had no intention…”

  Others grasped the opportunity. Two Cabinet Ministers on their feet must indicate an end to the meeting, a chance to bring to a close such extraordinary embarrassment. There was a general rustling of papers, and as rapidly as seemed elegant they departed without any further exchange of words.

  Urquhart was angry. With life, with Drabble, Burke, and Makepeace, with them all, but mostly with himself. There were rules between “the Colleagues,” even those whose ambition perched on their shoulders like storm-starved goshawks.

  “Thou shalt honor thy colleagues, within earshot.”

  “Thou shalt not be caught bearing false witness.”

  “Thou shalt not covet thy colleague’s secretary or job (his wife, in some cases, is fair game).”

  “Thou shalt in all public circumstances wish thy colleagues long life.”

  Urquhart had broken the rules. He’d lost his temper and, with it, control of the situation. He had gone much further than he’d intended, displayed insufferable arrogance, seeming to wound for the sake of it rather than to a purpose. In damaging others, he had also damaged himself. There was repair work to be done.

  But first he needed a leak.

  It was as he was hurrying to the washroom outside the Cabinet Room that, near the Henry Moore sculpture so admired by Mortima, he saw a grim-faced Makepeace being consoled by a colleague. His quarry had not fled, and here was an opportunity to bind wounds and redress grievance
s in private.

  “Tom!” he summoned, waving to the other who, with evident reluctance, left the company of his colleague and walked doggedly back toward the Cabinet Room. “A word, please, Tom,” Urquhart requested, offering the smallest token of a smile. “But first, a call of nature.”

  Urquhart was in considerable discomfort, all the tension and tea of the morning having caught up with him. He disappeared into the washroom, but Makepeace didn’t follow, instead loitering outside the door. Urquhart had rather hoped he would come in; there can be no formality or demarcation of authority in front of a urinal, an ideal location for conversations on a basis of equality, man-to-man. But Makepeace had never been truly a member of the club, always aloof, holding himself apart. As now, skulking around outside like a schoolboy waiting to be summoned to the headmaster’s study, damn him.

  And damn this. Urquhart’s bladder was bursting, but the harder he tried the more stubborn his system seemed to grow. Instead of responding to the urgency of the situation it seemed to constrict, confining itself to a parsimonious dribble. Did all men of his age suffer such belittlement, he wondered? This was silly—hurry, for pity’s sake!—but it would not be hurried. Urquhart examined the porcelain, then the ceiling, concentrated, swore, made a mental note to consult his doctor, but nothing seemed to induce his system to haste. He was glad now that Makepeace hadn’t joined him to witness this humiliation.

  Prostate. The old man’s ailment. Bodily mechanics that seemed to have lost contact with the will.

  “Tom, I’ll catch you later,” he cried through the door, knowing that later would be too late. There was a scuffling of feet outside and Makepeace withdrew without a word, taking his resentment with him. A moment lost, an opportunity slipped. A colleague turned perhaps to opponent, possibly to mortal enemy.

  “Damn you, come on!” he cursed, but in vain.

  And when at last he had finished, and removed cuff links and raised sleeves in order to wash his hands, he had studied himself carefully in the mirror. The sense inside was still that of a man in his thirties, but the face had changed, sagged, grown blemished, wasted of color like a winter sky just as the sun slips away. The eyes were now more bruised than blue, the bones of the skull seemed in places to be forcing their way through the thinning flesh. They were the features of his father. The battle he could never win.