by Douglas Hurd
Then Sarah made a fatal mistake. Having chaired all day the Select Committee on the final long-delayed audit of the Millennium Dome, she was tired. She had drunk two glasses of Chablis. She could not sustain the uncharacteristic effort that she had made to get into his mind. She fell back into her everyday role as a bit-part politician. She took her hand off his shoulder. Her voice was harsh again. ‘Do you really want to see that bitch Joan Freetown in Number Ten?’
So that, as Roger had sometimes supposed, had been her real motive in supporting him. He won back control of the discussion by throwing a question to John Parrott, the PR man. ‘John, is there any evidence that Joan Freetown was in any way behind the Thunder story?’
John Parrott hesitated.
‘Well? Come on, you must know.’
‘No evidence. She’s been at home all day, refusing comment. Her people say it came as a complete surprise to her. They’re firm that she won’t touch it.’
‘Why did you hesitate? Let’s get this straight.’
‘It’s just that David Alcester’s been going round with a grin on his face dropping hints of more to come. He’s close to Seebright. But that doesn’t implicate her.’
‘That man’s a snake – she’ll find him out in good time. She’s the one who’s standing, not bloody Alcester.’
‘She’d be a disaster,’ said Sarah.
‘Not a disaster,’ said Roger. ‘We mustn’t believe our own propaganda. Or, at least, not the wilder bits of it. You dislike her because she bangs about and has no sense of humour. Both things are true. They’re not hanging offences.’
Sarah was not having this. ‘You dislike her too. And think of that populist Budget. It was all wrong and went sour very quickly.’
‘I’d never go on holiday with Joan – or tell her about my love life, let her buy my shirts. But I did a deal with her on Russia the other day, remember? She’s straight and she’s strong. The Budget was a mistake. She’ll learn. And you’ll all learn to live with her.’
It was not a cheerful evening. For the most part the dinner guests and the support committee steered away from the subject that had brought them together. The argument was over; the statement had been quickly drafted. It said simply that for personal reasons Mr Roger Courtauld was withdrawing from the leadership contest, and would give no interviews. The chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee talked at some length about the collapse of the revolt in Russia. They argued whether the Scottish Parliament was entitled to hold its own referendum on Scottish independence. Sarah explained why the Crown Prosecution Service was not taking action against the accountants who had concealed for several years the financial problems of the Dome. Roger left early, though courteously, and with thanks to them all. There was no port.
Letter from Joe Seebright, editor of Thunder, to Herr Friedrich Vogl:
Thank you so much for your letter. I can quite understand your concern, and am glad that you wrote so that I can clear it up.
My colleagues and I are deeply appreciative of the help which you have given us in our project. It is true that some of the material which our representative Mr Scrowl discussed with you has been caught up in the present political contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party. We regret any difficulty this may have caused you, but we considered that the public, indeed the democratic, interest in this matter should prevail.
You raise in particular the question of the framed photograph of your family on holiday. There must, I think, have been a linguistic misunderstanding here (in our work these difficulties occur from time to time). My colleague Mr Scrowl believed that you were making available all relevant material, and does not recall your making any specific exception. Here again I apologise for any embarrassment, and have pleasure in returning the photograph which he removed from the lavatory, together with a voucher entitling you to four tickets to the forthcoming friendly match at Nuremberg on 10 April between Bayern and Newcastle United, a football company owned by this newspaper. I hope you and your family have a pleasant afternoon.
One of the austere cupboards at South Eaton Place was just wide enough to contain Hélène’s array of dresses. At the end of the row were two silk dressing-gowns, but occasionally she preferred to borrow Roger’s only such garment, large, scarlet and woollen. It made her look twenty years younger.
‘So you are leaving the battle?’
There was no reproach in her voice, either for the substance of the decision or for his failure to consult her in advance. Nevertheless it was a decision whose ripples definitely crossed the frontier within their marriage into Hélène’s zone, and he felt apologetic. ‘I had to decide quickly. I would have asked you if you’d been here.’
She said nothing, but lit a cigarette from a silver case on the table beside her. She smoked rarely, as a sign of independence, making it an action of elegant authority. The case, the long matches and the Limoges ashtray were more important than the nicotine.
‘Have you talked to Felicity?’
Their daughter would be upstairs in her own room, doing her homework.
‘Yes, I told her.’
‘How did she react?’
‘She said that when Joan Freetown came to the Lycée to talk about monetary policy she held the headmistress’s hand for at least ten seconds.’
Roger laughed for the first time that day. ‘But I doubt if they lay together on a towel. There would hardly be room.’
Another pause.
‘What do you think, Hélène?’
‘What should I think? In England, as in France, you erect mysteries round the political process, like fences to guard some prehistoric encampment. For many years I have not tried to enter or to understand more than I need. It is now too late to commence my education.’
A spurt of resentment ran through him. Usually he was content with the freedom of thought and action that their relationship gave him. Every now and then he longed for close understanding and mutual dependence. Under the fig tree long ago in Gascony she had been ready enough to listen to him talking about politics. ‘That’s rubbish, Hélène. There was no political mystery about this. I did it for young Roger.’ He told her about his visit to Hillcrest that afternoon.
Hélène stared at him. For once she did not treat what he said as something expected and discounted in advance. She stubbed out her cigarette, half smoked. When she spoke her tone showed that a similar resentment was running through her. ‘Sometimes I have to decide whether you are a hypocrite or blind. On the whole it is more comfortable to be married to a hypocrite. On this you are blind, only blind.’
‘You mean?’
‘You did this for yourself, not young Roger at all, just yourself. You are not old for a politician, but …’
‘But what?’
‘For myself I am content with your decision. Also for little Felicity. But I remark that fatigue makes men weak before they know it. Even when they are still young. I saw it in my father. I see it now in you.’
‘That’s nonsense too, Hélène. I have never felt so full of energy.’
It was as if he had not spoken.
‘I, too, am tired, and will now go to bed. Bonne nuit.’
She did not kiss him, but smiled at him as she left the room, her resentment purged by the pleasure of having the last word.
Letter to the Home Secretary:
Dear Daddy,
My knee is better and the blood has gone but I am not allowed to play football today. The first XI beat Ludgrove 3–0. Tom has a cold so he is off games too. I have not run away again.
I am looking forward to the holidays. A man called Jim will look after the school guinea pigs till we come back. There are six of them. We have not been allowed to see the newspapers today. But Gromson says you are not going to be prime minister. Does that mean we can live in the country and have a pony?
Love to Mummy and Felicity,
Roger
Chapter 4
At Peter Makewell’s prep school, St Martin’s, by a long and c
heerful tradition, the boys had manufactured at the beginning of term a mock Advent calendar in the shape of a huge green cardboard tree with paper panels set in the branches. Each panel opened to reveal a number. The number recorded the days still remaining till the beginning of the next holidays. The tree, called Happy Harry for reasons too remote to remember, had been at first discouraged and once destroyed by the masters; but by the time Peter Makewell reached the school, authority had relented, and even allowed each panel to include friendly caricatures of themselves and of leaving boys embracing the magic number. Happy Harry stood at the side of the stage in the school hall, behind the grand piano on which the school song was played at the close of each concert.
One Lent term the school had been invaded by floodwater from the Thames. Peter Makewell remembered how the headmaster, a theatrical young man, had announced that the school would have to close the next day, then strode across the stage in his gown and ripped open Happy Harry’s panels in succession until he unveiled the number one. Peter Makewell could hear the cheers even now. He had recently received and responded generously to a financial appeal from St Martin’s; among the projects to be financed were a new grand piano and certain necessary repairs to Happy Harry.
Peter had secretly adopted the Happy Harry principle in his own life as prime minister. Each night he received at the top of the papers in his top box a stiff white card listing his engagements for the next day. Each night he wrote a number on the top right corner of the card. His private secretary Patrick Vaughan had guessed what it meant, but did not think it right to comment. The number was the Prime Minister’s best estimate of the remaining days he would have to stay in office. On the latest card the number was twenty-eight. The 1922 Committee, to which all Conservative backbenchers belonged, had fixed 25 March as the date for the first round of voting in the leadership election. If a third candidate emerged in addition to Joan Freetown and Roger Courtauld there might have to be a second ballot four days later. A fortnight after that, party members in the constituencies would vote. Unless, as seemed to Peter Makewell highly unlikely, the constituencies disagreed with the choice of the MPs, the new leader would be announced by mid-April. Then events would accelerate: Peter would go at once to the Palace to resign, the Queen would send for Joan Freetown or Roger Courtauld the same day, and he would be on the sleeper to Perth, as a backbench MP on, he thought, the evening of Friday, 9 April.
That had been his calculation last night, before Roger Courtauld had rung to say that he was pulling out. There had been no serious conversation. Roger had spoken quickly, almost curtly, as if he had a dozen urgent calls to make, of which the call to the Prime Minister was not the most important. Peter Makewell guessed that Roger wanted to head off an attempt to persuade him to think again. Certainly, given time and a congenial atmosphere, he would have had a go. He thought the story of the photograph on the beach puerile in all senses of the word, and he disliked the idea of Joan Freetown as his successor. But he was given no time to mobilise his thoughts, and in any case he was handicapped by a prejudice against interfering in other people’s private decisions.
So how would that affect his personal arithmetic? Probably not by much. Some maverick backbench MP might try to gain personal publicity by putting up at the last minute against Joan Freetown and denying her a walkover. The wheels of the Party’s election machinery would have to turn as meticulously for a farce of that kind as for an evenly matched race.
Peter Makewell opened one of the packets of oatcakes that the Russells had left in the larder of the Prime Minister’s flat at the top of No. 10. The cupboard had been almost full – cereals, oatmeal for porridge, honey, marmalade, coffee beans and a host of different biscuits. Peter suspected that these were not Russell leftovers at all, but that Louise had sallied forth to Sainsbury’s in those hectic days after Simon’s death to buy provisions for the incoming widower. The preponderance of Scottish products for a Scot to eat strengthened the suspicion: so far as he could recall from their rare working breakfasts Simon had been a man for croissants rather than oatcakes. If so, it had been an odd act of kindness by his widow at a time when Louise had been fraught and very busy. The thought prompted Peter to look at the bottom of the engagement card propped in front of him against the jug of coffee. Yes, that was satisfactory: 8.30 p.m. Private dinner.
No restaurant name, no name of guest. But the protection officer would insist on knowing in advance and would book a table. Il Gran Paradiso behind Victoria, he thought. The Russells had taken regular holidays in Tuscany, so he assumed that Louise would like Italian food, which, at Il Gran Paradiso, was succulent and pleasantly served. He had hesitated before writing to ask her to dine with him. He had a shadow of a reason. The Chequers trustees, who ran the country home which every prime minister was entitled to occupy, had put forward a plan for reorganising the garden in front of the house. They wanted to replace the present regiments of red roses with a miscellany of colours on either side of a new stone path flanked with lavender. This would lead down steps to a statue of Norma Major, the historian of Chequers, conversing with Lord Lloyd Webber, composer of the hugely successful musical that took the story of the house as its central theme. Peter Makewell had found this scheme, warmly recommended by the trustees, in the red box for his first weekend as Prime Minister. Under cross-examination, Patrick Vaughan had admitted that Louise Russell had expressed, as he put it, ‘certain rather substantial reservations’ about it, which was why, uncharacteristically, Simon Russell had left it lying around, neither approved nor condemned. The trustees were still keen, the money for the whole scheme had been set aside and the statue commissioned. But as a matter of good manners and prudence Peter Makewell thought it right to consult Louise, even though she had no status in the matter now that Chequers had passed to him as the new Prime Minister. He would also like her advice about the cook at Chequers and what the local reaction would be if the trustees reversed Lord Blair’s decision and allowed the local hunt to draw a wood at the edge of the estate. Also, he had to admit, he liked Louise and was bored with official dinners or evenings spent alone in the company of his work.
Peter Makewell looked down the rest of the engagement card. It seemed only the other day that he had complained so bitterly about the avalanche of paper from departments. This was no longer so oppressive, partly because he had mastered the substance of the main government policies, partly because the volume of business had contracted. At a time of political uncertainty senior civil servants hoard submissions, giving their immediate masters the false impression as their workload decreases that all is settled and calm. Out of sight and earshot a pile of intractable policy conundrums wait for the reshuffle or the election, after which they will be quickly deployed for decision by the new Prime Minister and his colleagues. The Chequers scheme was the sort of second-rank non-political project that a skilled private secretary would try to slip past a caretaker prime minister during such a period.
The Prime Minister of Dominica was second on Peter Makewell’s card of engagements. She would worry him again about the genetically modified bananas she wanted her island to grow but which the EU scientists would not permit. The President of the European Central Bank came next. He would certainly protest about Joan Freetown’s Budget speech. He would be even more cross this morning after reading over his breakfast at Claridges that Joan was now bound to become Prime Minister.
The director of the National Portrait Gallery – the man wanted to arrange for the painting of Peter’s portrait, or the sculpting of a bust. An honour, of course, but Peter planned to dither until after day zero, confident that the tiresome project would lapse with his own premiership. But first of all … The phone rang.
‘Sir Martin Redburn is here, Prime Minister.’
Sir Martin was chairman of the 1922 Committee.
‘Ask him to come up to the study, would you?’
A few minutes later: ‘Martin, come and sit down. Coffee?’
‘Yes, please, Prime Minis
ter. Milk, no sugar.’
Peter Makewell had nothing against the chairman of the 1922 Committee, but he did not like the man, and was not sure why. Peter knew himself to be an anachronism – tweedy, nearly seventy, a Scottish laird with English manners, holding no particularly strong beliefs, following a tradition of service. While constantly complaining about them, he privately enjoyed the TV jokes and the press cartoons that, in one way or another, treated him as a dinosaur and the last of his kind. He relished the assumption that there would never be another prime minister so gentlemanly and out of date. Yet here was Martin Redburn. Not that Martin would ever, short of some earthquake, become Prime Minister, or a minister of any kind. Martin Redburn had been among the first to embrace the new career structure of the House of Commons. After entering the Commons he had quickly earned an extra salary as member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, then after five years had earned rapid promotion and a substantial salary as chairman of the Transport Committee. Peter Makewell preferred running a department to criticising it, but he approved the transformation of the Commons that this reform had brought about, and could welcome Martin Redburn as one of the first to make a success of climbing the new parliamentary ladder. Nor did he quarrel with Redburn’s views which, in so far as they could be discerned, were close to his own. Probably Redburn stood a few yards to the right of the acting Prime Minister. He had recently made no secret in private of his personal support for Joan Freetown, while in public preserving his neutrality as organiser and arbiter of the election process. But both men were pragmatists, sharing a definition of the Conservatives as a party of sound administrators rather than political ideologues.
And yet Makewell did not like the man. He admitted to himself that this was partly snobbery. Redburn looked like a traditional Tory, had been educated at Radley and was often described by foolish journalists as patrician. But this was not right. He often wore tweeds, but preferred them lightweight and new, whereas Makewell’s were old, indestructible and heavy. The creases on Redburn’s tweeds were straight and precise; the Prime Minister’s creases wandered hither and thither and occasionally disappeared. The Prime Minister’s shoes were clean, cracked and English; Redburn’s more highly polished, smooth and Italian. In the argument that seemed unending both men supported fox-hunting without hunting themselves, Makewell from Scotland because his children and most of his friends hunted, Redburn from Kensington because most of his constituents there thought a ban would be illiberal. The capital assets of the two men were of similar size, but Redburn’s dividends and capital gains yielded twice as much as Makewell’s income from agricultural and sporting assets. Makewell belonged to Boodles Club, Redburn to the Carlton. Makewell spent Christmas in Perthshire, Redburn in the Seychelles.