Ten Lords A-Leaping

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

  He saw Pooley’s quizzical look. ‘All right, I admit it. Of course the real reason I’m committed to this is that it’s always exhilarating being in cahoots with Jack. You never know what the day might hold.’

  Pooley gave a shiver. ‘I think I’d rather be on safer ground.’

  ‘Have you and Jim any interesting murders on your hands at the moment?’

  ‘No. I have to admit things are a bit dull. A few open-and-shut domestics are all I’m dealing with at present.’

  ‘Well, you never know. The way the activists are carrying on, you may yet be landed with a corpse. Their demos are getting nastier. Sometimes I’m quite nervous. I won’t be sorry when all this is over.’

  ‘So what’s going to happen now? The second reading debate’s on Tuesday, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How will it go? Will you win?’

  ‘Apparently by convention government bills just don’t go to a vote on the second reading. Mind you, at first Jack thought we should bash ahead with a vote regardless. She pointed out that in war it’s important to try to win as early as possible so as to minimize your losses. But Stormerod put his foot down. Said we’d lose the waverers if we flew in the face of tradition. Besides, as he rightly said, since some of the provisions are acceptable, it would be hard to vote against. You don’t win friends by voting for torturing squirrels.’

  ‘So what’s your immediate objective?’

  ‘To win a moral victory and, inter alia, give the government notice that this one could be a nuisance. They’re full of legislative plans—including Lords reform—so they won’t be pleased at the possibility of being tied down on this one. But our side intends to fight it out in hand-to-hand combat in Committee. We won’t be able to defeat it, but we intend—if we can—to emasculate it. And then bung it back to the Commons.’

  ‘Sounds straightforward, but I suppose it isn’t.’

  ‘Too right. It’ll all involve a lot of work and aggro, especially with these mad clowns demonstrating outside day in and day out. Our worry is that it won’t be easy to whip in enough of our chaps to support us in the chamber and turn up regularly to the Committee. However, I’m reasonably optimistic. Jack’s managed to form a coherent group that’s more or less prepared to follow orders.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘Stormerod nominally, though Jack’s the driving force and I’m the ventriloquist, writing speeches and doing briefings. It’s just like being back in the civil service. Just more fun.’

  ‘And who are your puppets?’

  ‘Beesley and Poulteney mainly. Though I’m doing a fair bit of work with Jack, Sid Deptford, and Stormerod to make sure they don’t trip over each other in their arguments. We’re focusing on the fox-hunting issue, since that’s the one everyone’s particularly exercised about.’

  ‘You should be all right, shouldn’t you? Isn’t Stormerod an old master at this sort of thing? Though of course Jack’s new to it. It must be a strain for her to have to make her maiden speech on such a high-profile occasion.’

  ‘You speaking of Jack Troutbeck?’

  ‘Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘In fact, she and Stormerod have decided to throw discretion to the winds and put her in the vulnerable position towards the end where she’ll have to respond to the opponents’ arguments. Old Bertie has great faith in her. So do I, really.’

  Pooley raised his glass. ‘To success. And I promise not to nag you again until it’s all over.’

  ***

  ‘I’ve written speeches for some dodos in my time, but nothing to match this. I don’t think even the dimmest politician presents a challenge of the magnitude of Tommy and Reggie.’

  The baroness laughed. ‘Are you seriously suggesting they’re stupider than your old minister, Norman Thring?’

  ‘He doesn’t even rate. At least when you gave him a speech—admittedly in words of one syllable—he was able to read it out with a bit of expression. But there are moments when I’ve been seriously wondering if Tommy Beesley can read. However, I’ve taken both of them through their speeches three times and they might just do.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want this to go to your head, Robert, but I have to say that bearing in mind the raw material they gave you and their deficiencies as orators, it sounds as if you’ve done a notable job of damage limitation.’

  ‘There’s always the chance Reggie will lose his speech or Tommy will return to his plan of simply asserting stoutly over and over again that he won’t stand for it.’

  ‘Just make sure that doesn’t happen. Now, had Reggie heard any more about the damaged saddle?’

  ‘Yes. Forensic tests show definitely it was tampered with, which is borne out by Hawkins, who had polished it within a few days of the hunt. But a lot of people could have had access to it during the day. And at night, if they knew where to find the key.’

  ‘Which was kept?’

  ‘On a nail outside the back door. Not very difficult. Anyone could have had access to it. It required no special skill.’

  ‘So is the money on the loony end of the animal activists?’

  ‘Jennifer said the police had given the family a considerable going-over, but that they’re now doing routine checks on any violent animal activists they’ve got on file. But they’re not hopeful of finding the culprit.’

  ‘How’s Reggie taking it?’

  ‘Very well. Snorted a lot and talked about tosses he had taken in his time and other fox-hunting witterings. What was more disturbing was the letter Tommy showed me.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Threatening vengeance if he didn’t support abolition.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘They seem to have gone out to everyone in the Lords, including me. I did a spot check when mine arrived. The only reason Reggie won’t have had it is because he wasn’t at home.’ She went over to her desk, took a piece of paper out of her drawer and tossed it over to Amiss. Printed in red ink on cheap paper, it was headed, ‘BEWARE’.

  ‘That’s a good opening,’ said Amiss. ‘They’ve obviously been reading about the necessity to grab your audience at the very first word.’

  He read on.

  Member of the House of Lords—You are trying to defeat a just bill which outlaws evil. Everyone who speaks against any part of the Wild Mammals Bill will be responsible for putting the lives of their families and property at risk. Wrongdoing must be punished.

  THE ANIMAL AVENGERS

  ‘I never heard of them, but they sound quite serious. Have you told the police?’

  ‘I rang your pal Pooley and then faxed it to him. Presumably Scotland Yard will be doing something, but it is worrying.’

  ‘You mean you’re afraid someone might take a pot shot at you?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. What’s worrying is the effect it will have on the noble lords without backbone, of whom I fear there may be a few. I’m concerned lest they find themselves on Tuesday with urgent business elsewhere, just when we need a show of strength.

  ‘So with Jock’s help I got Reggie to send this out to everyone this afternoon.’ She handed him a fax from the House of Lords. The letter read

  Dear

  I believe you may have received from a scoundrelly group calling itself THE ANIMAL AVENGERS a threatening communication. Since I have reason to believe that it was they who recently damaged my saddle and caused me to take a toss in the hunting field, I thought I should let you know that I am standing firm. I have no intention of letting terrorists move me from the path of duty to Britain and her way of life. Therefore I still intend to be speaking against the antihunting clauses of the Wild Mammals Bill on Tuesday.

  I have every confidence that you are as zealous as I am when it comes to upholding free speech and that you will not allow yourself to be persuaded by wicked and un-British threats into abandoning the path of duty.

  I remain,

  Yours sincerely,

  Poulteney

  ‘But I only le
ft him at two o’clock.’

  ‘Yes, but Bertie nobbled him a few minutes later and between his secretary, a word processor, and three clerks brought in from a nearby agency, the whole twelve hundred will have been sent out by five o’clock, topped and tailed by Reggie. It’s exhausted him more than an all-day hunt. If you work it out, he must have written more than two thousand four hundred words, which is probably as much as he would normally write in the course of a year. Martini?’

  ‘Martini?’

  ‘Yes, martini. What’s so difficult about that concept?’

  ‘Nothing. It just seems a bit unexpected. I hadn’t expected you to indulge in anything as effete as cocktails.’

  ‘There’s nothing effete about a good martini, young Robert. Not the way I make them.’ She strolled over to the fridge, removed a bottle of gin, poured it into two glasses, added a couple of drops of vermouth and dropped in an already prepared twist of lemon rind. She presented a glass to Amiss, who examined it doubtfully.

  ‘You believe in sixteen parts gin to one of vermouth, I see.’

  ‘I’m not quite as heavy on the vermouth as that.’

  He tried it timidly and after a certain amount of choking began to enjoy it. The baroness looked pleased.

  ‘Good. Now you’ve got some nourishment, I wouldn’t mind a chat about my own speech. I’m relying on you to stop me from getting too carried away. I am, after all, a maiden speaker and it behoves me to affect a certain modesty.’

  ‘Aren’t you a bit old to change the habits of a lifetime?’

  ‘Stop being smart and take a look at this draft.’

  ***

  ‘Have you never felt nervous about anything?’

  She raised her head from her newspaper. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Tuesday, for instance. Are you at all nervous about making this speech?’

  ‘No, why should I be?’ She was clearly baffled.

  ‘In case you make a hash of it.’

  ‘You mean compared to Tommy and Reggie?’

  ‘No, no, no. I’m talking within the bounds of possibility. I mean just do it badly.’

  ‘If I do it badly, I do it badly. Just have to do it better next time.’ She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘What are you going on about? Is it wrong not to worry?’

  ‘No, no, Jack.’ Amiss felt weary. ‘It’s not wrong. It’s just unusual.’

  ***

  The telephone rang early on Tuesday morning. Bleary from too late a night working on last-minute additions to Stormerod’s speech, Amiss climbed miserably out of bed, picked up the receiver and croaked, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  He was baffled at such an enquiry from the baroness. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘It’s just that I’ve had a letter bomb, and I was afraid you might have had one too.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ he shouted.

  ‘Of course. I spotted it just in time and chucked it into an armchair. It gave Plutarch a nasty shock when it went off, but she’s recovered now. The chair isn’t looking too good, but otherwise all is well. Right, you warn Bertie, Sid, Reggie, and Tommy and when I’ve tipped off the fuzz, I’ll get in touch with anyone else who occurs to me. Tell everyone we proceed regardless. Bye.’

  ‘Jack!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I…I’m glad you’re all right.’

  ‘I’m glad you are too,’ she said gruffly and put the phone down.

  ***

  ‘I won’t put up with it.’ Beesley was shaking with rage. ‘I tell you I won’t put up with it. First threatening letters and now this. You and Sid could have been killed.’

  ‘Well, we weren’t. So we go on as normal. We’re all here to make sure our speeches complement each other and that we know what we’re going to do. I trust no one’s got cold feet.’

  Beesley, Deptford, and Poulteney snorted with indignation at the suggestion. Stormerod merely smiled and Amiss raised his eyes to heaven.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Poulteney, ‘is why you two were the only ones to be sent bombs.’

  ‘I expect because apart from Robert—who doesn’t count—we’re the only ones likely to have been at home this morning. The senders would appear to have been considerate enough to wish to avoid unnecessarily injuring noncombatants.’

  ‘They weren’t so considerate with all those bombs a few weeks ago. Remember one took the hand off an MP’s secretary.’

  ‘Maybe they learned from that,’ said the baroness. ‘Anyway, speculation’s a waste of time and we haven’t any time to waste. Let’s get on with it. Robert, take us through the running order of the arguments again. Then we can have a decent lunch.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was no doubt that numbers were down. Where Stormerod had originally expected the Conservative benches to be full, there were now several gaps. But although the word was that a few names had been withdrawn from the speakers’ list, there were enough for Amiss, sitting in the front row of spectators just to the right of the baroness, to be resigned to a long session.

  Lady Parsons kicked off very much in the style of the Islington public meeting. She spent little time on the uncontentious clauses, but when she got to hunting, the detailed facts and figures tumbled out followed by the moral denunciation: there was no place for the anachronistic pursuits of the idle rich in a modern society facing the challenge of the European Union. It was disgraceful that country people should still carry such traditional baggage from the shameful days of Empire.

  She sat down to obedient but unenthusiastic ‘hear, hears’. Stormerod came next. His unassuming, urbane tone was ideally suited to the Lords. ‘I should like to congratulate the noble and learned baroness on her mastery of the evidence for the prosecution. Such is her skill that I wished she might have turned her redoubtable talents to the defence—where I am sure she would have made an even better case. She, whose concern for the underprivileged is so well known, could not have failed to be moving on the subject of the damage that would be done to ordinary people in so many professions if this bill went through.’

  He dwelt movingly and in sequence on the plight of the huntsmen and the houndsmen whose lives had been dedicated to the ancient trades in which they took such pride.

  ‘I am not myself a huntsman, so it might surprise you that I am opening for the defence of that sport, but then the noble and learned baroness is not a fox.’ This piece of wit elicited polite laughter from all over the house, fortunately drowning out to all but those in the Baroness Troutbeck’s immediate vicinity the mutter, ‘But she is a bloody vixen.’ Gently and in the pragmatic manner that befitted an elder statesman, Stormerod talked of those parts of the bill with which he was entirely happy and then about what made hunting different. Why was it, he asked, that as with capital punishment, every time the House of Commons had given proper consideration to the hunting issue, reason had triumphed over prejudice and the visceral popular demand to abolish the one and reinstate the other had been rejected? Now it was for the Lords to make sure that irrationality did not prevail.

  Brother Francis, aka the Lord Purseglove, could not compete with this. Where Stormerod fitted in with the ambience of the Lords like a top hat at Ascot, Brother Francis looked as out of place as an anorak. Amiss knew enough of the Lords by now to appreciate that while eccentricity was part and parcel of the place, it had to be within clearly defined parameters. You could be shabby, boring, dotty, absent-minded, repetitive, and a bit of a drunk, but anything that smacked of the spiv, the cad, or the crank made you, by definition, an outsider. Brother Francis’ dress, from his plastic sandals to his clerical collar, did not put his audience at their ease. Apart from anything else, as Sid had explained to Amiss, there was deep disapproval that he was sitting on the cross benches in clerical gear. To the Lords, clergy were bishops: they sat on the benches of the Lords Spiritual in a properly hierarchical manner, archbishops to the fore on the benches with the arm rests. It was muddling to have a mem
ber of the clerical lower orders turning up and suggested that the chap was obviously unsound.

  Like Lady Parsons, Brother Francis had made few concessions to a change of audience, though he had the wit to begin with a waffly wringing of hands about how dreadful violence was and how he hated it as much when it was applied to man as to beast. He had also left out his verses and his hymn; clearly he was not such an innocent as to be unaware that the Lords were likely to be a bit conservative about their hymn sheet. But he did produce an apposite verse from Cowper:

  …Detested sport,

  That owes its pleasure to another’s pain;

  That feeds upon the sobs and dying shrieks

  of harmless nature…

  Yet though his sincerity earned him a sympathetic hearing, he kept annoying their lordships. It was, for instance, clear to Amiss from the shocked expressions within his vision that it did not go down well to address peers as: ‘My noble brothers and sisters.’ Nor did his syrupy sentimentality appeal either to those of rural background—the majority of the hereditary mob—or to those who had fought their way up the greasy poles of politics, academia, law, or business. In choosing him as her seconder, Lady Parsons had shown how little she understood the institution.

  Deptford came next and—as an old Lords hand—got the tone completely right. Simply and directly, he told the autobiographical story of how hunting had brought joy, excitement, and an understanding of the cycle of nature to a boy from the most underprivileged of backgrounds. And he raised a laugh by telling of his delighted amazement in finding the sport egalitarian. ‘As the great hunting journalist, Nimrod, explained: “A butcher’s boy upon a pony may throw dirt in the face of the first duke in the kingdom.”’

  It should not be thought that only the right defended hunting, as the Labour Minister for Agriculture had shown when he opposed the antihunting bill of 1949 on the grounds that it was not for townsmen to attack the life of the countryside. Yet here we were now contemplating allowing an ‘urban dictatorship’ to prevail. The murmurs and ‘hear, hears’ throughout the speech were frequent and genuine.