The Knives

by Richard T. Kelly

  The list of signatories was long and staunch. Blaylock passed the pages back to Geraldine with a nod. ‘Okay, I’ll need to speak to Bannerman, if His Holiness will grant me five minutes.’

  ‘Got it. The Inspector of Constabularies would like to ride with you in the car to the police conference tomorrow, is that fine?’

  ‘Tell him I’d be glad of his company.’

  ‘And can we tell Number Ten you’ll be at the black-tie do at the Carlton on Thursday night? They’re chasing all Cabinet members.’

  ‘Aye, if I really can’t get a better offer.’

  Geraldine nodded and left. Blaylock moved to his desk, where a laptop sat dormant – his immovable note to self that all important exchanges in the building take place face to face, all important information pass from hand to hand. ‘I don’t want people in this building lobbing grenades over email’ had been his day-one decree.

  Setting Geraldine’s one-sheet down he glanced to the silver-framed photo of his children: a posed studio portrait, their gift to him last Christmas, decently done. He liked to imagine the kids had come up with the idea, but suspected it was their mother’s initiative. Alex’s irked eyes betrayed displeasure in having to pose; Cora’s querulous look rather challenged the lens; but at the foot of the pyramid Molly’s smile was so wide she was probably saying ‘Cheese’.

  Hearing footsteps Blaylock looked up to see the Permanent Secretary bearing down on him, having entered without a knock.

  ‘Good morning, Home Secretary. Heavens, if you wanted to come in late you needn’t have gone to such lengths.’

  Thus Dame Phyllida Cox’s version of Managing a Situation with Humour, accompanied by a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Possibly she had learned it from a manual. From Cambridge via the fast stream, Phyllida had always commanded big jobs in big departments. Not that ‘command’ was a term she acknowledged. ‘By golly’ – she had assured him at their first meeting – ‘we are here to serve our Home Secretaries, not to make problems for them.’ That plural, though – Secretaries – had stayed with Blaylock, in its sense of successive ministers as mere fly-by-nights passing through a far more entrenched world.

  Dame Phyllida stood six feet tall, her robust frame routinely softened – as today – by furled and pinned scarves, gemstone brooches and heathery-tweedy coats. Her nose was prominently curved and her cheeks coloured easily, whether from pique or discomfort or a generalised sense that things were not being done as the manual decreed. Blaylock saw her as a Head Girl type: her voice must have carried at assembly, and she would have been a useful bully on the hockey pitch. But he could imagine, too, the unrulier girls ganging up after lights-out to truss her vengefully into her bedsheets.

  ‘I’ve drafted this,’ said Blaylock, thrusting at Phyllida the envelope on which he had composed in the car. ‘A letter to the editor of Today, copied to the Head of News and the chairman of the Trust.’

  She held it between finger and thumb as she perused. ‘Yes. I heard this. You’re really concerned? Laura Hampshire didn’t let the Jabirman chap get away on anything.’

  ‘Phyllida, I know newsrooms. Desmond speaks for nobody, but someone at the BBC either finds him very impressive or else they reckon he livens up their show. So they let him talk a load of garbage that’s totally detrimental to what we call “social cohesion”, right?’

  ‘Do you not think he’s rather beneath your paying attention to him? Or dignified, let’s say, by your picking a quarrel with him. You are a scalp to him in that sense, no?’

  Not caring for Dame Phyllida’s tack, Blaylock was glad to see Mark Tallis sauntering up behind her, furled papers in one fist. But Dame Phyllida held her ground. ‘I expect you heard the complaints about police funding from the Lancashire Chief?’

  Tallis eased into the single armchair set before Blaylock’s desk. ‘David’s already got his rebuttal in. Actions speak louder and all that. I just told Rob Gritten at the Mail, “Our message is that every citizen has a part to play in reducing crime on the streets, and the Minister has shown us this very day that he doesn’t exempt himself from duty …”.’

  Dame Phyllida, ignoring Tallis, gave Blaylock some moments’ worth of a meaningful look, then turned and left. Mark unfurled and passed the papers he carried to Blaylock.

  ‘My polish on Phyllida’s draft of your speech to the cops.’

  ‘The last draft wasn’t Phyllida’s, was it?’

  ‘Not formally, but didn’t you spot how what had been crystal-clear was suddenly turned into mud?’

  ‘Right. So, what’s your beef with the Post?’

  ‘Didn’t you see? “The error-prone and volatile David Blaylock”? And Martin Pallister got two whole inches just to whack away at you.’

  Pallister, Blaylock’s shadow on the Labour frontbench, was a seasoned media performer with aged-heartthrob looks and the dim aura of a lost leader. But Blaylock was unbothered by him, and vexed to see Tallis fret – hopeful of one day conveying to his spad that what the papers called a ‘crisis’ was usually manageable, and that he would pay no heed to such panicky language until the morning they had gathered sufficient dirt on him as to run a big thick-eared close-up of his bleary 6 a.m. face with DISGRACE etched above in big capitals. And on that day, maybe, they would be right – maybe he was a disgrace, maybe more than he or they knew. Today, though, was not that day.

  ‘Mark, listen – I don’t want you forever on the blower to the hacks and hounding my critics on Twitter. Okay? You could use a bit of Deborah’s sangfroid. You’re not an attack dog. I see you as a deep thinker.’ He smiled. ‘Will you sit in with me and the Sheikh?’

  Mark – having stiffened at the comparison to Deborah Kerner, Blaylock’s policy-specialist spad – seemed mollified by the boss’s jocular compliment and clasp of his shoulder, as Blaylock rose and moved to the door where Geraldine stood wearing her brightest ‘Now?’ face.

  *

  ‘I was sorry to hear al-Kasser’s praises being sung on my Roberts radio this morning,’ said Sheikh Hanifa, making pained and rueful shapes with his hands. ‘Poison in the air. He speaks for no one. And it so wearies most Muslims. To be tarred with his brush.’

  Blaylock had once assured Sheikh Hanifa that his door was always open, and the Sheikh had taken this literally. But his sexagenarian presence – round-faced, mild-eyed, silver-haired under a green-banded turban – was no burden, and his credentials were unimpeachable. Chaplain of Russell College, a twenty-year veteran of ‘inter-faith dialogue’, Hanifa was a man on whom successive governments had relied to provide reliable definitions of what in British Islam lay within the pale and what lay beyond.

  As the tea trolley was trundled into the office Blaylock took the chance to discreetly look over the stranger Sheikh had brought with him, introduced as Ashok Mankad, Russell Professor of History and Head of Pastoral Care – a slight, doleful man in big black-framed spectacles.

  ‘Home Secretary?’ the Sheikh ventured. ‘We have, of course, just had our freshers’ weeks, and in chatting with Ashok I saw that both he and I noticed similar things, disturbing things, that have caused us concern. We have often spoken of the Islamic societies? Their calibre varies from college to college, some of high standard and great value to Muslim students. Others …’ The Sheikh shrugged and slowly set a glossy printed leaflet down on the table before Blaylock. ‘Our society at Russell, we have had some disputes. Who keeps the key to the prayer room, what content is put on social media … But, it has been okay. Now, the society has connected itself to an organisation that is new to me, and already they have booked a series of talks that, well …’

  Blaylock looked at the leaflet. It advertised a list of Islamic Society debates scheduled up to Christmas. The billings – ‘Does the Media Understand Sharia?’, ‘Can a Good Muslim Be Gay?’, ‘What Is Preventing a Palestinian State?’, ‘What is the Real Meaning of Jihad?’ – had a uniformity to Blaylock’s eye, as did the repeated listing of one Dr Ghassan Doumani as guest speaker. At the foot
of the leaflet was the legend ‘In Association with the Institute of Islamic Praxis’.

  ‘Is this Institute by any chance headed up by Dr Doumani?’

  Professor Mankad nodded. ‘A remarkably busy man.’

  ‘You can sense, I think,’ said Hanifa, ‘the tenor of what is proposed, the attitude to non-Muslims, to Israel, to same-sex relations … For the first-year students newly arrived to Russell, keen to join in activities … it sends a confrontational message, I think.’

  Silently, glumly, Blaylock agreed. It was Russell he hoped his son Alex might attend to read Law in a year’s time.

  ‘Now, Home Secretary, I have of course tried to speak to the society president, but he has been persistently avoiding me.’

  ‘I see.’ Blaylock shifted in his seat. ‘The issue, it seems to me, is the one you raise about the duty of care owed to your students. We don’t want to be painted as Orwellian bullies. But it may be that universities and student unions are a bit out of date on free speech issues – certainly if we’ve got parties who want to use free speech as a platform to argue that other people shouldn’t speak freely.’

  Mark Tallis was clicking his pen. ‘Are female students welcome to attend these sorts of events?’

  Hanifa winced. ‘They are, though lately there has been this business of separate seating, if the invited speaker wishes it so.’

  Blaylock threw a pointed look to Tallis. ‘Well, then, it may be past time to look more closely at the validity of the invitations. It’s been on our minds, in fact – the idea of some second-level order to bar certain kinds of gatherings on campuses.’

  ‘On what grounds?’ Professor Mankad looked very alert.

  ‘On the grounds of their being un-collegiate. We won’t abide segregation. No union within a union, no state within a state.’ Blaylock turned to Geraldine, who sat taking notes. ‘I need a report done on the college societies, nationwide. And I want to see the Director of Counter-Extremism Strategy tomorrow for a catch-up.’

  ‘Shall I invite the Minister for Security?’

  Blaylock knew why Geraldine asked. His Security Minister Paul Payne was zealous in his junior brief yet apparently unsatisfied, possibly seeing himself as a Laertes miscast as Osric. Blaylock preferred to keep Payne out of the way by tasking him with issues such as cyber-security, which Blaylock never really understood.

  ‘No, just me and Rory Inglis. Sheikh, Professor, forgive me but—’

  The two visitors rose to go. Mankad, though, looked at Blaylock very directly. ‘Where I live in Stepney, I understand this “Free Briton Brigade” intend to march?’

  ‘Yes. I am just in receipt of a petition to ban it.’

  ‘You have a view?’

  ‘It’s the view of Scotland Yard that counts. You have a view yourself?’

  ‘I do. These rallies, they are an incitement to violence.’

  ‘Well, there is a right to demonstrate. But if, as you say, the intent is to provoke disorder then we won’t be having it. We treat thugs as thugs. No exceptions, no excuses.’

  Sheikh Hanifa sighed loudly. ‘I am guilty, perhaps, of rosy spectacles? But when I first came to England, the seventies? It seemed to me that people could just get on with things in their own way, following their custom. Then came all this anger, the attacks, the “Go home!”’

  Mankad nodded, intensely. ‘The white fascists, they made a climate of intimidation. There had to be a defence of our rights. But, we were different communities. So how could we speak with one voice?’

  ‘Islam,’ Blaylock murmured.

  ‘That’s right. All the things we did anyway, believed anyway, we had to start shouting about. In the name of Islam.’

  Mark Tallis, silent and seemingly restive until now, leapt in. ‘That’s interesting. God, yes, white people say the same, that’s the time it started going wrong, when integration went backward.’

  Blaylock winced, not liking Tallis’s analysis or his choice of words.

  ‘So who is to blame?’ asked Mankad, eyes unblinking behind his thick lenses, seemingly very desirous of something other than a politician’s answer.

  ‘Evil in the hearts of men,’ said Blaylock. ‘What else?’ He extended his hand to Hanifa. ‘We fight on and fight to win, my friend.’

  *

  His courtesies having made Blaylock a few minutes late for Cabinet, he moved at pace to the private lift, but Mark Tallis stayed at his heels. Coming toward them from the Level Three kitchen were Mark’s fellow spads, Deborah Kerner and Ben Cotesworth – Deborah cupping her double-shot espresso, Ben bearing his chipped pint mug of tea.

  ‘Ride down with me,’ Blaylock said, gesturing to the opening lift. The three young people did as they were told. They were bright and ambitious, and Blaylock found them endlessly willing to surrender their time and privacy in return for his trust and preferment.

  ‘You’re all ready for some dust-ups this afternoon?’ he said.

  ‘Maybes not as ready as you, gaffer,’ offered Ben, the dogsbody of the team – a sharp, serious, recessive Geordie with an endearingly daffy laugh. Blaylock had handpicked Ben as an exemplary figure of the mission to rediscover Tory votes in northern cities. He was a large lad with a straight back and a sensible haircut and Blaylock saw in him a sort of loyalty that suggested a platoon commander in waiting.

  ‘Okay, Ben, so we do immigration figures after lunch, I’d be glad of your input there. Deb, I need you in with me for the team meet on the Identity Documents Bill.’

  ‘You want me to drop a bomb on that bunch of deadbeats?’ This in her Georgetown drawl, from over the rim of the espresso. ‘I saw some of the figures they’ve got, I told ’em it’s bullshit.’

  ‘Let’s see the lay of the land. I have to keep the troops motivated.’

  Deborah rolled her eyes. There was a cosmetic appliqué aura around her – her mask of pale foundation and red lipstick, her long black hair worn in a visor-like fringe with long side bangs, her striped and belted dress. She was so overtly feminine Blaylock had to stop himself stealing second glances at her; and yet he had come to believe she neither cared nor noticed. Deborah was impervious to charm, intently focused and seemingly – like himself? – unencumbered by a private life. Her appearance seemed merely a sort of armour she donned to do battle. Blaylock wondered if her sexuality wasn’t wholly sublimated in politics.

  They exited to the underground car park where Martin waited at the wheel of the Jag. Blaylock turned.

  ‘Listen, you all need to remember to respect the system. Geraldine is my voice, right? She’s the weapon of choice. Whatever noise I kick up, nothing much seems to work round here. But when Geraldine asks someone to do something for me, they do it. A lesson for us, eh?’

  His praetorian guards nodded, in unison, however unhappily.

  3

  The implacable black door swung wide, admitting Blaylock to what he never failed to think of as Wonderland – a rabbit’s warren, a hall of mirrors, its chequered marble floor made for games. A glance to his wrist told him it was 9.39 a.m. and he was nearly back on schedule.

  As he hastened down the plum carpet of the long corridor to the Cabinet anteroom, Downing Street Head of Comms Al Ramsay was sauntering across from the press room, fingers pressed to his slow-shaking head as if the world were really just too much this morning.

  ‘David, for your info, Scotland Yard have issued a statement about this morning’s … incident? That two young persons were arrested on suspicion of robbery and affray?’

  ‘That sounds as I remember it.’

  ‘I hear you’ve seen some trouble?’ Caroline Tennant, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had materialised at Blaylock’s side as if by magic, in a tailored black suit and extravagant heels that gave her ash-blonde head an inch over his. She addressed him as she addressed everyone, like an admired head teacher who wore her authority lightly.

  ‘No more than usual, Caroline.’

  Since neither of them did small talk they were condemned to stride together
silently down the hall – Blaylock, per his custom, nodding slightly toward Churchill’s old leather armchair – until they reached the anteroom, where Caroline swayed off ahead.

  Her Majesty’s ministers were helping themselves to teas and coffees, some ducking in and out of the empty Cabinet Room. Blaylock craned his neck to see who had already set out their stall and strewn their papers around a place setting. A few ministers already sat pensively, like candidates for examination. The cooler customers loitered and chattered. Loudest and most expansive, as usual – ‘So I said to him, “Come off it!”’ – was Business Secretary Jason Malahide, broad of shoulder and trim of beard, hands in the pockets of his double-breasted suit as he rocked and guffawed.

  Needing a substitute for adrenalin, Blaylock poured a black coffee and knocked it back, then took care to exchange nods with those few ministers he counted as friends. There was Chas Finlayson, Employment Minister, lean and bloodhound-eyed. An ex-officer in the Territorials, Finlayson was big on schemes to put shiftless young men to work and had won Blaylock’s support for some new version of national service. Then there was Simon Webster, Justice Secretary, who seemed honestly to approve of Blaylock’s reform of British policing, at least to the degree that it saved money for the courts.

  Now Peter Kitson, balding button-eyed Secretary for Health, stepped aside from a sotto voce exchange and hastened over to Blaylock.

  ‘David, did you deck someone this morning?’

  ‘Yep. A very, very minor ruck.’

  Sir Alan Ruthven, Cabinet Secretary, with whom Kitson had been conferring, now stepped over too – crisply turned out as ever, in his pale spectacles, a look of freeze-dried patience under his parted grey fringe.

  ‘Yes, so we hear. It really is an admirable thing about you, David, this way you just – leap into the fray.’

  Blaylock smiled, thinking how Ruthven might whisper a subtly transformed version into Patrick Vaughan’s ear. ‘I have to say, Prime Minister, it does concern me somewhat, this keenness of the Home Secretary to just … leap into the fray?’ Blaylock thought Ruthven simultaneously aloof and over-engaged, the Prime Minister’s watchman–gatekeeper, forever on manoeuvres so as to preserve his own share of power.