Power Play. Gavin Esler
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thought I was good enough for his sister, although it took some time for Fiona to come round to her brother’s opinion.
In those first days of October two years ago, no one expected Theo Carr and Bobby Black to win the White House. The opinion polls had been consistent for months. Carr was way behind, more than ten points adrift against a comfortable, competent incumbent President. The American economy had at last picked up, and the smart people I knew in Washington–diplomats, journalists, members of Congress–dismissed Carr and Black as too extreme, too right wing, too out of touch with the mood of America. Their rhetoric was all from the past, talk of taking the War on Terror to ‘the Bad Guys’ and ‘the Worst of the Worst’, whoever they happened to be. When I raised the prospect of a meeting we were in the private sitting room in Number Ten Downing Street–the Prime Minister, me, his special adviser, Janey Masters, and the Director of Communications, Andy Carnwath. Fraser Davis joked that Theo Carr and Bobby Black talked as if they had an ‘Enemy of the Month Club’.
‘Y’know, a calendar of men with beards they plan to bomb. One Dead Beard a Month until the War on Terror is won.’ Fraser Davis prided himself on his sensitive political antennae and expertise on the United States. He turned to me. ‘Forget Bobby Black, Alex. Waste of my time.’
‘Meeting Bobby Black is never a waste of time, Prime Minister,’ I contradicted him. ‘Trust me.’
You can get away with contradicting the PM’s judgement about once per meeting. More can be perilous.
‘I simply don’t see why I should bother with Losers,’ he responded, looking up from his briefing papers and pouting a moist lip in my direction, the way he did when he was annoyed. ‘Fix me up with the Winners, for God’s sake. Get the President or Vice-President in here. That’s what we pay you for.’
I pointed out that unfortunately the incumbent President and Vice-President were not coming through London. Bobby Black was.
‘Thirty minutes of your time,’ I persisted. ‘At Chequers.’ Chequers is the Prime Minister’s private retreat in the countryside just outside London. ‘Tea and biscuits. A chat. It can do no harm, and it could do a lot of good. It will raise your profile in Washington and—’
‘Nonsense,’ he snapped, arching a prime ministerial eyebrow and pouting once more. Davis is a toff, of course, even though he tries to hide it. He makes a big thing of his love of football and is forever telling newspaper feature writers that his iPod is full of Kill Hannah and Nickelback, though I have never once heard him enquire about football match results, nor have I ever seen him listen to his supposedly beloved rock music. He’s Eton to the core, Oxford PPE, once a City smoothie, a stint as a management consultant, and then time in a hedge fund where he made a lot of money and decided that he understood ‘how the market works.’ At moments when we disagree he and I are like two different species sizing each other up. My own background as a soldier in Northern Ireland gives me a bit of an edge. Davis likes to joke that his brother-in-law had ‘strangled IRA terrorists with his bare hands.’ Perhaps he likes this joke because the closest the Prime Minister ever came to serving his country in uniform was wearing a tailcoat at Eton and the Bullingdon dining club.
‘Look, I simply haven’t got time to listen to Yesterday’s Man.’ Davis smiled that way he has which looks like a smirk. ‘Black and Carr want to continue making the same mistakes in their War on Terror that we made thirty years ago in Ulster. Why, oh why, do these bloody Americans persist in thinking you can wage war on a tactic, for goodness sake?’
The British ability to suck up to the Americans and to patronize them simultaneously should not be underestimated. Janey Masters and Andy Carnwath shook with laughter at this Prime Ministerial aperçu. I didn’t.
‘Prime Minister, you are making a serious mistake,’ I contradicted them all firmly. The chorus of laughter stopped. I was now on the edge of being rude, but I had the floor and so I used it. ‘You should not make unnecessary enemies.’
‘Unnecessary enemies?’ Davis repeated, rolling the words around his mouth like a sip of unexpectedly good wine.
‘Bobby Black wants to meet you,’ I explained. ‘And he is a man who plays favourites and bears grudges.’ I advised that even if Black and Carr lost the presidential election, Senator Black would eventually have a position of considerable leadership, one day Senate Majority Leader. ‘A good friend and a bad enemy. His reputation is as Washington’s silent throat-slitter.’ All eyes were on me now. Very busy people in power remind me of children: self-obsessed, in their own little world. Any device that catches their attention is legitimate. ‘You cross Bobby Black at your peril. He’s coming to London and we should be nice.’
The Prime Minister sighed and then agreed. Reluctantly.
‘Very well then, Alex. If you say so. Fix it. Fix it. Please ruin my weekend at Chequers.’
And so I fixed it. I felt confident that ruining his weekend was the right thing to do and that Fraser Davis would soon be grateful. It really is what I am paid for.
On that day of Bobby Black’s visit I drove myself down to Chequers from central London while Andy Carnwath, Janey Masters and the Prime Minister travelled by helicopter. Another of Fraser Davis’s routine jokes at my expense is that I was brave enough to interrogate IRA suspects face to face but too timid to get on a ‘heavier-than-air machine’. He regards such schoolboy teasing as a sign of affection. I went to a different type of school.
The Chequers event was–how shall I put it in the language of diplomacy?–not a meeting of minds. Bobby Black and Fraser Davis had little in common, except for one fact: each of them always thought that in any meeting, in any gathering, he was the smartest person in the room. On that day, when we brought these two super-egos together at Chequers, at least one of them had to be wrong. Perhaps both of them. Bobby Black had flown from Washington to Heathrow and then helicoptered over to meet the Prime Minister. I remember it as an unseasonably warm day, early October, a day belonging more to summer than the start of autumn. The fine weather put everyone in a good mood. The American helicopter came down on the lawn, picture perfect. Unusually for Chequers, which is by tradition always private, we allowed a tight pool of British and American TV crews to film the occasion. What everyone saw on the evening news on both sides of the Atlantic was Davis and Black greeting each other with all the false bonhomie demanded on such occasions. The American network TV coverage–as I had predicted–helped raise Fraser Davis’s profile in the United States.
We carry out confidential public opinion surveys in key allies once a year, and the most recent showed that when you asked Americans about British prime ministers they could name Churchill, Thatcher, and Blair. Fraser Davis, like the rest of our political leaders, simply did not exist. That night, thanks to me, for a few seconds on the American TV evening news, Fraser Davis did exist. The two men ran their hands up each other’s arms to show how touchy-feely they were. They grinned. They exchanged pleasantries. The Prime Minister said he was ‘delighted’ to meet the grizzled Senator, more than twenty years his senior. Bobby Black, his owlish eyes glinting behind thick glasses, managed to appear as if he had just flown the Atlantic on the off chance he might catch a few words with our own esteemed Dear Leader, the Bright New Thing in London.
‘I’ve come to learn how to win elections,’ he joked for the cameras. ‘Like you did, Mr Prime Minister.’ Bobby Black’s Chief of Staff, Johnny Lee Ironside, winked at me as we stood on the edges of the photo-opportunity, our faces split by broad grins. He’s a tall, lanky southerner with a South Carolina accent that makes me think of the warmth of a hit of Southern Comfort.
‘Good work on this get-together, Ambassador Price,’ he whispered.
‘Please call me Alex,’ I introduced myself. He seemed like someone I could do business with.
‘Johnny Lee.’
I had checked him out beforehand of course. Born Charleston. Rich Old South family, Anglophile, Harvard Law, Rhodes scholar. And now, as I could see, polite and generous. My kind of American. We moved to the main Chequers dining room. It was scheduled to be a half-hour visit before Bobby Black