Power Play. Gavin Esler
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track and started hiking up the mountain as the sun split through a clear blue Highland sky. It was cold, with the edge of the moon visible over the hills, like a poster from the Scottish Tourist Board, and I was nervous. The Queen, the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, at least two other government ministers, staff from Number Ten, the Foreign Office, and the Office of the Vice-President were all being brought together over the next forty-eight hours in the Scottish wilderness, thanks to what Downing Street was calling Alex Price’s ‘great idea’. I wasn’t sure what would come of it, but I hoped for a footnote in the history books, if I was lucky, and a few headlines for my own Ego Wall. The Balmoral Understanding. The Aberdeenshire Entente. The Scottish Special Relationship. Something had come of it already.
In the thaw leading up to the trip, the Americans had announced that Muhammad Asif Khan, the British detainee we had all made so much of a fuss about, was to be released. The release of Khan was privately regarded as very useful by the British security service, MI5. They wanted him out of jail so they could watch him. They needed to know if he was indeed connected to what they were now convinced was a major conspiracy that included his cousins, a plot that was leading towards what Andy Carnwath told me was an imminent attack involving Heathrow Airport.
‘Imminent?’
‘Within the next month or so,’ he responded. ‘That’s what I’m told. That’s all I know.’
‘Not during Bobby Black’s visit?’
‘Not during the Vice-President’s fucking visit,’ Carnwath replied, exasperated, ‘as far as we know, Alex. Though I will obviously have to get bin Laden on the blower to ensure al-fucking-Qaeda cooperates so as not to interrupt your fucking plans.’
Carnwath repeated his instructions that on no account must I mention anything about the Heathrow plot or Khan’s family to any American, any member of the Carr administration, any US government official.
‘The Americans have no fucking patience when it comes to things like this,’ he said. ‘They will want to charge in and put their big boots all over everything. Our people say we need to give them time to get a result in court. The Prime Minister is putting everything on the line for this, Alex. You understand how important this is?’
I said that I did understand. If it went wrong, Fraser Davis’s political career would melt. Khan’s arrival in Britain was expected to include some kind of hero’s welcome from his handful of supporters. It was scheduled for the same day as the beginning of the Vice-President’s shooting trip.
‘Accidental timing,’ the Foreign Office said. ‘A coincidence.’
‘Coincidences,’ Johnny Lee whispered to me with a wink, ‘are God’s way of reminding folks he’s still around.’
Coincidental or otherwise, on the Scottish moors none of us thought very much about anything–except the grouse and whether Bobby Black was enjoying himself. Anstruther took the Vice-President with him to hunt on the right of the shooting party.
‘Best if we keep him on the far right,’ Anstruther whispered to me with a knowing wink. ‘If you see him or his gun heading leftwards, don’t forget to duck. I hear in the Carr administration that the right hand sometimes doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.’
‘Not so loud,’ I hissed, worried that all our good work might be undone with some feeble joke at Bobby Black’s expense. The Vice-President’s problems on shooting trips in the past had been well publicized. There had been a minor scandal in his first year in office when the Vice-President had mysteriously shot one of his hunting companions in the backside on a quail shoot in Texas.
The hunting companion had been Paul Comfort of Warburton, the long-time FOB, Friend of Bobby, who had to spend a painful night having buckshot removed from the cheeks of his bottom. Details were hard to come by, although Comfort appeared on TV and publicly blamed himself for stepping into Bobby Black’s line of fire. Kristina said to me at the time that it was a display of true loyalty.
‘Greater love hath no man’, she smiled, ‘than to lay down his ass for his friend.’
Princess Charlotte was also to be with Bobby Black on the right of the shooting party. I was pleased because she was a charmer, and Black warmed to her immediately. The Princess and Anstruther had a closeness that I never figured out, a closeness despite their marriages to other people and the fact that she was fifteen years his junior. There was gossip. Possibly it was an aristocratic affair that oiks and retainers like me would never be told about.
I looked around and thought how far I had come from my grandmother’s little three-bedroomed semi to this walk in the Highlands with the great and the good and the not-so-great and not-so-good. At least Bobby Black was on good form. He breathed the clean air and said how much he liked Scotland. It made him feel ‘at home.’ He smiled in his owlish way, and muttered about ‘ancestral roots’. When I saw him in his green and brown shooting gear I realized that I had never before seen him without a dark suit, white shirt, and sober tie, and I had never seen him happy either. For his age, mid-sixties, Black was fit, wiry, with a hint of a suntan on his face from the golf course and the quail hunts.
After an hour’s walk from where the Land Rovers dropped us off, we reached a high valley with a stream–a burn–flowing through the heather. Anstruther suggested that Prince Duncan and some of the others stay in the middle or move to the left. Prince Duncan had every sign of a hangover. We headed to the shooting butts at a place called Shap Fell. Everyone fell in line and deferred to Anstruther. I was told he could trace his ancestry back to Robert the Bruce and the de Brus family from Normandy sometime after 1066. In aristocratic circles this was regarded as more impressive than the Battenberg family of mere British monarchs who had been imported from Germany when the British royal line was in danger of dying out. Since I was unable to trace my own ancestry on my father’s side even by one generation, I suppose I should have been in awe of Anstruther, but I wasn’t. I liked him. He told me he had joined the Labour Party at university only because there were already ‘too many Anstruthers in the Conservative Party.’
When Fraser Davis was elected, Anstruther switched sides and was offered a job at the Ministry of Defence.
‘Ah,’ I told him, ‘we have something in common.’
‘Which is?’ Anstruther cocked his head sideways with curiosity.
‘We are both class traitors.’ He had the good grace to laugh.
Barbara Holmes, the Foreign Secretary, walked with us for the first couple of hours. She had a pair of worn hiking boots and an impressively battered Barbour jacket. She was a vegetarian, which meant she had to swallow some of her supposed principles for the pleasure of a hunting trip to meet Bobby Black and the Queen, though she seemed to manage the process of political indigestion with reasonable grace. Johnny Lee and I walked behind the main hunting party, alongside four of Bobby Black’s US Secret Service bodyguards and a couple of our own British protection people–the minimum possible. After their survey of the hills over the previous two days–mostly by helicopter–the security services said they were satisfied, as the Americans put it, that the probability of anything bad happening to the Vice-President ‘tended towards zero.’ It was a phrase of perfectly duplicitous precision.
* * *
Lord Anstruther and Vice-President Black hit it off immediately. Every time I looked to where they walked together or whispered in the shooting butts, they were deep in animated conversation, sometimes pointing out local landmarks and sometimes jabbing their fingers towards where they thought the grouse might be. Anstruther is a tall, handsome man, early forties, a contemporary of Fraser Davis’s at Eton. Davis and Anstruther both have Scottish ancestry, but they fit perfectly into the English upper classes. Anstruther, with a shock of black hair that flicks across his forehead, has a passing resemblance to the actor Hugh Grant, but instead of Grant’s blinky-stuttering foppishness, Anstruther has steel about him. He had served in a Guards regiment in Northern Ireland and the 1991 Gulf War, and was famous for being a member of the Dangerous Sports Club. Apparently it involves jumping off mountains, leaping down waterfalls, and sitting in underwater cages waiting for great