The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (11 page)

“You have. You’ve bloody dropped it, haven’t you?” the Honorable and usually disrespectful Member for Newcastle West erupted from his position below the gangway, so loudly that not even Hansard could claim to have missed it.

The faces on the Opposition Front Bench broke into smiles, at last catching up with the game. Their Leader, not six feet from where Collingridge stood, turned to his nearest colleague and gave the loudest of Welsh whispers. “You know I think he’s fluffed it. He’s running away!” He began waving his Order Paper, as did all his colleagues. It seemed like the sails of ancient galleons sailing into battle.

The pain of a thousand encounters in the House welled up inside Collingridge. He was unprepared for this. He couldn’t bring himself to admit the truth yet neither could he lie to the House, and he could find no form of words that would tread that delicate line between honesty and outright deceit. As he observed the smugness on the faces in front of him and listened to their jeers, he remembered all the many lies they had told about him over the years, the cruelty they had shown and the tears they had caused his wife to shed. As he gazed at contorted faces just a few feet in front of him, his patience vanished. He had to bring it to an end, and he no longer cared how. He threw his hands in the air.

“I don’t have to take comments like that from a pack of dogs,” he snarled, and sat down. Like a bear backing out of the baiting ring.

Even before the shout of triumph and rage had a chance to rise from the Opposition benches, Kendrick was back on his feet. “On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. The Prime Minister’s remarks are an absolute disgrace. I asked a perfectly straightforward question about why the Prime Minister had reneged on his election promise and all I’ve got are insults and evasion. While I understand the Prime Minister’s reluctance to admit that he’s perpetrated a gigantic and disgraceful fraud on the electorate, is there nothing you can do to protect the right of Members of this House so that we get a straight answer to a straight question? I know I’m new in this place but there must be something in the Trade Descriptions Act that covers this.”

Waves of approval washed across the Opposition benches as the Speaker struggled to be heard above the commotion. “The Honorable Member may be new, but he seems already to have developed a sharp eye for parliamentary procedure, in which case he will know that I am no more responsible for the content or tone of the Prime Minister’s replies than I am for the questions which are put to him. Next business!”

As the Speaker tried to move matters on, a red-faced Collingridge rose and strode angrily out of the Chamber, gesticulating for the Chief Whip to follow him. The very unparliamentary taunt of “Coward!” rang after him across the floor. From the Government benches there was nothing but an uncertain silence.

* * *

“How in Christ’s name did he know? How did that son-of-a-bitch know?”

The door had barely been slammed upon the Prime Minister’s office, which stood just off the rear of the Chamber before the tirade began. The normally suave exterior of Her Majesty’s First Minister had been cast aside to reveal a wild Warwickshire ferret. “Francis, it’s simply not good enough. It’s not bloody good enough I tell you. We get the Chancellor’s report in Cabinet Committee yesterday, the full Cabinet discusses it for the first time today, and by this afternoon it’s known to every sniveling little shit in the Opposition. Less than two dozen Cabinet ministers knew, only a handful of civil servants were in the loop. Who leaked it, Francis? Who? You’re Chief Whip. I want you to find the bastard and I want him hanged from the clock tower by his balls!”

Urquhart breathed a huge sigh of relief. Until the Prime Minister’s outburst he’d had no idea if the finger of blame was already pointing at him. He smiled, but only on the inside. “It simply astonishes me, Henry, that one of our Cabinet colleagues would want deliberately to leak something like this,” he began, implicitly ruling out the possibility of a civil service leak, narrowing the circle of suspicion to include each and every one of his Cabinet colleagues.

“Whoever is responsible has humiliated me. I want him out, Francis. I want—I insist—that you find the worm. And then I want him fed to the crows.”

“Henry, as a friend?”

“Of course!”

“I’m afraid there’s been too much bickering among our colleagues since the election. Too many of them want someone else’s job.”

“They all want my job, I know that, but who would be so—so cretinous, so calculating, such a cock-artist as to deliberately leak something like that?”

“I can’t say”—the smallest of hesitations—“for sure.”

Collingridge picked up on the inflection. “An educated guess, for Chrissake.”

“That would scarcely be fair.”

“Fair? You think what just happened was fair, having my arse used as a letterbox?”

“But…”

“No ‘buts,’ Francis. If it’s happened once it can happen again and almost certainly will. Accuse, imply, whatever you damned well like. There are no minutes being taken here. But I want some names!” Collingridge’s fist came down on his desk so hard it made the reading lamp jump.

“If you insist, I’ll speculate. I know nothing for sure, you understand…let’s work from deduction. Given the timescale involved, it seems more likely to have leaked from yesterday’s Cabinet Committee rather than from today’s full Cabinet. Agreed?”

Collingridge nodded his assent.

“And apart from you and me, who is on that Committee?”

“Chancellor of the Exchequer, Financial Secretary, Health, Education, Environment, Trade, and Industry.” The Prime Minister reeled off those Cabinet ministers who had attended.

Urquhart remained silent, forcing Collingridge to finish off the logic himself. “Well, the two Treasury Ministers were scarcely likely to leak the fact that they’d screwed it up. But Health bitterly opposed it, so Paul McKenzie had a reason to leak it. Harold Earle at Education has always had a loose lip. And Michael Samuel has a habit of enjoying the company of the media rather too much for my liking.”

The suspicions and insecurities that lurk in the darker recesses of a Prime Minister’s mind were being dragged into the light.

“There are other possibilities, Henry, but I think them unlikely,” Urquhart joined in. “As you know Michael is very close to Teddy Williams. They discuss everything together. It could have come out of Party Headquarters. Not from Teddy, I’m sure, he’d never…But one of the officials there might have leaked it. Some of them spend their lives pissing into paper pots.”

Collingridge pondered for some moments in silence. “Could it really have been Teddy?” he mused. “He was never my greatest supporter—different generations—but I brought him in from the scrap heap, made him one of the team. And he repays me with this?”

“It is only a suspicion, Henry…”

The Prime Minister threw himself into his chair, exhausted, no longer willing to fight the thought. “Perhaps I’ve relied on Teddy too much recently. I thought he had no ax to grind, no ambition left, not in the House of Lords. One of the old guard. Loyal. Was I wrong, Francis?”

“I don’t know. You asked me to speculate.”

“Make sure, Francis. Do whatever you need to do. I want him, whoever he is. I want his balls dragged out through his ears and I want the whole of Westminster to hear the screams.”

Urquhart nodded and lowered his eyes, as a servant might, not wanting the Prime Minister to see the delight dancing within them. Collingridge had announced open season. Urquhart was back on the moors, his feet planted firmly in the heather, waiting for the birds to rise.

Eleven

Christopher Columbus was a huge disappointment. When he set out he had no idea where he was going, and when he’d arrived he had no idea where he was. If you want to screw the natives, much better to stay at home.

Friday, July 16—Thursday, July 22

Life in the House of Commons can be exhilarating, occasionally historic, but that is not the norm. The norm is crap. Long hours, heavy workloads, too much entertaining and too little respite all ensure that the long summer break beckons to Members like an oasis in a desert. And while they wait, patience thins and tempers fray. During the days before the recess, Urquhart moved around the corridors and bars of the House, trying to bolster morale and calm the doubts of many Government backbenchers who were growing uneasy about Collingridge’s increasingly scratchy performance. Morale is easier to shatter than to rebuild and some old hands thought Urquhart was trying perhaps a little too hard, his strenuous efforts serving to remind many that the Prime Minister had gotten himself into surprisingly choppy waters, but if it were a fault on the part of the Chief Whip, it was one that was generally recognized as exceptional if occasionally aggressive loyalty. But what did it all matter? The breezes of the South of France beckoned and would soon be washing away many of the parliamentary cares.

August was a safety valve, which was why governments had a knack of trying to bury difficult announcements in the final dog days of the session, often slipping out the details by means of a Written Answer published in Hansard, the voluminous official report of parliamentary proceedings. It meant that the matter had been placed openly and clearly on the public record, but at a time when most Members were packing up their desks and trying to remember where they had hidden their passports. Even if one or two did spot the detail, there was scarcely time or opportunity to make much of a fuss. It was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth—so long as you read the fine print.

Which was why it was unfortunate that a photocopy of a draft Written Answer from the Secretary of State for Defense should have been found a full ten days before it was due to be published, lying under a chair in Annie’s Bar, where Members and journalists congregated to gossip. It was an added embarrassment that the Written Answer announced the intention to impose substantial cuts on the Territorial Army on the grounds that the TA was increasingly less relevant to government plans in the nuclear era. What made the matter all the more exquisitely awkward was that the draft was found by the lobby correspondent of the
Independent
. Everybody liked the man, respected him, he knew how to check out a story. So when it became the page one lead item in his newspaper four days later, at what was the start of the final full week before the summer recess, people knew it was reliable. Cock-up soon became chaos.

Retribution arrived from an unusual source. The pay of the Territorial Army wasn’t large but its numbers were great and influential. Considerable prestige was involved. In constituency parties up and down the country there were senior members who proudly added the initials “TD” after their names—“Territorial Decoration”—someone who had served in and would defend the Terrors to their last drop of writing ink.

So when the House gathered to wrap up some of the final business of the session with the Leader of the House, the air was heavy not simply with midsummer heat but with accusations of betrayal and emotional appeals for a change of course, almost all of which came from the Government benches. The Opposition scarcely had to break sweat, sitting back like contented Roman lions watching the Christians do all the work for them.

Sir Jasper Grainger, OBE, JP, and very much TD, was on his feet. The old man proudly sported a carefully ironed regimental tie along with a heavy three-piece tweed suit, refusing to compromise his personal standards in spite of the inadequate air-conditioning. He was a senior backbencher and the elected Chairman of the Backbench Defense Committee. His words carried weight.

“May I return to the point raised by several of my Honorable Friends about these unnecessary and deeply damaging cuts? Will the Leader of the House be in no doubt about the depth of feeling among his own supporters on this matter?” As his anger grew, white flecks of spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. “Has he any idea of the damage that this will do to the Government over the coming months? Will he even now allow the House time to debate and reverse this decision, because if he doesn’t, he will leave the government defenseless to accusations of bad faith just as he will leave the country defenseless against bad friends?”

Roars of manly support came from all sides, apart from the government Front Bench. The Leader of the House, Simon Lloyd, straightened and readied himself once again to come to the Dispatch Box; he was beginning to feel it should have been constructed with sandbags. He was a sound man, plenty of “bottom,” but it had been a torrid twenty minutes and he had grown tetchy as he found the response he had prepared earlier affording increasingly less protection from the grenades being thrown at him by his own side. He was glad his Prime Minister and the Defense Secretary were sitting beside him on the Front Bench. Why should he suffer on his own? He hopped from foot to foot, as did his argument.

“My Honorable Friend misses the point. The document published in the newspapers was stolen Government property. Stolen! And that’s an issue which rises high above the details of the document itself. If there is to be a debate, it should be about such flagrant breaches of honesty. He’s a man of both honor and experience and frankly I would have expected him to join me in wholeheartedly condemning the theft of important Government documents. He must realize that by going on about its details he’s as good as condoning the activity of common theft.”

It sounded good, for a moment, until Sir Jasper rose to seek permission to pursue the point. It would not normally be granted but these circumstances weren’t normal. Amidst waving of Order Papers throughout the Chamber, the Speaker consented. The old soldier gathered himself up to his full height, back straight, mustache bristling and face flushed with genuine anger.

“It’s my Right Honorable Friend who is missing the point,” he thundered. “Doesn’t he understand that I would rather live alongside a common British thief than a common Russian soldier, which is precisely the fate his policy is threatening us with?”