The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (23 page)

“Do you know how many other Charles Collingridges there are listed in the London telephone directory, Prime Minister?”

Collingridge offered no response, but sat looking grim and ashen faced.

“I wonder if you’d be interested to know that there are no other Charles Collingridges listed in the London telephone directory. In fact, sources at British Telecom tell us that there is only one Charles Collingridge listed throughout the United Kingdom. And that’s your brother, Prime Minister.”

Again a pause, inviting a response, but none was offered.

“Since this appears to be an abuse of insider information, we asked both the Renox Chemical Company and the Department of Health if they had a Mr. Charles Collingridge working for them. Renox tells us that neither they, nor their subsidiaries, have any Collingridge among their employees. The Department of Health’s Press Office was rather more cagey, promising to get back to us but they never did. However, their trade union office was much more cooperative. They, too, confirmed that there is no Collingridge listed as working at any of the Department’s 508 offices throughout the country.” The presenter shuffled his notes. “Apparently they did have a Minnie Collingridge who worked at their Coventry office until two years ago, but she went back to Jamaica.” The lion smiled as he closed his jaws.

At the side of the stage Collingridge could see Sarah. Tears were running down her cheeks.

“Prime Minister, we’ve almost come to the end of our program. Is there anything you wish to say?”

Collingridge sat staring at Sarah, wanting to run to her and embrace her and lie to her that there was no need for tears, that everything would be all right. He was still sitting motionless in his chair as the eerie silence that had settled in the studio was broken by the program’s theme music.

It was the end.

* * *

On his return to Downing Street Collingridge went straight to the Cabinet Room. He entered stiffly, looking slowly and with an exhausted eye around the room. He walked slowly around the Cabinet table, so eloquently shaped like a coffin, trailing his fingers on the brown baize cloth, stopping at its far end, where he had first sat as the Cabinet’s most junior member. It seemed so much longer than ten years ago, almost another lifetime.

When he reached his own chair, in the middle of the room, beneath the gaze of that great survivor Walpole, he reached for the single telephone that stood beside his blotter. The Downing Street switchboard was a legendary institution, simply known as “Switch,” its female operators seeming to be endowed with powers of witchcraft that enabled them to reach anyone at any time. “Get me the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Please.”

It took less than a minute before the Chancellor was on the line.

“Colin, did you see it? How badly will the markets react?”

The Chancellor gave an embarrassed but honest opinion.

“Bloody, eh? Well, we’ll see. I’ll be in touch.”

Collingridge then spoke to the Foreign Secretary. “What damage, Patrick?”

“What’s
not
damaged, Henry? We’ve been trying to stuff our brothers in Brussels for years. Now they’re laughing at us.”

“Is it recoverable?”

Collingridge got a prolonged silence in answer.

“Bad as that, eh?”

“Sorry, Henry.”

And, for a fleeting moment, Collingridge thought the other man meant it.

Next it was the turn of the Party Chairman. Williams was ancient, filled with experience, had seen sad times before. He knew such occasions were best dressed in formality rather than friendship. “Prime Minister,” he began, because he was speaking to the office rather than the man, “within the last hour I have had calls from seven of our eleven regional chairmen. Without exception, I am sorry to say, they believe the situation is quite disastrous for the Party. They feel that we are beyond the point of no return.”

“No, Teddy,” Collingridge contradicted wearily, “they feel that
I
am beyond the point of no return. There’s a difference.”

He made one more phone call. It was to his private secretary asking him to seek an appointment at the Palace around lunchtime the following day. The secretary rang back four minutes later to say Her Majesty would be available to see him at one o’clock.

And with that it was done.

He was supposed to feel relieved, a great burden lifted from his shoulders, but every muscle in his body hurt, as though he’d been kicked for hours by soccer thugs. He gazed up into the stern features of Walpole. “Oh, yes, you’d have fought the bastards, to the very end. You’d probably have won. But this office has already ruined my brother and now it is ruining me. I won’t let it ruin Sarah’s happiness, too,” he whispered. “Better let her know.”

A little while later he left the room in search of his wife, after he had dried his face.

PART THREE

THE DEAL

Twenty-Four

The time for change is when it can no longer be resisted. In other words, when you have a man by the balls and are pulling hard, he will invariably follow in your footsteps.

Monday, October 25

The day after the disastrous outing on
Weekend
Watch
, and shortly before ten o’clock, the members of the Cabinet assembled around the baize-covered table. They had been called individually to Downing Street rather than as a formal Cabinet, which was normally held on a Thursday, and most had been surprised to discover their colleagues also gathered. There was an air of tension. They dragged with them the contents of the newspapers and their explosive editorials, and the conversation around the table was unusually muffled while they waited for their Prime Minister.

As the tones of Big Ben striking the hour seeped into the room, the door opened and Collingridge walked in.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” His voice was unusually soft. “I’m grateful to see you all here. I won’t detain you long.”

He took his seat, the only chair in the room with arms, and extracted a single sheet of paper from the leather bound file he was carrying. He laid it carefully on the table in front of him and then looked slowly around at his colleagues. His eyes were raw, sleepless. There wasn’t a sound to be heard in the room.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to inform you that this morning’s meeting was to be one of the full Cabinet. I wanted to ensure that you could all be assembled without creating undue attention and speculation.” He looked around the table to see if he could read anything in their faces, in search of Barabbas. “I’m going to read to you a short statement that I’ll be issuing later today. At one o’clock I shall be going to the Palace to convey the contents formally to Her Majesty. I must ask all of you, on your oaths of office, not to divulge the contents of this message to anyone before it’s released officially. I must ensure Her Majesty hears it from me and not through the press. It’s a matter of courtesy to the Sovereign. I would also ask it of each one of you as a personal favor to me.”

He picked up the sheet of paper and began to read in a slow, matter-of-fact voice. “Recently there has been a spate of allegations in the media about the business affairs of both me and my family. These allegations show no sign of abating. I have consistently stated, and repeat today, that I have done nothing of which I should be ashamed. I have adhered strictly to the rules and conventions relating to the conduct of the Prime Minister.”

He ran his tongue around dried lips. The paper he was holding trembled.

“The implied allegation made against me is one of the most serious kind for any holder of public office, that I have used my office to enrich my family. I cannot explain the extraordinary circumstances referred to by the media that have given rise to these allegations, so I have asked the Cabinet Secretary to undertake a formal independent investigation into them. I am confident that the official investigation by the Cabinet Secretary will eventually establish the full facts of the matter and my complete exoneration.”

He blinked, rubbed an exhausted eye.

“This investigation will inevitably take some time to complete. In the meantime the doubts and insinuations are doing real harm to the normal business of Government, and to my Party, and also to those I love. The time and attention of the Government should be devoted to implementing the program on which we were so recently re-elected, but this is not proving possible. The integrity of the office of Prime Minister has been brought into question, and it is my first duty to protect that office.”

He cleared his throat, a sound of feathered thunder.

“Therefore, to re-establish and preserve that unquestioned integrity, I have today asked the permission of Her Majesty the Queen to relinquish the office of Prime Minister as soon as a successor can be chosen.”

The silence was profound. Hearts had momentarily stopped beating.

“I have devoted my entire adult life to the pursuit of my political ideals,” he continued, “and it goes against every bone in my body to leave office in this fashion. I am not running away from the allegations but rather ensuring that they can be cleared up as quickly and expeditiously as possible. I also want to bring a little peace back to my family. I believe history will show that I have made the right judgment.”

Collingridge replaced the piece of paper in his folder. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you,” he said curtly, and, before anyone could sigh, let alone respond, he strode out of the door and was gone.

Twenty-Five

All members of a Cabinet are referred to as Right Honorable Gentlemen. There are only three things wrong with such a title…

Urquhart sat at the end of the Cabinet table transfixed. As the murmuring and gasps of surprise broke out around him he would not, could not, join in. He gazed for a long time at the Prime Minister’s empty chair.

He had done this. Alone. Had destroyed the most powerful man in the country. While the others around the table erupted in a babble of confusion, his mind turned to a memory forty years old, when as a raw military recruit he had prepared to make his first parachute jump 2,500 feet above the fields of Lincolnshire. Sitting in the open hatchway of a twin engine Islander, his feet dangling in the slipstream, gazing down at the landscape a million miles below. Jumping was an act of faith, of trust in one’s destiny, showing contempt for acts that terrified others. But the view from up there had been worth the danger. As he and the others had jumped the wind had picked up, knocking them aside; one had broken a leg, another a shoulder, but Urquhart had wanted to go straight back up and do it all over again.

Now, as he gazed at the empty chair, he felt just the same. He gave an inner cry of joy while contriving outwardly to look as shocked as those around him.

* * *

While others lingered, milling around in confusion, Urquhart walked the few yards back to the Chief Whip’s office in 12 Downing Street. He locked himself in his private room and by 10:20 a.m. he had made two phone calls.

Ten minutes later Roger O’Neill called a meeting of the entire Press Office at Party Headquarters. “You guys are going to have to cancel all your lunch arrangements today. I’ve had word that shortly after one o’clock this afternoon we can expect a very important statement from Downing Street. It’s absolutely confidential, I can’t tell you what it’s about, but we have to be ready to handle it. Push everything else aside.”

Within the hour five lobby correspondents had been contacted with apologies to cancel lunch. Two of them were sworn to secrecy and told that “something big was going on in Downing Street.” It didn’t take a
Brain
of
Britain
winner to conclude that it was likely to have something to do with “the Collingridge Affair.”

One of those facing the prospect of a canceled lunch was the PA’s Manny Goodchild. Instead of twiddling his thumbs, he used the formidable range of contacts and favors he had built up over the years to ascertain that every single member of the Cabinet had canceled engagements in order to be at Downing Street that morning, although the Number Ten Press Office refused to confirm it. He was a wise and experienced old hound and he smelled blood, so on a hunch he phoned the Buckingham Palace Press Office. That, too, like Downing Street, had nothing to say—at least officially. But the deputy press secretary had worked with Goodchild many years before on the
Manchester
Evening
News
and confirmed, entirely off the record and totally unattributably, that Collingridge had asked for an audience at 1:00 p.m.

By 11:25 a.m. the PA tape was carrying the story of the secret Cabinet meeting and the unscheduled audience expected to take place at the Palace. It was an entirely factual report. By midday IRN was feeding local radio with a sensationalized lead item that the Prime Minister “will soon be on his way for a secret meeting with Her Majesty the Queen. Speculation has exploded in Westminster during the last hour that either he’s going to sack several of his leading Ministers and inform the Queen of a major Cabinet reshuffle, or he’s going to admit his guilt to recent charges of insider trading with his brother. There are even rumors that she has been advised to exercise her constitutional prerogative and sack him.”

Downing Street filled with the press pack, jostling, eager. The far side of the street from the famous black door became obscured by a forest of cameras and hastily erected television lights. At 12:45 Collingridge walked out onto the doorstep of Number Ten. He knew the presence of the crowd denoted treachery. Someone had betrayed him, again. He felt as though nails had been driven through his feet. He ignored the screams of the press corps, didn’t look up, wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. He drove off into Whitehall, pursued by camera cars. Overhead he could hear a helicopter hovering, pursuing. Another crowd of photographers was waiting outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. His attempt at a dignified resignation had turned into a public crucifixion.