A Very British Coup

by Chris Mullin

  Such language had never been heard from a British Prime Minister before. Although received with rapture in Sheffield town hall, Harry Perkins’ words burst upon the Athenaeum as though the end of the world was at hand. Which, in a manner of speaking, it was.

  “South of France for me, old boy,” said Furnival.

  “Certainly looks like the game’s up, Arthur,” murmured the Bishop, whose faith in divine providence had temporarily deserted him.

  From nearby Trafalgar Square came a burst of firecrackers as crowds of young people celebrated the election result.

  By 1.15 the scale of the disaster was apparent to everyone. The television commentators were now citing a computer prediction that Perkins would have an overall majority of around ninety seats. Gradually the cluster of eminent gentlemen around the television dwindled. Some donned overcoats and slipped miserably out into the night. One ancient member dozed on a Chesterfield in the lobby, his head resting on the marble wall, pince-nez dangling from a cord around his neck.

  Not everyone went home. Some drifted upstairs to the huge drawing room and sat in urgent little groups discussing what life in Harry Perkins’ Britain held in store for them.

  “Early days yet.” The speaker was Sir Lucas Lawrence, former permanent secretary at the Department of Industry. He was standing at the end of the drawing room overlooking Carlton House Terrace. On the mantelpiece behind him were white marble busts of Alexander Pope and Edmund Burke. Below in the grate a pinewood fire crackled.

  “These Labour chappies are all the same,” Sir Lucas went on. “Always shooting their mouths off in opposition, but once they’ve got their backsides in the limousines they’re as meek as lambs.” After retiring from the Department of Industry Sir Lucas had joined the board of an arms company. There had been one or two raised eyebrows at the time. The odd parliamentary question drawing attention to his dealings with the same company in his capacity as a public servant, but it had all blown over and now Sir Lucas was chairman of the board, his civil service pension intact.

  “Pretty damn serious if you ask me,” boomed Lord Kildare, a portly landowner with a castle and 30,000 acres in Scotland and a town house in Chelsea. He was standing facing the huge mirror above the fireplace. His considerable bulk rested on the back of one of the green leather armchairs. The mirror afforded a panoramic view of the vast room behind him. In the distance he could see stewards in red jackets and black bow ties silently commuting between the bar and the little groups of elderly gentlemen scattered around the room. He shook his head sadly. A way of life was coming to an end. “Pretty damn serious,” repeated Kildare gazing absently into the fire.

  Sir Lucas was not convinced. He drew deeply on his Havana and exhaled vigorously. “Mark my words,” he said firmly, “once the boys in the private office get to work, these Labour chappies won’t know what’s hit them.”

  Kildare side-stepped to avoid being engulfed by an oncoming cloud of cigar smoke. “All very well,” he said miserably, “but I’ve never heard any Prime Minister talk like that fellow Perkins tonight.”

  Sir Lucas was unruffled. “You forget,” he said. “I’ve seen all this at close quarters. Mind you, I am not saying it was plain sailing. One or two Labour ministers always prove difficult, but in the end we sorted them out.”

  “How?” asked Kildare, who already had visions of a life in exile. He pictured himself in a white suit and a straw hat sitting alone on the verandah of the Bermuda Cricket Club, a daiquiri in one hand and an out of date airmail edition of the Daily Telegraph spread on the table before him. No, thought Kildare, give me the grouse moors any day.

  Sir Lucas adopted a confidential tone, “I’ll tell you how.” He lowered his voice and touched Kildare reassuringly on the forearm. “We turned the whole damn machine loose on them. More than any man can stand. Whenever my minister insisted on giving money away to co-operatives or any of his other harebrained schemes, I would give old Handley in the Cabinet Office a ring and put him in the picture. He’d get his people to produce a brief opposing ours which would be distributed to all other departments. If necessary he’d follow up with telephone calls to sympathetic ministers and when the matter came up at Cabinet my minister would find himself totally outgunned. After a while he got the message and resigned. Just as well, otherwise we’d have had him reshuffled.”

  “All very well, Lucas, when you’ve only got one or two extremists in the government, but what if you’ve got a whole Cabinet full of them?” Kildare ran a finger round the rim of his whisky glass.

  Sir Lucas smiled wanly. “In that case something bigger’s called for.” He glanced over his shoulder as though afraid of eavesdroppers. “One or two runs on sterling. A whopping balance of payments crisis. Only takes a few telephone calls to lay this sort of thing on. If you’d seen, as I have, the Prime Minister’s face at 2.30 in the morning when sterling’s going down the drain at a million pounds a minute, you’d soon realise how right I am.”

  “If you ask me, we’ve got a job of work on our hands preserving civilised values.” The newcomer to the conversation was Sir Peregrine Craddock, who had been quietly sipping his orange juice on the fringe of the gathering. Speaking as though he was dictating a top secret memorandum, Sir Peregrine continued, “Very serious situation. Whole country crawling with extremists. Everything we stand for threatened. Fight back essential.”

  With that he placed his glass, still half full of orange juice, on the mantelpiece, turned on his heel and strode out of the drawing room. The lobby was empty now except for the member with the pince-nez who was still dozing. It was silent too, apart from the sporadic patter of the tape machine. Sir Peregrine put on his hat and coat, paused to peer at the latest offerings from the Press Association and walked out into the night. It was exactly 2 am on Harry Perkins’ first day as Prime Minister.

  Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC, lies just north of Oxford Circus and about a mile from the Athenaeum. On general election nights it is the custom for the Director General to give a small drinks party for the governors, their spouses and a handful of senior executives. The party takes place in a sterile suite adjacent to the Director General’s office on the third floor of Broadcasting House, down the corridor from the special radio election unit.

  BBC governors are a small body of impartial men and women, whose job is to uphold the commitment to fairness and balance enshrined in the Corporation’s charter. Although BBC governors are supposed to reflect a wide cross-section of society, it is fair to say that the political views of Harry Perkins were not within the spectrum of opinion which they embraced. As the alcohol flowed and the scale of Perkins’ election victory was becoming clear, the wafer-thin veneer of impartiality which normally shrouds BBC pronouncements began to give way to something less dignified.

  “CAT-AST-ROPHIC.” The Belfast brogue of Sir Harry Boyd, who twenty years earlier had been the last Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, broke the gloomy silence around a television set which was delivering a computer prediction of a Labour majority of at least 100 seats. “Catastrophic,” repeated Sir Harry quietly, collapsing into an armchair.

  “We could be in for civil war,” said Jonathan Alford, a rather correct man in his late thirties and a senior television news executive. Civil war was something Alford knew a bit about since he was also a major in the territorial Special Air Services. He was one of a number of senior BBC personnel whose spare time was spent scrambling over assault courses in Herefordshire and attending lectures in army staff colleges on strike-breaking and riot control. The outgoing government had trebled the territorial army budget and left recruits in no doubt that they would have a rôle to play in the event of large scale civil disturbance.

  Major Alford was just beginning to enlarge, rather gleefully, some felt, on the prospects of civil war when he was interrupted by a shrill cry of, “Oh Christ, there goes Roddy,” from over by the television set.

  The scream, for that is what it was, emanated from the cons
iderable frame of Dame Margaret Carrington, Justice of the Peace and chairperson of the Historic Homes Association. Roddy was Lieutenant-General Sir Rodney Appleton, until now Member of Parliament for Taunton, of whom it was once said, “If there was a canal in Taunton he’d send a gunboat up it.” Sir Rodney was a neighbour of Dame Margaret’s in Surrey.

  Over by the door the Director General, Sir Roland Chance, was administering a stern warning to Jack Lansman, link-man on the breakfast-time radio news programme. It would be Lansman’s job to break the news of Perkins’ election victory to those members of the British public who hadn’t sat glued to their television sets into the small hours. “I do hope we’ve got this straight, Jack,” drawled the Director General. “You can’t go on describing these people as ‘extremists’. After all, they are now the government.”

  Lansman was unrepentant. “I’ve been calling them extremists for years, and nobody’s ever complained.”

  The DG was sympathetic. “You really mustn’t take this personally, old chap. I don’t like them any more than you do. It’s just that they’ve won and we shall have to take them seriously.”

  “If you say so,” sighed Lansman, “but what about the moderates? Surely I can identify a moderate or two? Damn it all, the public have a right to know what they are in for.”

  “They’ll find out soon enough. The public don’t need any guidance from you. Just give it to them straight. No more labels. Do you understand?” Lansman nodded sulkily. The DG sidled off to commiserate with Dame Margaret, leaving Lansman muttering, “I’ll give it to them straight all right.”

  On leaving the Athenaeum, Sir Peregrine Craddock crossed Pall Mall and headed up a side street into St James’s Square. He cut the corner by the London Library and turning left walked crisply up Duke of York Street, then through Church Place and into Piccadilly, emerging by the Church of St James. Although the buses had long since stopped, taxi cabs were doing brisk business and private cars still cruised towards Piccadilly Circus.

  Turning left, Sir Peregrine walked quickly past Hatchards and Fortnum and Mason where he had recently purchased a pound of caviar to celebrate his daughter’s birthday. Past the Royal Academy on the other side of Piccadilly, its huge metal gates locked shut, and past the Ritz Hotel. All symbols of everything he found best in the British way of life.

  Sir Peregrine was a troubled man. For years he had laboured to keep British public life free from extremism. Every civil servant, every army officer, every MP, every BBC executive whose background betrayed the merest possibility of disloyalty had been quietly blocked from promotion. Now, overnight, all these years of hard work were threatened. Within days the establishment would be crawling with extremists. In Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, people who until now, thanks to DI5’s good work, would not have qualified as doorkeepers in a government department would now be Cabinet ministers. And all because the British public was composed of ignorant clodheads who didn’t know what was good for them. Sir Peregrine had never had much time for democracy, but this was the final straw.

  By Green Park tube station Sir Peregrine crossed the road and turned right into Bolton Street. Those who did not know better might have assumed that this well-dressed, solitary gentleman was on his way to Shepherd Market where expensive ladies have long been known to provide a wide range of unmentionable services for the upper classes at all times of the day and night. In fact Sir Peregrine was on his way to the DI5 Registry: a seven-storey, fortress-like building of Second World War vintage in Curzon Street, called simply Curzon Street House. Apart from the heavy lace curtains which are features of most secret service décor, there is nothing to indicate what goes on behind the solid walls of Curzon Street House. Those who get as far as the reception will notice only that the internal telephone directory is stamped ‘Secret’. In the street directory the building is listed simply as ‘central government offices’.

  Sir Peregrine entered by the glass doors at the front of the building. Behind these was a steel portcullis with a small door and beyond a reception desk manned by a security officer. Briskly acknowledging the man’s attempt at pleasantry, Sir Peregrine went straight to the lift. He emerged on the second floor, turned right and walked a few paces down a carpeted corridor to an unmarked door. Taking his wallet from an inside pocket, he withdrew what appeared to be a plastic banker’s card and fed it into a slot in the wall. There was a muffled click as the machine checked the pass code and then, from the door, came the sound of a lock automatically disengaging. Sir Peregrine returned the pass to his wallet, turned the doorhandle and entered.

  His office was a large and comfortable room. Wine-red velvet curtains were matched by thick Tibetan rugs. The walls were hung with Vietnamese watercolours and on a table by a lampshade stood a Burmese Buddha: reminders that Sir Peregrine had seen service in the East in his Foreign Office days.

  The desk was a large Queen Anne affair, empty save for a tea mug full of felt-tip pens, a teak letter-opener and a framed picture of his wife and daughter. To one side, within easy reach of his swivel chair, stood a visual display unit, still encased in the blue plastic cover in which it had arrived five years ago. Sir Peregrine had only to tap the requisite code into the keyboard of the VDU in order to summon instantly to the screen the most intimate secrets of any one of the two million or so people said to be on the Curzon Street computer. He had only to tap another button and a print-out would slide silently from the belly of the machine.

  Gone were the days when clerks and secretaries commuted between the principal floor and the basement of Curzon Street House. Gone were the days of filling in requisition forms, frantic telephone calls to the Registry demanding reasons for delay. Today, on the application of a few simple codes, the secrets of the Curzon Street computer were instantly available.

  Not that Sir Peregrine had much time for technology. He was one of the old school, trained in the days of triplicate memoranda and beige files. He had never made any serious attempt to master the VDU and so it stood unused, spurned, beside his desk, an incongruity among the Vietnamese watercolours and the Burmese Buddhas.

  Sir Peregrine pressed a buzzer and immediately a side door opened to admit a sharp-featured young man wearing a dark suit and a blue and white striped shirt. This was Fiennes, personal assistant to the Director General. Fiennes was a high-flyer plucked straight from St Antony’s College, Oxford, on the recommendation of his tutor.

  “Things not going too well, are they, Fiennes?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What have you got for me, then?”

  “Actually, sir, there is not very much.” He handed Sir Peregrine a beige file labelled ‘Perkins, Harold A., Member of Parliament (Labour)’. The file contained about 200 sheets of computer print-out, including records of telephone conversations, photocopies of letters and details of Perkins’ voting record on the Labour Party National Executive. There were also some photographs taken at demonstrations. On the top was a short summary of the contents, typed by Fiennes. Sir Peregrine read this and then looked up. “Is this the best you can do?”

  “Seems to be all we have, sir.”

  “What about his sex life?”

  “Not married, sir.”

  “Precisely. The man must have buggered or screwed somebody at some time or other.”

  “Not to our knowledge, sir. Lived with his mother in Sheffield until she died about ten years ago. Then he moved to London and bought a flat near the Kennington Oval. Leads a fairly humdrum sort of life.” Fiennes flicked a lock of his blond hair away from his forehead.

  “What about East European embassies? Surely he’s in and out of those all the time. Most of these lefties usually are.”

  “Perkins never seems to have been much of a one for freebies, sir.”

  “Well, we are going to have to do better than this.” Sir Peregrine closed the file and handed it back to Fiennes. “When the new Cabinet is announced I want you to go through their files with a fine-
toothed comb. And not just the Cabinet. Every minister of state, every under-secretary and, above all, any political advisers they bring in with them.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fiennes was heading for the door. “And there is one other thing, sir.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ebury Bridge Road have been on. They want to know if they’re to keep the phone taps on Perkins and the other Labour people.”

  Sir Peregrine smiled. “Why not? Since the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary are theoretically our authority for tapping phones, Perkins and his men will be in the unusual situation of authorising taps on their own phones. I think that’s rather amusing, don’t you?”

  Around the corner from Curzon Street, almost within sight of DI5 headquarters, the nightshift were reporting for duty at Annabel’s. Annabel’s was not the sort of place where Harry Perkins had a big following.

  “Why doesn’t someone turn that rubbish off?” A slick young man in a red velvet dinner jacket gestured to the colour television set on the bar which was displaying the beaming features of Prime Minister-Elect Perkins.

  “Sarah couldn’t come tonight,” said a girl in a light blue jumpsuit. “Her father said if she didn’t go down to Sussex and vote Conservative he’d stop her allowance.”

  “Oh, the beast. Poor Sarah.”

  “Brilliant idea of Charlie’s to come on here. We’d have been cutting our throats with depression at the Cavalry Club. Who’s for a drink before we start noshing?” The young man in the velvet dinner jacket reached for his wallet.

  At the bar a woman strung with pearls the size of gobstoppers was saying she was too depressed even to think about food.

  Someone hung a gravy-stained napkin over the television screen, obscuring the view of Perkins.