A Very British Coup

by Chris Mullin

  The sun shone brightly over Chelsea as Lady Elizabeth Fain left for her weekend in the country. On the back seat of her new Volkswagen (assembled by robots at the old Rover plant in Solihull) was a small blue suitcase containing two changes of clothes and an evening dress. Beside the case a wicker shopping basket covered by a teacloth contained an apple pie she had baked herself and a bottle of Beaujolais. Walpole the spaniel was upright on the front passenger seat.

  Kensington High Street was jammed with Saturday shoppers, but the traffic flowed smoothly. Within twenty minutes Elizabeth was through Hammersmith and on to the M40 motorway. As grey suburbs turned into green countryside she found herself thinking of Fred. On paper at least he was not her type. Had a bit of a chip on his shoulder; always going on about his being working class and how he came from another planet from the one on which she lived. She had a very easy life. Like most of her friends she had a private income and only worked when she felt like doing so. Now she came to think about it, she hadn’t a single friend, apart from Fred, who would answer to the description of ‘working class’.

  Fred was always going on about how corrupt and violent the police were. She had protested that all the policemen she had ever met were kind and courteous. He had replied that the police existed to protect people like her from people like him. At the time she had laughed at him, but as the riots crept closer to Sloane Square she began to think that there might be a grain of truth in what Fred had said.

  Walpole curled up on the front seat and fell asleep. Elizabeth exerted pressure on the accelerator. The motorway cut a swathe through lush Oxfordshire pastureland sloping away to a river valley and, beyond, a clump of forest which parted to reveal a country house not unlike the one in which her parents lived. What a contrast with life in one of the great grey skyscrapers in Battersea, where she had once worked for six months in a private nursery school. Somehow people in Battersea even looked different from those she mixed with. The women were pale, pasty, often with unwashed straggly hair and tired eyes. Girls her own age were weighed down with children and shopping baskets and push chairs. Was that what being working class meant? Would she have been like that if she had been born on a council estate in Battersea instead of a country house in Somerset?

  About ten miles from Oxford Elizabeth left the motorway at an exit signposted to Watlington. Before reaching the village she turned into an avenue marked ‘private’. The avenue was lined on either side by beech trees which united overhead to form a long tunnel. After a thousand yards it swerved sharply right and, suddenly, there was the house.

  Watlington Priory was the seat of the Nortons, an ancient Catholic family which traced its ancestry back to the time of King John. The house was a Tudor mansion with two main wings branching off from a centrepiece to which clung several centuries’ growth of ivy. The Volkswagen crunched across the gravel forecourt and came to a halt by a walled vegetable garden. As it did so two golden labradors came bounding from the house and rushed in excited circles round the car. From the passenger seat Walpole eyed them cautiously.

  The labradors were followed by a young man in faded levis and a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. “Elizabeth,” he called, “how lovely to see you.”

  Elizabeth had by this time emerged from the car and was being mobbed by the labradors. “Roger,” she beamed.

  “Jackson, Johnson, get down,” the young man bellowed as though giving orders on a parade ground. Instantly the dogs obeyed.

  By now Roger stood face to face with Elizabeth. He placed a hand on each shoulder and kissed her on both cheeks. Then, turning, she reached into the car and pulled out first the suitcase and then the wicker basket.

  “You shouldn’t have bothered,” said Roger when she showed him the apple pie and the wine. Taking her case, he ushered her towards the main door of the house. Walpole and the labradors had in the meantime disappeared.

  Roger Norton was a major in the Coldstream Guards, his father’s old regiment. Home on leave after a spell in Oman. His elder brother, William, the brains in the family, was Conservative Member of Parliament for Banbury. “William’s coming for dinner this evening,” said Roger as he showed Elizabeth up the creaking staircase to her room in the west wing, “so’s Uncle Philip; I think you’ll find him interesting.”

  They dined on roast duck, taken from a deep freeze stocked by Roger in the shooting season. Apart from the presence of Elizabeth it was a family affair. Mrs Norton did the cooking; Mr Norton, a retired banker, carved. Uncle Philip poured the wine. They ate around a large trestle table in the sixteenth-century banqueting hall lit only by candles which cast long shadows.

  At first the conversation was dominated by Roger, who regaled them with tales of his exploits in Oman ‘bopping the wogs’, as he put it.

  “Bloody lucky we’re there, if you ask me,” said Roger, helping himself to more sprouts. “Somebody’s got to stick up for democracy, even in that fly-blown dump.”

  “I thought it had more to do with oil than democracy,” said Elizabeth, trying to sound as though she was making an enquiry rather than an assertion.

  Roger was taken aback. He didn’t have much experience of being contradicted, let alone by a woman. “What do you know about Oman?”

  “Only what I read in the papers.” Elizabeth sipped her wine. She wasn’t looking for an argument. Roger was a friend, not a lover. He had been a classmate of her brother’s at Eton and they had kept in touch ever since. There was a time when Elizabeth had been attracted by him, but nowadays the more she saw the less keen she was.

  It was Roger’s brother, William, who first brought the conversation round to the home front. William was in his late thirties, young for such a safe seat as Banbury. Like his father he had started in merchant banking. Folding his napkin and placing it on the table he leaned back and said firmly, “Won’t be long before we need someone to stick up for democracy here.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs Norton with relish, “I was wondering how long it would be before we got round to Harry Perkins.”

  William warmed to his theme. He spoke with the sort of loud self-confidence learned at public school debating societies and rugby club dinners. “Harry Perkins will be the ruin of this country. Nobody in his right mind would invest a penny piece here while he and his shower are in charge. Pound’s already going down the chute. Americans are being told to clear out and leave us to the mercy of the Russians. There’s even talk of muzzling the press.”

  “The question is,” said Mrs Norton, “what are we going to do about it?”

  “No good looking to us chaps in the House of Commons,” sighed William. “Morale on our side’s pretty low. I’ve never known it so bad.”

  “Come now, William, dear boy.” It was Uncle Philip who until now had hardly spoken. “Picture’s nothing near as bleak as you make out.”

  Uncle Philip paused to cut the end from the cigar he had taken from his top pocket, but no one interrupted. “It’s not as though Perkins has got a free hand. Any day now he’s going to have to go to the International Monetary Fund for a socking great loan and they aren’t going to part with that money without attaching a few strings.”

  He leaned forward to take them into his confidence. “Between you and me, the chaps in the Treasury are already having a quiet word with their opposite numbers in the finance ministries of the other IMF countries. Do you know what the Treasury chaps are saying? ‘Don’t bale the bastards out,’ that’s what they’re saying. Let Perkins and his crew stew in their own juice for a while.”

  Uncle Philip paused again to light his cigar. He went on, “As regards the Americans. If you think they’ll just pack their bags and go just because Brother Perkins tells them to, you’re quite mistaken. Of course, if the worst comes to the worst they may make a show of leaving, taking a few aeroplanes and soldiers home, but they’ve got billions of pounds worth of equipment invested in British bases and they aren’t going to abandon it. They’ll do a deal with the British military to keep it on ice fo
r a while until we get a government with some sense. Then they’ll come back and take over where they left off.”

  Uncle Philip had everyone’s attention. The candlelight made the shadows flicker. He took a puff on his cigar and still no one else spoke. “If you ask me,” he went on, “Perkins isn’t going to make it to the next election. I’d give him a year, maybe two.”

  “Surely you aren’t suggesting someone’s going to bump him off?” asked William.

  “Not literally, no, but there’s other forms of assassination.” He tapped the ash from the end of his cigar into a saucer. “Character assassination, for example. You never know what the boys in the media will dig up.”

  Elizabeth thought she saw a twinkle in his eye, but it may only have been the candlelight.

  “Your Uncle Philip seems very sure of himself,” she said later as Roger showed her to her room.

  “So he should be. Don’t you know who he is?”

  “Should I?”

  “Uncle Philip is the Co-ordinator of Intelligence in the Cabinet Office. The link man between the Prime Minister and the spooks.”

  On Monday morning Fred Thompson arrived at Number Ten Downing Street at 8.30 sharp. The policeman on the door was expecting him and he was taken immediately up the main staircase to the Prime Minister’s study.

  “Ah, there you are, lad,” said Perkins, stretching out his hand.

  “Nice place you’ve got here, Harry.”

  “Comes with the job.” Perkins gestured Fred towards an easy chair at the near end of the room. “Tea or coffee?”

  “Coffee,” said Thompson, expecting the Prime Minister to pick up a telephone and order coffee for two. Instead Perkins walked to the far corner of the study and plugged in a kettle which stood on a formica-topped surface behind the writing desk. As the kettle boiled he scooped spoonfuls of Nescafé into two coffee mugs. One of the mugs bore the slogan “Harry for Prime Minister.”

  “A present from one of the lads at Firth’s,” said Perkins when he noticed Thompson straining to read the inscription.

  The kettle had boiled and Perkins was pouring the steaming water into the mugs. “About this job.” As he spoke he stirred in milk from a half empty bottle that stood beside the kettle. “Officially, you’ll be in charge of replying to correspondence from party members and trade unions.”

  Perkins did not ask about sugar. He just plopped two lumps into each cup and carried them back to where Thompson was sitting. He was still wearing a red carnation in his buttonhole. When he was seated in the armchair opposite Thompson he took a sip of his coffee and then resumed in a low voice.

  “Unofficially, I want you to keep an eye on the civil servants.” He lowered his voice. “To be honest, Fred, I don’t trust the bastards an inch. When things hot up, we can expect ferocious opposition to our policies from the Treasury, the Foreign Office and the MoD. I want you to keep your ear to the ground for any underhand tactics. Leaks to the press, withholding information, that sort of thing.”

  Perkins drained his mug and placed it on the low table by his chair. “I’ve told the Cabinet Secretary in words of one syllable that we don’t want any of the nonsense we had to put up with last time Labour was in government. And I told him to pass the word around.”

  The Prime Minister stood up and walked to the door. Thompson followed. “Where will I be working?” he asked.

  “Follow me and I’ll show you.”

  They turned right outside the study and walked until they came to the staircase at the front of the house. Perkins took the stairs two at a time. On the second floor he opened a door leading from the landing. Inside there was a small room with a low ceiling. The walls were bare except for a Tory Central Office calendar left over from the previous régime and a copy of the fire regulations. The front wall sloped inwards in line with the angle of the roof. “Used to be the servants’ quarters,” said Perkins.

  Thompson walked to one of the two box windows that protruded from the roof and peered out. The view below was of Downing Street and opposite, the huge metal gates barring the first of a series of archways through the Foreign Office and beyond the Treasury.

  “Doesn’t catch the sun much, I’m afraid,” said Perkins, who had half seated himself on the grey metal desk that stood by the left-hand wall. The wall bore traces of a bricked-up fireplace.

  The surface of the desk was clear apart from a Philips word processor and a wire rack containing Downing Street writing paper and envelopes. On the floor by the desk was a table lamp with a long flexible arm, but minus a light bulb.

  “Functional, that’s the word,” said Perkins, who was by now seated on the desk with his feet no longer touching the floor. “Still, I expect you’ll brighten the place up a bit. Stick up a few CND posters. That’ll give them heart attacks downstairs.” He gave a little chuckle. Thompson smiled too.

  Outside on the landing Perkins indicated another door to which was glued a hand-painted wooden sign which read: Church of England Crown Appointments Commission. “Your neighbours for the time being,” said Perkins, raising his eyebrows. “You should have heard the fuss when I said I was asking the Archbishop of Canterbury to find them a place at Lambeth Palace. Anyone would have thought I’d ordered them to demolish Westminster Abbey.”

  Thompson moved closer to the door so that he could read the sign. “What on earth are they doing here?”

  “In theory the Prime Minister appoints the bishops and all sorts of other worthies.” Perkins was now leaning against the wall with one hand in a trouser pocket. “In practice the Archbishop just sends over his nomination and I sign on the dotted line. Ludicrous, isn’t it? I haven’t set foot in a church since we buried my Mum.”

  They went downstairs again. This time to the ground floor. In the entrance hall Perkins introduced Thompson to Inspector Page, who was taking tea with the duty policemen. “This is the gent who keeps me safe from all those vicious Tory ladies.” Inspector Page managed only the briefest of smiles as he reached for Thompson’s hand.

  From the entrance lobby they passed down the long gold-carpeted corridor to the Cabinet Room. Perkins opened the door and they stepped inside. At the far end the early morning sunlight streamed in through the long windows. “This is where it all happens,” said Perkins, propping himself against one of the two white pillars which extend from ceiling to floor just inside the door. “The table,” explained Perkins, “is shaped like a boat. I sit in the middle” – he pointed to the chair in front of the mantelpiece – “so everyone can see the expression on my face.” For a moment they stood in silence and then they turned and left, Perkins closing the door behind them.

  The private office adjoins the Cabinet Room. Horace Tweed had just arrived when Perkins’ head came round the door. His bowler hat was on a peg by the filing cabinets. He stood as Perkins entered. “Good morning, Prime Minister.”

  “Mr Tweed, I want you to meet Fred Thompson who is joining my political staff.”

  “Delighted,” said Tweed in a tone of voice that suggested he was far from delighted by the prospect of working with some young Labour Party upstart.

  When they were out of earshot Perkins whispered, “Don’t forget, Fred, you report to me and only to me. Don’t let Tweed or anyone else tell you otherwise.” Thompson nodded.

  They went back upstairs again to the office that was to be Thompson’s. By this time a sack of mail had arrived and was sitting on the floor by the desk. “I assume you’ll type most of your own letters,” said Perkins, “but if you want any help, the typing pool is in the basement. Garden girls they call them. All twinsets and pearls. That’s something we’ll have to sort out. Get some of our lasses in.” Perkins looked at his watch. He still had some reading to do before the Cabinet meeting. “Right, Fred, I’ll leave you to it. If you want anything, ask Tweed.” As he moved towards the door Perkins turned. “There is one thing I should have mentioned.” He smiled broadly, causing the lines in his rugged face to sharpen. “You’ll have to be vetted by secur
ity. To make sure you aren’t a threat to democracy.”

  The Cabinet met at ten o’clock. Ministers arrived at Downing Street on foot as Perkins had given instructions that cars from the government pool were only to be used for emergencies.

  In the Cabinet Room Perkins sat with his back to the fireplace in the seat traditionally occupied by Prime Ministers. Above him hung a melancholy portrait of Sir Robert Walpole. Wainwright, the Chancellor, sat on his left. Only a handful of members of the new government had ever held Cabinet rank before and some had never held any government office.

  Perkins opened the proceedings with a little homily. “We are about to embark on one of the most exciting programmes any British government has ever dared contemplate. Although we have a clear popular mandate, we can expect to come under the most severe pressure from those vested interests who would rather our programme were not fulfilled. If we are to resist such pressure it is important we should never lose sight of the ideals of the Party that sent us here.”

  He looked around the table. He had the attention of everyone present. “At the moment we have the advantage of surprise. This will not last long, but while we have it we must use it. As my old Dad used to say, ‘Hit ’em hard and when they’re down, hit ’em again.’” This elicited smiles from everyone except the Cabinet secretary who sat stone faced.

  Item one on the agenda was a paper on the economic situation prepared by the Treasury. Wainwright reviewed the main points and stated his opinion. “They want us to go for higher interest rates and a large IMF loan.”

  “They don’t waste any time at the Treasury, do they?” interrupted Jock Steeples, the Leader of the House. “Before we know where we are they’ll be asking for spending cuts and an incomes policy.” From around the table there was a sympathetic murmur.

  Wainwright ignored the interruption. “As far as the IMF’s concerned we don’t have much choice. If the pound continues to fall at the present rate our entire reserves will be gone by the end of the month.”