A Conspiracy of Friends

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Barbara, I need to talk to you.”

  She looked up. “Certainly. Take a seat, Rupert.”

  He shook his head. “No need to prolong this. It’s about Errol Greatorex—the autobiography of the yeti.”

  “Oh, yes. I’m expecting a couple of new chapters soon. He said he’d send them. Do you want to read them?”

  Rupert smiled. “No need. He’ll be sending them to me, in fact. I’m taking him over.”

  Barbara put down the letter she was holding. “You? He’s my client, Rupert.”

  “Was, Barbara. Was your client. He’s come over to me, along with the yeti.”

  “The yeti? The yeti is my client, Rupert. You can’t just take these people.”

  “They asked, Barbara. It wasn’t me.”

  She rose to her feet. “You’re saying that the yeti asked? You don’t even believe in the yeti, Rupert. You said so.”

  “I do, now that I’ve met him.”

  “And he asked to go over to you? ”

  “Yes.”

  60. Oedipus Encounters the New Rules

  OEDIPUS SNARK WAS extremely pleased to be a government minister, even one so lowly as to be left off just about every list of who did what. His position was vague: so much so that the post in question was sometimes described as being “The Undersecretary for This and That.” Oedipus himself had used this name for it in the past—at the expense of the then occupant, a political rival—but upon his own appointment had dropped the joke.

  “It’s a relatively minor appointment, as these things go,” he said to friends. “But it is influential, you know. Part of it is to do with science, and investment in training. We need more scientists, you see, and that’s where I come in.”

  He also liked to point out that the post in question had been occupied by a politician who subsequently became extremely influential. “Not quite prime minister,” he said, “but close enough. Had he not been defeated in an election, he would have been PM pretty soon. No doubt about that. And he was where I am now for at least three months. It’s a bit of a springboard, this post. Rising stars, you know.”

  The perks that went with the post were small enough, yet Oedipus guarded them jealously. He had a shared government car, which he used rather more than the other minister to whom it had been allocated; he had a full-time secretary; and he was entitled to two tickets to the Garden Party. That was not quite all: as a government minister, he was also entitled to hang in his office one painting from the government collection. Ministers, of course, are aware of the interest that journalists take in their choice of art, and most choose with one eye to how their selection will reflect on them. For this reason, the best paintings—those of some artistic significance and aesthetic quality—are frequently ignored in favour of paintings by contemporary artists whose work is deemed to be progressive, forward-looking or indeed at the cutting edge. Most of these works are not ones that anybody would wish to have on a wall in circumstances other than at night or in a darkened room, and the ministers in question are obliged to spend an uncomfortable time averting their eyes from the visual disasters they have favoured. Eventually those paintings are returned to the collection and something more pleasing—even if unfashionable—is put on the wall; or they are inadvertently mistaken for rubbish by the cleaners and sent off to the dump alongside all the waste paper generated in such heroic quantities by these sorts of offices.

  But Oedipus did not choose anything like that. When asked to select a painting for his office, he had requested Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, only to be told that this painting was currently in the collection of the national galleries and not available for ministerial use. A subsequent request for Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid was also turned down—on the same grounds—and Oedipus eventually settled for a small watercolour sketch by Sir Stanley Spencer.

  Now ensconced in his Whitehall fastness, Oedipus set about his ministerial tasks, enjoying his power to order civil servants to troop into his office and brief him not only on the subject of his portfolio but also on the portfolios of other, more senior ministers, whose positions he envied and would like to obtain in some way or other. In this way, he received detailed briefings on subjects as diverse as the European Union’s policy on barge traffic on inland rivers, the attitude of the United Kingdom to the issue of international sale of goods treaties and the development of offshore resources in the South China Sea.

  Ideally, Oedipus would have liked to be Foreign Secretary, a post he recognised as having considerable options for foreign travel, which he enjoyed. He watched with envy the peregrinations of the current incumbent, and studied in detail the issue of access to the VIP suites at Heathrow airport. Oedipus had been outraged to discover that he was not on the list of those entitled to use these suites, and had demanded an explanation from the civil servant with whom he had raised the matter.

  “Well, frankly, sir,” said the official, “you aren’t actually a very important person. You are undoubtedly an important person—and I would be the first to acknowledge that, I do assure you—but in terms of the eligibility requirements agreed between HMG and BAA, you are not a VIP.”

  Oedipus had glowered. “So I must go about government business mixing with the public? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “More or less, sir. In fact, yes, I think I can commit to that position. Yes, that’s what I might be considered to be saying.”

  Oedipus laughed sneeringly. “And I suppose I have to go economy class. I suppose you expect me to sit at the rear of the plane with the screaming babies and the students and whatnot?”

  He intended it as a joke—a reductio ad absurdum—and did not expect the civil servant’s reply.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not serious,” said Oedipus.

  “Yes, I’m afraid I am. Under the new rules, the austerity provisions, all junior government ministers—and I’m afraid, sir, you’re not considered senior, which I suppose, on one view of the matter, implies that you’re junior—under the new austerity provisions, junior ministers are required to travel in economy class, and I wouldn’t wish to labour this point, but I feel I must inform you: you are also required to get an advance-purchase economy ticket where possible. On a cheap airline too.”

  Oedipus could barely speak, but he did manage to say, “What’s the point, may I ask? What’s the point of being in office if these indignities …”

  The civil servant answered, “Well, with respect, sir, I would have thought that the point of being in office was to serve the public. I know it’s a terribly old-fashioned view—and not one which all of our political masters are entirely enthusiastic about—but it is, I think, a view which finds acceptance, and indeed, one would go so far as to say, full endorsement, by at least ninety-nine point nine per cent of the population of this country, that is, in a manner of speaking, by that body of persons sometimes vulgarly referred to as the people.”

  Oedipus was silent. He would see about that.

  The civil servant coughed discreetly. “Of course,” he added, “when I say ninety-nine point nine per cent of the people, I am merely hazarding a guess. It’s possible that the correct figure is even higher, perhaps so close to one hundred per cent as to make the opinion to all intents and purposes unanimous. To put it crudely, one might even use an expression such as ‘everybody thinks.’ ”

  “Do they?” said Oedipus, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “Yes,” said the civil servant. “They do.”

  61. Big Science Calls

  THE INDIGNITIES OF economy-class travel were inflicted on Oedipus Snark and other junior ministers by what he saw as an excessively penny-pinching government. The fact that he was himself a member of that government was, he felt, beside the point.

  “Show me one mention, just one single mention,” he expostulated, “in the manifestos of either my party or that of our coalition partners of anything—anything—to do with making Ministers of the Crown travel in the back of the plane. Found
it? No, you wouldn’t, would you, because it isn’t there. So on what authority do they cut a well-established and necessary arrangement for the maintenance of high standards of government? Now, it’s not just comfort, it’s security as well—in fact, it’s mostly about security. We have to deal with confidential papers when we travel, and how can things remain confidential when you have some oaf leaning over your shoulder looking at your working papers?”

  That was the essence of his position, but there were further arguments to be advanced. “Frankly,” Oedipus said, “I don’t see why they don’t make a distinction between travel arrangements for us and for members of the former government. When we go on these House of Commons committee trips, I think they should make business class available to our people and not to the opposition. Why? Well, it’s their fault, isn’t it? They’re the ones who caused the crisis by overspending with reckless abandon for the last n years. So let them suffer the consequences of economising. Yes, why not? Your mess—you clean it up. The polluter pays—or, in this context, the spender saves. Ha! That would teach them a thing or two.

  “And there’s another thing,” he continued. “On our side of the House we believe in individual effort and in letting people enjoy the benefits of their hard work. The other side doesn’t—not really; they may say they do, but have you noticed how they cross their fingers when they talk about rewarding effort? Have you noticed that? So I think we should recognise their strong anti-elitist sentiments and save them the embarrassment of travelling business class by forbidding it—for them at least. Ha!”

  Of course, these arguments—like most of the views expressed by Oedipus Snark—got him nowhere, and he found himself constrained to accept an economy-class ticket to Geneva when he and twelve other MPs on the All-Party Committee on Pure Scientific Research were invited to visit the Large Hadron Collider. This project was funded in part by the British government, which gave over seventy million pounds a year as part of its support of scientific endeavour. The Collider authorities were always keen to enthuse politicians over the research they undertook, and so a regular stream of members of parliament paid a visit each year to the vast tunnel under the Alps where particles were accelerated towards one another at speeds close to the speed of light. The resultant events promised to show us just what conditions were like a fraction of a second after the Big Bang—information that the government of the United Kingdom was keen to obtain for some reason.

  Oedipus rapidly cleared his diary for the three days that the trip would require. There was to have been a meeting with his constituency party committee—it was easily set aside on the grounds of absence “on government business.” There was an invitation to visit a new school, which he had already put off once before; it could be postponed again—in fact, cancelled altogether. After all, it was just a school. And there was a meeting which had been set up by a conservation pressure group—they could be strung along indefinitely, irritating people that they were, going on about voles or whatever it was. There were no voles in his constituency, he was sure of it, and yet they had targeted him for some reason. Cancelled.

  Big science called, and science did not get any bigger than the Large Hadron Collider. Oedipus was a bit hazy about what exactly it did and how it did it, but he had seen pictures of it and it was certainly large: Los Alamos stuff, this. They were looking for something, he had read, and when they found it they would know how it all started: the slime, the human race, the Liberal Democrat party—the lot! It had some bearing on evolution, of course, and Lib Dems, as everybody knew, were the most evolved of the available political species! He might try that joke on some of his colleagues; he was building up a reputation for being a bit of a wag, and these sorts of bons mots always helped.

  The day before the departure for Geneva, Oedipus received a telephone call from a journalist. He was always happy to speak to journalists, and he enjoyed nothing more than profile features about the decor of his flat or the three best books he had read in the last year. Favourite restaurants too—he liked those features; the Notting Hill Bistro had been a recent haunt, as had Semplice, off Blenheim Street. This journalist presumably wanted something along those lines, and he would try to oblige. A good newspaper article, he had once been told, was worth at least eighty votes, while a television interview—a successful one—was worth two hundred and fifty.

  The journalist was quick to come to the point. He had come into possession of papers relating to a transaction between Oedipus and a certain businessman which suggested that influence had been used to secure a contract: money had changed hands. The documents appeared genuine. Did Mr. Snark have any comment to make?

  Oedipus issued an immediate denial. Any such documents, he said, were certainly fakes, and if any mention were made of them in the press he would instruct his solicitors to start proceedings for libel. Would the journalist please inform his editor of this immediately. And goodbye.

  He put the receiver down. The back of his neck felt hot, and his heart was thumping within him. He had a good idea of what those documents were, and he knew that the most likely person to have had access to them was Barbara Ragg, his lover at the time. Barbara! So this was her revenge, was it? Well, she was in for an unpleasant surprise—an extremely unpleasant surprise indeed. But for the time being he would put the whole thing out of his mind. CERN beckoned, with its hadron collider and its accelerated particles. Perhaps they would find the Higgs Boson at last, or another particle. It would be wonderful to have a particle named after one. The Snark Particle. It sounded very appropriate. If he mentioned his role in continuing British financial support for the collider, the director might take the hint and choose that name for a particle. Not necessarily a big or important particle, but a particle nonetheless.

  62. In the Collider

  WHEN THE PARTY of British MPs arrived at CERN, they were met by one of the associate directors, the director himself being at a conference in Berlin. This associate director was one of the British appointments, a slight Ulsterman who had pursued a career in physics at Imperial College before transferring to the accelerator project. Dr. David Ferman was a softly spoken man who lived for the more abstruse, remote provinces of physics; if anybody knew how the universe started, it was said, he did. He met the MPs in one of the conference rooms, where coffee was served before the tour was due to begin.

  “I’m not sure how much you know about this project, ladies and gentlemen,” Dr. Ferman began. “As you know, we get a lot of press coverage, but we do not always find that the public grasps exactly what we’re about. Not that anybody can blame them: our work is very much at the cutting edge of modern physics, and there are plenty of people with degrees in physics who might be quite hazy on what it’s all about. So please don’t hesitate to ask questions.”

  There then followed a half-hour presentation on electroweak forces, the discovery of the W and Z bosons and the hunt for Higgs. Some of the MPs followed the lecture, but most quickly became lost. Oedipus followed nothing at all, though he did recognise references to gravity, with which he, like most of us, was familiar. References to antimatter intrigued him, and in the question time at the end he took up Dr. Ferman’s comment about the explosive potential of a pound of antimatter.

  “It would be a substantial bang,” said Dr. Ferman. “The equivalent of about several thousand atomic bombs. But I wouldn’t worry about it too much if I were you.”

  Oedipus assumed a severe expression. “You’ve heard of the precautionary principle, Dr. Ferman,” he said. “It’s our job as politicians—and especially those of us who happen to be government ministers—to be prepared for all eventualities. I don’t think we should make light of the threat that antimatter could represent to democracies if it got into irresponsible hands.”

  Dr. Ferman said nothing for a moment, which make Oedipus look about him with a slightly superior smile. The other MPs waited for the physicist’s reaction.

  “By all means, take precautions,” said Dr. Ferman. “I would never en
courage anybody to be foolhardy in these areas.”

  “Exactly,” said Oedipus. “I’m glad that you take my point.”

  “Of course, it would be a long-term threat,” continued Dr. Ferman. “It’s not short-term.”

  “Ah, but that’s what we need to guard against,” Oedipus crowed. “Short-termism. We need to take the long view.”

  Dr. Ferman shrugged. “By all means,” he said. “But it would take all our collider resources about sixty billion years to produce enough antimatter to make one bomb. I assume that even your planning horizons, Mr. Snark, do not extend that far into the future. Or am I doing you an injustice? I am aware, of course, that you are a member of a government that is deliberately taking the longer view. Perhaps, therefore, you’re correct, and we should plan for the next sixty billion years.”

  There was a snigger from one or two of the MPs, and Oedipus turned red.

  “So,” Dr. Ferman went on, “are there any other questions—short-term or long-term?”

  The jibe brought another burst of laughter. “It’s going to take your party at least sixty billion years to get into power on your own,” said a sharp-faced MP, pointing a bony finger at Oedipus. This brought even greater laughter from everybody present, except from Dr. Ferman, who clearly wanted to laugh too but decided that tact precluded it.

  They now left the conference room and moved towards a large metal door marked Hadron Collider: No Admittance.

  “I’m happy to say that this sign doesn’t apply to us,” said Dr. Ferman. “We don’t want just anybody wandering around the collider, but the director and I are allowed to take groups in. Please put on this protective gear, though—these plastic hats and shoe covers. We don’t want the wrong sort of particle getting in there!”

  Dressed in their special outfits, the MPs followed Dr. Ferman through the door and into a high tunnel stretching into the distance on either side. There were great magnets on the side of the tunnel and a bewildering array of scientific hardware—wires, switches, large metal boxes.