The Knives

by Richard T. Kelly

  ‘Not on paper. However, on this go-round he’s being represented by a proper heavyweight human rights silk. Namely, your ex-wife.’

  The news struck Blaylock in the manner of an uppercut from close range, but he did his best to act like he could still see straight.

  ‘I thought she’d not done this line of work in a while?’ Sedgley continued. ‘Busier fighting foreign tyrants in Strasbourg than defending exclusions? Do you have any idea why this now?’

  Blaylock felt the silk’s courtroom gaze now turned upon him. ‘No. It makes for an odd situation but … what can we do but put our paws up? It’ll be a little story for the papers, win or lose.’

  ‘Quite. I just wanted you to be aware.’

  Blaylock saw Deborah Kerner and Mark Tallis were at his door. He made his apologies to Sedgley and headed with the spads toward the urgent meeting of the team preparing the Identity Documents Bill – for which, he knew, he needed to have his head screwed on and facing forward – and yet pulsing through his head all the way was one obdurate note: Why has Jennie picked this fight?

  ‘Sorry, say again, Deb?’

  ‘I said you should look to give ’em the silent treatment for this one. Be cool, let them do all the talking ’til they trip themselves up.’

  ‘Okay. I’m cool.’

  Deborah looked sceptical. ‘Sure you are. Just so you know, I can hear you cursing under your breath.’

  *

  As it transpired, Blaylock found that a brooding silence came naturally to him as he sat inking pyramids on a page while colleagues whose names he persistently forgot – the lead legal advisor, the bill drafter, the communications bod, the note-taker – took their seats. His attention was reserved for the bill’s ‘delivery manager’, Graham Petrie – a big-bodied, perfectly bald, softly spoken fellow whose manners belied a steeliness of will – and on Phyllida Cox, whose support in this matter he did not count upon. As the last chair was scraped under the desk Blaylock looked up.

  ‘Right. Graham. Where the hell have we got to?’

  So began the reporting back: the counsel of despair. ‘The costings remain, frankly, on the side of hair-raising … The guarantees we need for the security of people’s personal data remain elusive … Communities still haven’t signed off on our using their computer system … It’s hard to see past these anomalies we have over our travel treaties with the Irish Republic …’

  Blaylock looked to Deborah and saw that she was struggling to heed her own advice, full of fret and straining at the bit to query the evidence. When Petrie was done Blaylock frowned at him.

  ‘Graham – why don’t you tell me something new? Counsel needs to get drafting this bill. The timeline is clear: a year from today anyone who wants a driver’s licence or a passport gets an ID card. I know the issues, I understand other departments want tweaks. We need to write it up and crack on. The trouble is I listen to you all and I almost detect the sound of your – trying to talk me out of this? Like it’s too much bother?’

  Blaylock saw that he had now obtained all of the silence he could have wished for, and he leaned in.

  ‘Understand, the die is cast – we will do this. Yes, we will make contingencies. No set of costings can be called cast-iron – they will change. But that cost is to be weighed against what we gain, fighting fraud, crime, illegal immigration. We may be sure Parliament in its wisdom will find the right amendments to keep us within EU law and satisfy the guardians of our ancient liberties, all of that. But we’re not here to debate principles. Just to resolve technical issues. Now, does anyone in this room not get this? If not then speak now, speak freely.’

  Graham Petrie looked from face to face around the table, then at Blaylock. ‘Minister, this is a bill where … I feel we have to be wary of haste to implement the policy unless it is absolutely adequately worked out. I don’t say this one can’t work—’

  ‘Of course not. If you said that then I’d have to throw you out of the room.’ Belatedly Blaylock ventured a smile – Joke! – but too late, for Graham had not taken it lightly.

  ‘I happen to believe, Minister, that we are obliged to be honest about gaps or logical wrinkles in a policy. Also, to weigh the time and effort it will take to craft this bill, as against the risk of public suspicion of it, the potential for major budget overruns and for judicial rejection.’

  ‘Graham, all I see is a weird unwillingness round this table to put forward a set of clauses in order to be tested. I repeat, it will cost what it will cost. Data security will be the best we can make it.’

  ‘Minister, are you so confident our “best” will satisfy the concerns of the public about what the state will do with their data—’

  ‘Graham …’ – Blaylock shook his head – ‘you talk about the state like it’s a villain in a movie. The state is us. We, the people’s servants. Legitimate by contract, with the right to command. And we’re not such an awful bunch, are we?’

  The room stayed silent, no one visibly impressed by Blaylock’s oratory. He wondered if he had confused Hobbes and Locke – or Rawls? – to the distaste of all these First and Upper Second PPE graduates.

  Finally Mark Tallis raised a hand. ‘David, just thinking aloud here but – might it be a help if we just, well, called the cards something else?’

  Turning to his spad with an expression of intrigue, as if to encourage him to continue, Blaylock was suppressing a laugh.

  ‘“Identity cards,”’ said Tallis, as if turning the words in the air for the first time. ‘Okay, I can see why people might think it’s got a Stasi feel to it. But what’s the card really for? Just a simple way to say you’ve the right to be here, and you’re entitled to work here and claim services here. Why not call them “rights cards”?’

  ‘That’s a thought, Mark. Or “freedom cards”. Or “citizen cards”.’

  Deborah winced. ‘“Entitlement cards” isn’t totally terrible.’

  But Blaylock could read from the room that it was time to end the sideshow of he and his spads versus the rest. Graham Petrie looked affronted. ‘I don’t see how cosmetic alterations will pre-empt the parts of this bill that are going to be politically unacceptable.’

  Blaylock heard Deborah in his head. Be cool. ‘What’s your solution, then, Graham?’

  ‘In my view? It’s not too late to park this bus and look afresh at how to make simpler provisions that will serve us perfectly well – say, if we just made it compulsory for all adults to hold a passport? Most people have got them already. They feel comfortable with them. The application and issuing processes we already have are rigorous. I took the liberty of preparing a paper …’

  Graham thumped a bound document of near-cuboid proportions onto the table. Half of the room seemed to lean toward it as if suppressing admiring coos.

  Phyllida Cox wore her driest smile. ‘Well, you did invite the table to speak freely, Home Secretary.’

  Blaylock could feel his temples thrumming with blood. ‘You’re right. I asked for it. I underestimated the mood in this room. I get it now, obviously – it’s a sort of boring, low-level, let’s-just-kick-this-one-into-the-long-grass obstruction—’

  ‘Minister, that’s—’

  ‘I’m talking now, Graham. Get this straight, you all need, collectively, to get out of that mindset and get yourselves on a war footing. Get focused on delivering this policy, on doing what’s expected of you. The mission is not refurbishing passports – that’s not what this government promised or what we have committed to do. That is a national biometric identity card, whatever the bloody hell we call it.’

  His pen clenched in his fist, he thumped the desk, conscious of speaking through gritted teeth.

  ‘Next time we meet, and that had better be sharpish, I don’t want to be having some bloody college debate, I want to be reviewing a draft bill ready for parliamentary counsel. Now, do you lot think you can manage that?’

  Phyllida’s eyes were full of an alarm that Blaylock had wholly wished for. ‘Home Secretary, yo
u know everyone in this department performs in a professional—’

  ‘Yeah, “perform” is the word, it’s all “Let’s pretend” and no action, that’s what I’m weary of, that’s what I’m saying—’

  Blaylock felt – the room heard – his pen crack. He looked at the broken bits in his palm and felt all eyes, which had looked away during his tirade, now upon him. He tossed the debris at the wastepaper basket in the corner of the room, and missed. Then he stood.

  ‘David,’ said Phyllida urgently, ‘let’s reconsider—’

  ‘Naw, let’s pack it in. Eh? Let’s all get out of here and see if we can’t make ourselves useful.’

  People were still sitting, still staring at him somewhat. Finally they stood and shuffled out in silence. They would be talking soon enough, Blaylock knew that much.

  *

  Blaylock paced to and fro across the tiles of the Level Three men’s room, end to end, until he was sure his teeth were no longer on edge, his hands no longer curling reflexively into fists. All the while he was mentally replaying his conduct in the meeting. He believed he had expressed himself correctly, that his concerns had been appropriate. And yet the anger in him still flared like an affliction. For a second time he stooped to the sink and spattered his face with cold water.

  Still he could feel it in his chest – that old familiar, heedless urge, pressing him to the brink of an act he knew to be ill-fated, even as he pushed ahead and did that thing which, on sober contemplation, he surely ought not to have done. This urge he called the urge of What Should Be, and he was borne along by it regardless of a quieter voice that struggled to plead caution. He shuddered at how he managed, over and over, to carry on as if ‘rightness’ itself could suffice in the teeth of a storm of wrong outcomes. And yet, simultaneously, some part of him shrank from the true reckoning of what this mindset might have cost him, again and again throughout his life. In his head now, unbidden, was a veritable photo album of times he had reduced his children to tears and taken some black satisfaction in it.

  He straightened from the sink, breathed deeply, met his reflection in the glass and was repulsed by the grim furrow of his brow, the small red veins in the whites of his eyes.

  *

  For the remainder of the day Blaylock sequestered himself behind a closed office door, annotating a draft of his party conference speech with red ink. Soon it was past 6 p.m., for Geraldine knocked, entered and began diligently to pack up his ministerial red box with layers of colour-coded folders, correspondence for review and signature, briefs for diary meetings, a big night’s homework.

  Blaylock stood, stretched, went to the threshold and gazed around Level Three. Still uniformly lit, it now had a deserted aspect, cleaners’ black bin bags dumped outside many a door.

  ‘Mr Blaylock, sir! So sorry for your team!’

  Fusi, a rotund and jocund Nigerian security guard, was ambling down the corridor. Blaylock joined him in cheery chat about the weekend’s defeat suffered by Middlesbrough FC, whom Blaylock affected to support for constituency purposes – though Fusi, having fastened onto this fact, believed him a diehard fan. Thus they mulled further over the prospects of Joey Folari, a Nigerian lad on loan to Boro from Chelsea, the team Fusi had adopted keenly since arriving in the UK from Lagos, having learned his trade passing inspection mirrors under cars at the gated entrances to hotel compounds. Blaylock observed that Joey had yet to get a first-team game; Fusi believed the lad would be homesick, struggling to get a decent bowl of ogusi soup on Teesside; Blaylock did not doubt the scale of the problem.

  As they talked, Blaylock’s spads slipped past them into his office and Geraldine, coat on, went the opposite way with a mouthed ‘Goodnight’. At last Blaylock stepped back inside, to see Ben at the meeting table reading a hefty document, and Deborah hunched over Blaylock’s laptop, the glow of the inbox across her fretting features as she performed her routine recompense for Blaylock’s inattention to email by logging in to his account and clearing his backlog. Mark had switched on the usually dormant TV screen fixed to the wall and BBC News 24 played to no one as he paced about while talking to his phone. ‘Obviously, don’t write that, just know I’ve said it, okay? Yup.’

  Blaylock surveyed his charges with affection. ‘While most head home for supper, here we burn the lights late like Il Duce on the Piazza Venezia …’ The spads eyed him curiously. He shrugged. ‘Okay, at ease.’

  As they sat together at the oval table Mark pushed the evening paper toward Blaylock. ‘You made the front of the Standard.’

  He inspected. ‘THE HAVE-A-GO HOME SEC’ was the headline illustrated with a shot from the morning’s scrum outside the building.

  Deborah was eyeing the pages of his red-inked conference speech on the table. ‘You ready for a fresh pair of eyes on that?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m still working on the bits meant to be from the heart.’

  ‘Hey, I can do heart.’

  But Blaylock wished to crack on. ‘Listen, about the ID cards team meeting, did I come over like a mental case?’

  ‘No, David.’ Mark winced. ‘You were great. It’s not the worst idea to come on like a loose cannon once in a while. For one thing people might start to live in fear they’ll get shot.’

  ‘Some of them you really do need to get shot of,’ remarked Deborah, moodily. ‘What did Cox say to you afterwards?’

  ‘I think Phyllida and I are non-speakers for the moment.’

  ‘Well, it’s her system you’re attacking. All these schlumps need to understand that if you can’t deliver then you don’t just get a hug and a nice change of job.’

  Deborah was forever calling people out on failures to ‘deliver’: ‘delivery’ was perhaps her only concern. While liking her stridency Blaylock felt it lacked the needful finesse – the talent for backstage palm-greasing – by which politics routinely got done. And yet her dream of a stiff-broom sweep through the building didn’t displease him. He allowed himself the occasional fantasy of what he might accomplish with a permanent secretary he could call an ally, a proper tactical commander. Let’s get this done, chop-chop, no buggering about.

  Ben Cotesworth was looking pensive. ‘I don’t reckon it’s the worst thing for our processes if we just take a moment to consider whether the nay-sayers have a point.’

  Blaylock had to respect Ben’s pluck, even as his other two lieutenants threw him hard looks. ‘You mean Graham Petrie’s idea? Passports for everyone instead of ID cards?’

  Ben gestured to the fat document in front of him. ‘He did ask me very politely to have a read of this.’

  Blaylock scoffed. ‘Polite of him to have typed up that bloody telephone directory instead of working on my bloody bill.’

  ‘No, no.’ Deborah sounded galled, now twisting her silk scarf between her hands as if fashioning a garrotte. ‘He just pulled that out of the drawer it’s been sitting in since the last time they stopped a Home Secretary doing ID cards. He put a new fucking date on the cover …’

  Blaylock shifted in his chair, wanting to unseat the block of frustration inside him. ‘Ben, I got us pregnant with this bill, it was done for love, and we’re just going to have to carry it to term whatever the bairn looks like. The point is that the schedule’s slipping, the Captain’s hearing voices that say jack it in.’

  ‘But if the Prime Minister isn’t right behind it—’

  Tallis jumped in. ‘Number Ten gets the principle of the bill, they just get jumpy at the complaints. But if we make it work, they’ll love the results. Our trouble is this idea that we’re going to mess it up. That’s what the media says, and that’s who Vaughan listens to. We need to work on the press. If I get someone tame to interview you, you’d do it?’

  ‘What am I meant to say, though?’ Blaylock shook his head and silence reigned for some moments, in which Blaylock realised that Ben was very diligently tapping the bridge of his nose with his forefinger.

  ‘I think I know what this bill needs,’ he offered at last.

 
‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘We need to invite the Home Affairs Committee to do a full interrogation of the draft, get all its enemies in to give evidence, the civil liberties groups and tech firms and what have you – the works.’

  Blaylock had the sudden surreal sense of entertaining at his table some strange angel who had assumed Ben’s approximate shape. ‘Are you having a laugh, Ben? You want Gervaise Hawley’s committee to chew the bill up clause by clause? Do you want us to lose?’

  Tallis, though, was looking as pensive as Ben. ‘No, hold on. He’s a clever boy. People think we’re not listening. Let’s show how much we listen, let’s have the debate, make it clear how serious we are. So our critics have to show how serious they are, too. Then we’ll find out what’s a real concern and what’s just sanctimony. I mean, come on, David, if it’s a proper debate don’t you think we’ll win it? Whatever Hawley says, that committee will get pregnant with the bill, too. Sure, they’ll have recommendations, we’ll make a big show of appearing to take those on-board, yadda yadda. Meanwhile I bet a few things happen in the real world that make our case for us …’

  Blaylock wondered what sort of horror Mark had in mind. Inwardly, the troubling incompleteness of the thing had begun to haunt him. He had a firm-to-middling conviction on identity cards. Yet in his heart he knew there were other shades to the story, consequences unforeseen or unforeseeable. The world changed while he slept, then he woke and lumbered onward into a new dawn with ‘the policy’ designed to address yesterday’s problems. There was a bottle of red wine on the office sideboard and he was suddenly thirsty to crack it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘If nothing else then Ben’s idea will get the draft bill written faster, by god. I’ll get on to Francis Vernon, get the committee scheduled.’

  Deborah appeared disapproving. ‘Gervaise Hawley’s just going to complain his committee’s being forced into an unreasonable timeframe.’

  ‘Oh, but’, Tallis tutted, ‘in his arrogance Gervaise won’t be able to pass up his big chance to kill the bill. Then we put David on the witness stand and, boom, David fucking kills Hawley.’