Open Arms

by Vince Cable

  ‘Deepak alerted his friends in Delhi – there are a lot of them already alarmed by the drift in Indian politics. They made the mistake of placing too much faith in the Gandhi family. “Madam”, like your Mrs Thatcher, was tough as old boots but her grandchildren and their hangers-on are absolutely clueless. Some of them are deeply corrupt. Deepak was one of a group of businessmen financing a secular “front”’ to mobilise opposition. His own experiences in Mumbai were featured in a big exposé in the weekly India Today. He said too much; mentioned Desai; implied that the Pakistani spy was set up. There are some things you don’t say even in a democracy like ours. Now this… which we think is connected but aren’t sure.’

  Veena hadn’t paused for breath. But, for the first time Kate could see how the pieces of the jigsaw fitted together including her own small corner. Veena turned away but Kate could sense that she was trying to compose herself to maintain the front of business-like conversation. But it was clear, from the way Veena clenched her fists and dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands, that the calmness was a façade that might soon crumble. After a deep breath, Veena took up the story again.

  ‘Deepak was seized by an armed gang yesterday on his way to the factory. The gang who took him have been tracked down to a slum area quite near here and are surrounded. Inspector Mankad’s working theory is that it is a group related to the gang who killed Mr Patel and also linked to the extremist party Shiv Sena. He knows where they hang out and, sure enough, the gang were seen there unloading a bound man from a van. It seems to have been a thoroughly clumsy operation or perhaps they didn’t expect to have a competent and honest police officer on the case. Anyway, a team of paramilitaries has taken over and we are praying that they get Deepak out alive.’

  Kate could see that Veena was now close to breaking point and they lapsed into a long silence, broken only by the shuffle of servants and the clink of glasses as tumblers were refilled with an inexhaustible supply of lime juice. An hour passed. Two. Then as evening approached on the second day of the crisis Inspector Mankad emerged from his room. ‘Something is happening soon,’ he announced. ‘Our men are surrounding a building where he is. I want someone from the family…’ Kate realised that he could mean identification of a corpse. She wasn’t sure she had the stomach for what was coming. But when Veena stepped forward and announced that she would go with the police, Kate insisted on joining her.

  The procession of police vehicles made its way through the city led by motorcycle outriders. The journey was nonetheless infuriatingly slow through streets jammed with pedestrians, cycles, motorbikes, rickshaws, mopeds, buses, cars and animals. The sirens and flashing lights of the police helped a little but they were just part of the urban cacophony and kaleidoscope and the crowds parted only slowly and reluctantly.

  After what seemed an eternity they arrived on a road surrounded by a sea of shacks spreading to the horizon in each direction: the townscape of Dharavi and the neighbouring slums. There was a helicopter hovering a hundred yards away with a searchlight penetrating the gathering dusk and the fog of woodsmoke. And people everywhere with police trying and failing to marshal them behind an official-looking tape. Kate could see the excitement on the faces of the adults and the wide-eyed wonder of the children: better than the cinema, and free. And unlike the communal troubles of recent days, this drama could be watched in safety.

  Kate and Veena were told to stay with their police car and not to come close to the action. Tension grew with the crowds building up, the noise level rising. Then, suddenly, there was the dull thud of an explosion, a brief crackle of gunfire and a plume of smoke rose from somewhere beneath the probing light of the helicopter. The crowd gaped and then cheered, but whether supporting the police or the putative villains wasn’t clear.

  After a few minutes a senior police officer beckoned to them to follow him into the settlement. They passed through narrow lanes, trying to step over rather than into the open sewers and avoiding the mangy dogs, chickens, pigs and children. When Kate recalled these events long after, one image stuck in her mind: passing a fetid rivulet, a storm drain, and seeing a little boy, totally indifferent to the chaos and excitement around him, poking with a stick at his imaginary navy and in particular steering a large paper boat, the flagship of his fleet.

  Eventually they came to a more open area on raised ground and in the middle was an extensive single storey building – a meeting hall? perhaps a school? – with smoke rising through its roof. They were directed inside where police and paramilitary officers with automatic weapons were examining several corpses splayed on the floor. No Deepak.

  Kate saw that there was a side room, with a half-open door guarded by a policeman, and pushed her way inside. There was a body on the floor, inert, facing away from her, with blood covering the ears and the back of the head. She knew immediately who it was, or had been. She turned the corpse towards her to look at the familiar face and gazed at it. Then, an eyelid started to quiver. She heard the rasp of a breath. She screamed for help and heard the clatter of boots coming up behind her.

  Deepak Parrikar managed a smile through the bandages covering his head. Several times in the last few days, spent mostly unconscious, with concussion, his doctors had feared for the worst. But he came through. His injuries were still severe but no longer life threatening.

  He was gradually coming to understand what had happened. In the chaotic shoot-out, a bullet had entered his body causing severe blood loss and damage to bone and muscle but missing his vital organs. The greatest damage had been done not by the bullet but by a metal rod when one of his captors had seen him try to wriggle to safety. The surgeons had nonetheless been able to heal the skull fracture and contain the swelling of the brain.

  It would take some time yet for him to comprehend his new celebrity status. The raid had a television audience of millions. The narrative was stripped of its complexities: Deepak was a champion of secular values, almost killed by extremists embedded in the world of gangland. The politics of the abduction, the exposure in the national press of the links between the extremists and organised crime provided a catalyst for attempts to bring together the various secular parties and factions in a common front to fight the 2019 general election. Deepak was deified somewhat prematurely by those imagining that his soul had already ascended from its earthly capsule.

  The Prime Minister, no less, had seen the value of distancing himself from his party’s more violent and extreme elements and their unsavoury allies like the Shiv Sena. He sent a message of sympathy and support to the family. The abduction and attempted murder of a leading industrialist, supposedly for political ends, outraged opinion formers in a way that casualties of recent riots and the daily suffering of countless Dalits, Muslims and Christians in village India had not. The more pragmatic elements in the ruling party had drawn the conclusion that a show, at least, of inclusive secularism was a necessary requirement to staying in office. The Prime Minister had concluded his handwritten note with a tantalising comment, that he was considering a proposal that he would shortly make to Deepak ‘to play a major role in India’s political life’.

  The drama had affected some of the other actors too. Mr Desai had withdrawn back into the shadows. There would be time again to exploit his particular skills, his links with the Mumbai underworld and his influential American friends, But, for the moment, what was needed was a blander, more emollient face.

  Inspector Mankad was lauded for his efforts even though the attempt at negotiation was confused and the wild firing of the police was responsible for several deaths and at least some of Deepak’s injuries. Instead of being despatched, as he feared, to some fly-blown police station in the rural depths of Maharashtra he was rapidly promoted to Superintendent within his current command, albeit on the clear understanding that his Trishul enquiry would be limited to some of the more egregiously venal and less elevated politicians involved.

  All of this and the other missing details of the last few weeks were explained
to Deepak by the two women who had moved to the centre of his life. With his parents no longer able to function effectively and deeply scarred, psychologically, by recent experiences, control of the family company had effectively passed to Veena with the consent of her other, less assertive, brother, Manu. She had prised out of her father’s tenacious grip most of the financial secrets of the property empire and had set about restructuring it on more conventional business lines, as well as establishing the charitable trust for her father, albeit less generously endowed than he envisaged. Parrikar Avionics already had a strong senior management team capable of operating, at least for a while, without their CEO and without Mr Desai’s unsolicited advice.

  Sitting next to her was Kate who, in a short but intense period of mutual need, had become a close friend and confidante. Both the family and nursing staff insisted that her presence had led to a measurable step forward in Deepak’s recovery. The same was not said of the more reluctant, dutiful, visit from Delhi of Rose Parrikar. There were months of gradual rehabilitation ahead but full recovery was now probable rather than merely possible.

  Kate’s visit to India was an item on the agenda of an emergency meeting of the executive committee of the Surrey Heights Conservative Association. ‘I hesitate to raise this difficult issue,’ said the Chairman, Sir William Beale, non-executive director of several companies and, once, a powerful figure in the City, a former Lord Mayor of London. ‘But several of you have asked me to put it down for discussion. I recognise that there is a lot of feeling in the association about the behaviour of our MP in recent months. We all had such high hopes of her, especially when she became a senior figure in our government. Who would like to speak?’

  Most of the members present put up their hands. ‘I am absolutely disgusted,’ said one, ‘we might as well have a Lib Dem or a socialist as our MP.’ ‘She campaigned for Remain. Just shows the contempt those people have for decent British values,’ interjected another. The discussion centred initially on her wayward, rebellious voting record since she had left the government – ‘sacked’ insisted one of the members – and a variety of strange causes she had taken up far removed from the interests and prejudices of Surrey Heights. There was the series of parliamentary questions she had asked about a missing asylum seeker from Eritrea: ‘I ask you… where the hell is that?’ ‘It’s some rat-hole in Africa, for God’s sake.’ ‘How many people want more asylum seekers anyway?’ Then there was the infamous debate on social housing where she admitted she had been wrong to oppose more of it in her constituency: ‘I suppose she wants to bring every single mother in Britain to live here.’

  But these were merely the hors d’oeuvres. The main course was ‘the Indian boyfriend’, or ‘the coloured gentleman’ as one of the elderly members preferred to call him. ‘I don’t have anything against them myself. But I didn’t expect to see our MP chasing one of them to India like some silly school girl.’ ‘And what about her lovely family? I have been told she now spends her time – when she is in the country – at her flat in London, not at home.’

  One brooding figure had not yet spoken. Stella was still simmering with resentment after being relieved of her duties as Kate’s casework officer (and the associated remuneration). She had had to make way for a bright young woman called Anne-Marie. She had started to produce letters to constituents for the MP to sign that made some sense, answered the questions asked and were not padded out with party propaganda. For this, Kate had been profoundly grateful, since Stella’s letters – which Kate had given up trying to improve – had become a source of ridicule in the correspondence columns of the local press. But Anne-Marie’s faultless spoken English was delivered with a French accent, the product of her childhood, and this reinforced the sense that, thanks to the MP, ‘bloody foreigners’ had penetrated deep into the inner sanctum of the local party at a time when Britishness was being rediscovered and continental miscegenation was being discouraged.

  Stella served up her dish of revenge with icy venom. ‘I think I can claim to know Mrs Thompson better than any of you. I have worked… tried to work… with her since she was elected, which some of you may remember I masterminded. She has some good points, of course, but I speak for all of us when I say I am deeply, deeply, disappointed. I felt particularly let down – actually, betrayed is what I felt – when for the first time in many, many years the MP did not turn up for our annual fete. She was, I believe, in India.’ Gasps of disapproval followed.

  ‘We can sit here and complain. Or we can do something about it. I have taken the liberty of exploring with party HQ the procedure for deselection. You may recall that, a few years ago, one of our Yorkshire MPs was deselected for not carrying out her constituency duties as she should. I have established what the procedure is and,’ with a final, triumphant, flourish, ‘we should do it.’

  The nods and grunts of approval were taken by the Chairman as assent. But there was a belated objection from one of the local councillors who remembered how much enthusiasm there had been for Kate when she was first adopted. He could also claim to speak for the under-eighties in the local party and had a job – as an estate agent. ‘I think we should be careful. There will be more bad publicity. The other parties will exploit it. Mrs Thompson hasn’t done anything illegal or abused her expenses. Her visit was in the summer recess when other MPs were on holiday. And my wife tells me that her friends admire her for being broad-minded and an independent thinker.’

  This novel thought threw the Chairman off his stride but Stella moved quickly to close the rebellion down. ‘The mood of the executive is clear. I suggest we vote on a motion to convene an extraordinary meeting of members with a resolution of no confidence in our Member of Parliament.’ Agreed thirteen to one, with one abstention.

  A few weeks later parliament reconvened and the National Security Council was summoned to a special meeting in the COBRA room under the Cabinet Office where Cabinet ministers, intelligence and service chiefs consider matters of exceptional sensitivity. There was one item on the agenda: aircraft carriers. The Prime Minister opened proceedings.

  ‘Some of you were here when we last considered the future of our two new aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales. It was a mess then and it is now a bigger mess. Thanks to our dear friend Gordon Brown, whose legacy this was, we have an unnecessary, unwanted pair of white elephants. The project was designed to create thousands of new jobs not a million miles from his constituency, to keep the Scots loyal to Labour – what a joke! – and keep the Admirals happy – sorry, Chief, not you, you were probably still commanding rowing boats at the time.’ Prolonged laughter followed.

  ‘When we last looked at this, during the Coalition, some of us,’ he said, looking at the then Chancellor, ‘wanted to scrap the programme. We flunked it. The Scottish referendum was in the offing. The Telegraph ran a big campaign, prompted, I suspect, by the top brass in the navy, to keep the carriers. How could we save the Falklands again without them? A lot of wishful thinking about how the carriers could be adapted to carry the F-35 (which, of course, we hadn’t bought and couldn’t afford). And the frigates we would need to protect the carriers could also be built on Clydeside to provide more jobs for the Scots.

  ‘You can guess what has happened since. All the warnings about the difficulties of adapting the F-35 to fly off the carriers proved to be spot on. The costs have escalated out of control. Then, we have had a series of own goals. The bloody Commies in Unite have been working to rule to make the job spin out longer. Then we had to agree to use British steel to avoid a scandal over our using cheap Chinese steel for the navy. Almost doubled the cost. Now, the Chancellor tells us that he can find no more money down the back of the sofa. His borrowing targets are looking worse by the week. There is no more money left.’

  The Chancellor nodded in agreement while pulling a face to signal his annoyance at having his failures of financial control given such prominence.

  ‘We will have to make some difficult choices. Wh
at I am absolutely clear about is that we cannot compromise Trident. Going ahead with the full replacement was the best decision we made after getting those wretched Lib Dems off our back. Within these four walls Trident is a complete waste of money, isn’t independent and isn’t a deterrent for our main enemy, the terrorists, and belongs to a bygone age. But the public and our friends in the press love it. It keeps us on the UN Security Council. And it has helped us to stuff the Labour Party.

  ‘But, of course, it is costing us a bomb.’ (Nervous laughter.) ‘We thought the four subs and missiles would cost twenty billion pounds back in 2010; now we will be lucky to get away with a hundred billion. Unless we decide to abolish the army as a fighting force or put the air force back into World War Two aircraft, we have to choose: Trident or the carriers.’

  The PM turned to Jim Chambers. ‘Jim, I asked you to help us set out the options. What do we do?’ The Business Secretary had little background in defence but enjoyed the Prime Minister’s confidence. The Defence Secretary smarted at the snub but he knew he could lose his job if it emerged that he had been sitting on the cost escalation numbers for months and had done nothing about the issue; so he nodded deferentially, while Jim Chambers spoke.