A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  Oakley’s Cheshire-cat smile softens as, fingertips together, he delicately formulates his reply:

  ‘Where do I sit, you ask. Why, at the conference table. Always at the table. I wheedle, I chip away, I argue, I reason, I cajole, I hope. But I do not expect. I adhere to the hallowed diplomatic doctrine of moderation in all things, and I apply it to the heinous crimes of every nation, including my own. I leave my feelings at the door before I go into the conference room and I never walk out in a huff unless I’ve been instructed to do so. I positively pride myself on doing everything by halves. Sometimes – this could well be such a time – I make a cautious démarche to our revered masters. But I never try to rebuild the Palace of Westminster in a day. Neither, at the risk of being pompous, should you.’

  And while Toby is fumbling for an answer:

  ‘Another thing, while I have you alone, if I may. My beloved wife Hermione tells me, in her capacity as the eyes and ears of Berlin’s diplomatic shenanigans, that you are conducting an inappropriate dalliance with the spouse of the Dutch military attaché, she being a notorious tart. True or false?’

  Toby’s posting to the British Embassy in Madrid, which has unexpectedly discovered a need for a junior attaché with Defence experience, follows a month later.

  *

  Madrid.

  Despite their disparity in age and seniority, Toby and Giles remain in close touch. How much this is due to Oakley’s string-pulling behind the scenes, how much to mere accident, Toby can only guess. Certain is that Oakley has taken to Toby in the way that some older diplomats consciously or otherwise foster their favoured young. Intelligence traffic between London and Madrid meanwhile was never brisker or more crucial. Its subject is not any more Saddam Hussein and his elusive weapons of mass destruction but the new generation of jihadists brought into being by the West’s assault on what was until then one of the more secular countries in the Middle East – a truth too raw to be admitted by its perpetrators.

  Thus the duo continues. In Madrid, Toby – like it or not, and mainly he likes it – becomes a leading player in the intelligence marketplace, commuting weekly to London, where Oakley flits in the middle air between the Queen’s spies on one side of the river and the Queen’s Foreign Office on the other.

  In coded discussions in Whitehall’s sealed basement rooms, new rules of engagement with suspected terrorist prisoners are cautiously thrashed out. Improbably, given Toby’s rank, he attends. Oakley presides. The word enhance, once used to convey spiritual exaltation, has entered the new American dictionary, but its meaning remains wilfully imprecise to the uninitiated, of whom Toby is one. All the same, he has his suspicions. Can these so-called new rules in reality be the old barbaric ones, dusted off and reinstated, he wonders? And if he is right, which increasingly he believes he is, what is the moral distinction, if any, between the man who applies the electrodes and the man who sits behind a desk and pretends he doesn’t know it’s happening, although he knows very well?

  But when Toby, nobly struggling to reconcile these questions with his conscience and upbringing, ventures to air them – purely academically, you understand – to Giles over a cosy dinner at Oakley’s club to celebrate Toby’s thrilling new appointment on promotion to the British Embassy in Cairo, Oakley, from whom no secrets are hidden, responds with one of his doting smiles and hides himself behind his beloved La Rochefoucauld:

  ‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, dear man. In an imperfect world, I fear it’s the best we can manage.’

  And Toby smiles back appreciatively at Oakley’s wit, and tells himself sternly yet again that he must learn to live with compromise – dear man being by now a permanent addition to Oakley’s vocabulary, and further evidence, were it needed, of his singular affection for his protégé.

  *

  Cairo.

  Toby Bell is the British Embassy’s blue-eyed boy – ask anyone from the ambassador down! A six-month immersion course in Arabic and, blow me, the lad’s already halfway to speaking it! Hits it off with Egyptian generals and never once gives vent to his callow personal opinions – a phrase that has lodged itself permanently in his consciousness. Goes diligently about the business in which he has almost accidentally acquired expertise; barters intelligence with his Egyptian opposite numbers; and under instruction feeds them names of Egyptian Islamists in London who are plotting against the regime.

  At weekends, he enjoys jolly camel rides with debonair military officers and secret policemen and lavish parties with the super-rich in their guarded desert condominiums. And at dawn, after flirting with their glamorous daughters, drives home with car windows closed to keep out the stench of burning plastic and rotting food as the ragged ghosts of children and their shrouded mothers forage for scraps in filthy acres of unsorted rubbish at the city’s edge.

  And who is the guiding light in London who presides over this pragmatic trade in human destinies, sends cosy personal letters of appreciation to the reigning head of Mubarak’s secret police? – none other than Giles Oakley, Foreign Office intelligence broker extraordinaire and mandarin at large.

  So it’s no surprise to anyone, except perhaps young Bell himself, that even while popular unrest throughout Egypt over Hosni Mubarak’s persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood is showing signs of erupting into violence four months ahead of the municipal elections, Toby should find himself whisked back to London and yet again promoted ahead of his years, to the post of Private Secretary, minder and confidential counsellor to the newly appointed Junior Minister of State to the Foreign Office, Fergus Quinn, MP, latterly of the Ministry of Defence.

  *

  ‘From where I sit, you two are an ideal match,’ says Diana, his new Director of Regional Services, as she hacks away manfully at her open tuna sandwich over a dry self-service lunch at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. She is small, pretty and Anglo-Indian and talks in the heroic anachronisms of the Punjabi officers’ mess. Her shy smile, however, belies an iron purpose. Somewhere she has a husband and two children, but makes no mention of them in office hours.

  ‘You’re both young for your jobs – all right, he’s got ten years on you – but both ambitious as all get-out,’ she declares, unaware that the description applies equally to herself. ‘And don’t be fooled by appearances. He’s a thug, he beats the working-class drum, but he’s also ex-Catholic, ex-communist and New Labour – or what’s left of it now that its champion has moved on to richer pastures.’

  Pause for a judicious munch.

  ‘Fergus hates ideology and thinks he’s invented pragmatism. And of course he hates the Tories, although half the time he’s to the right of them. He’s got a serious supporters’ club in Downing Street, and I don’t mean just the big beasts but the courtiers and spinmeisters. Fergus is their boy and they’re putting their shirts on him for as long as he runs. Pro-Atlantic to a fault, but if Washington thinks he’s the cat’s pyjamas, who are we to complain? Eurosceptic, that goes without saying. Doesn’t like us flunkies, but what politician does? And watch out for him when he bangs on about the G-WOT’ – the prevailing in-word for the Global War on Terror. ‘It’s out of style and I don’t need to tell you of all people that decent Arabs are getting awfully pissed off with it. He’s been told that already. Your job will be the usual. Stick to him like glue and don’t let him make any more puddles.’

  ‘More puddles, Diana?’ Toby asks, already troubled by some fairly loud rumours doing the rounds of the Whitehall gossip mill.

  ‘Ignore totally,’ she commands sternly, after another pause for accelerated mastication. ‘Judge a politician by what he did or didn’t do at Defence, you’d be stringing up half tomorrow’s Cabinet.’ And finding Toby’s eyes still on her: ‘Man made a horse’s arse of himself and got his wrist smacked. Case totally closed.’ And as a final afterthought: ‘The only surprising thing is that for once in its life Defence managed to hush up a force-twelve scandal.’

  And with that, the loud rumours are officially declared
dead and buried – until, in a concluding speech over coffee, Diana elects to exhume them and bury them all over again.

  ‘And just in case anyone should tell you different, both Defence and Treasury held a grand-slam internal inquiry with the gloves off, and concluded unanimously that Fergus had absolutely no case to answer. At worst, ill advised by his hopeless officials. Which is good enough for me, and I trust for you. Why are you looking at me like that?’

  He isn’t looking at her in any way he is aware of, but he is certainly thinking that the lady is protesting too much.

  *

  Toby Bell, newly anointed Private Secretary to Her Majesty’s newly anointed Minister takes up his seals of office. Fergus Quinn, MP, marooned Blairite of the new Gordon Brown era, may not on the face of it be the sort of minister he would have chosen for his master. Born the only child of an old Glaswegian engineering family fallen on hard times, Fergus made an early name for himself in left-wing student politics, leading protest marches, confronting the police and generally getting his photograph in the newspapers. Having graduated in Economics from Edinburgh University, he disappears into the mists of Scottish Labour Party politics. Three years on, somewhat inexplicably, he resurfaces at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he meets and marries his present wife, a wealthy but troubled Canadian woman. He returns to Scotland, where a safe seat awaits him. The Party spin doctors quickly rate his wife unfit for presentation. An alcohol addiction is rumoured.

  Soundings that Toby has taken round the Whitehall bazaar are mixed at best: ‘Sucks up a brief quick enough, but watch your arse when he decides to act on it,’ advises a bruised Defence Ministry veteran strictly off the record. And from a former assistant called Lucy: ‘Very sweet, very charming when he needs to be.’ And when he doesn’t? Toby asks. ‘He’s just not with us,’ she insists, frowning and avoiding his eye. ‘He’s out there fighting his demons somehow.’ But what demons and fighting them how is more than Lucy is willing or able to say.

  At first sight, nonetheless, all augurs well.

  True, Fergus Quinn is no easy ride, but Toby never expected different. He can be clever, obtuse, petulant, foul-mouthed and dazzlingly considerate in the space of half a day, one minute all over you, the next a brooder who locks himself up with his despatch boxes behind his heavy mahogany door. He is a natural bully and, as advertised, makes no secret of his contempt for civil servants; even those closest to him are not spared his tongue-lashings. But his greatest scorn is reserved for Whitehall’s sprawling intelligence octopus, which he holds to be bloated, elitist, self-regarding and in thrall to its own mystique. And this is all the more unfortunate since part of Team Quinn’s remit requires it to ‘evaluate incoming intelligence materials from all sources and submit recommendations for exploitation by the appropriate services’.

  As to the scandal-at-Defence-that-never-was, whenever Toby is tempted to edge alongside it, he bumps up against what feels increasingly like a wall of silence deliberately constructed for his personal benefit: case closed, mate … sorry, old boy, lips sealed … And once, if only from a boastful clerk in Finance Section over a Friday-evening pint in the Sherlock Holmes – got away with daylight robbery, didn’t he? It takes the unlovable Gregory, seated by chance next to Toby at a tedious Monday focus session of the Staffing and Management Committee, to set his alarm bells ringing at full blast.

  Gregory, a large and ponderous man older than his years, is Toby’s exact contemporary and supposed rival. But it is a fact known to all that, whenever the two of them are in line for an appointment, it’s always Toby who pips Gregory at the post. And so it might have been in the recent race for Private Secretary to the new Junior Minister, except that this time round the rumour mill decreed that there was no proper contest. Gregory had served a two-year secondment to Defence, bringing him into almost daily contact with Quinn, whereas Toby was virgin – which is to say, he brought no such murky baggage from the past.

  The focus session drags to its inconclusive end. The room empties. Toby and Gregory remain by tacit agreement at the table. For Toby the moment provides a welcome opportunity to mend fences; Gregory is less sweetly disposed.

  ‘Getting along all right with King Fergie, are we?’ he enquires.

  ‘Fine, thanks, Gregory, just fine. A few wrinkles here and there, only to be expected. How’s life as Resident Clerk these days? Must be pretty eventful.’

  But Gregory is not keen to discuss life as a Resident Clerk, which he regards as a poor second to Private Secretary to the new Minister.

  ‘Well, watch out he doesn’t flog the office furniture out the back door is all I can say,’ he advises with a humourless smirk.

  ‘Why? Is that his thing? Flogging furniture? He’d have a bit of a problem, humping his new desk down three floors, even him!’ Toby replies, determined not to rise.

  ‘And he hasn’t signed you up to one of his highly profitable business companies yet?’

  ‘Is that what he did to you?’

  ‘No way, old sport’ – with improbable geniality – ‘not me. I stayed clear. Good men are scarce, I say. Others weren’t so fly.’

  And here without warning Toby’s patience snaps, which in Gregory’s company is what it tends to do.

  ‘Actually, what the hell are you trying to tell me, Gregory?’ he demands. And when all he gets is Gregory’s big, slow grin again: ‘If you’re warning me – if this is something I should know – then come out with it or go to Human bloody Resources.’

  Gregory affects to weigh this suggestion.

  ‘Well, I suppose if it was anything you needed to know, old sport, you could always have a quiet word with your guardian angel Giles, couldn’t you?’

  *

  A self-righteous sense of purpose now swept over Toby which, even in retrospect, seated at his rickety coffee table on a sunny pavement in Soho, he could still not wholly justify to himself. Perhaps, he reflected, it was nothing more complicated than a case of pique at being denied a truth owed to him and shared by those around him. And certainly he would have argued that, since Diana had ordered him to stick like glue to his new master and not let him make puddles, he had a right to find out what puddles the man had made in the past. Politicians, in his limited experience of the breed, were repeat offenders. If and when Fergus Quinn offended in the future, it would be Toby who would have to explain why he had let his master off the lead.

  As to Gregory’s jibe that he should go running to his guardian angel Giles Oakley: forget it. If Giles wanted Toby to know something, Giles would tell him. And if Giles didn’t, nothing on God’s earth was going to make him.

  Yet something else, something deeper and more troubling, is driving Toby. It is his master’s near-pathological reclusiveness.

  What in Heaven’s name does a man so seemingly extrovert do all day, cloistered alone in his Private Office with classical music booming out and the door locked not only against the outer world but against his very own staff? What’s inside those plump, hand-delivered, double-sealed, waxed envelopes that pour in from the little back rooms of Downing Street marked STRICTLY PERSONAL & PRIVATE which Quinn receives, signs for and, having read, returns to the same intractable couriers who brought them?

  It’s not only Quinn’s past I’m being cut out of. It’s his present.

  *

  His first stop is Matti, career spy, drinking pal and former embassy colleague in Madrid. Matti is currently kicking his heels between postings in his Service’s headquarters across the river in Vauxhall. Perhaps the enforced inactivity will make him more forthcoming than usual. For arcane reasons – Toby suspects operational – Matti is also a member of the Lansdowne Club off Berkeley Square. They meet for squash. Matti is gangly, bald and bespectacled and has wrists of steel. Toby loses four–one. They shower, sit in the bar overlooking the swimming pool and watch the pretty girls. After a few desultory exchanges, Toby comes to the point:

  ‘So give me the story, Matti, because nobody else will. Wh
at went wrong at Defence when my minister was in the saddle?’

  Matti does some slow-motion nodding of his long, goatish head:

  ‘Yes, well. There’s not a lot I can offer you, is there?’ he says moodily. ‘Your man went off the reservation, our lot saved his neck and he hasn’t forgiven us is about the long and short of it – silly bugger.’

  ‘Saved his neck how, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Tried to go it alone, didn’t he?’ says Matti contemptuously.

  ‘Doing what? Who to?’

  Matti scratches his bald head and does another ‘Yes, well. Not my turf, you see. Not my area.’

  ‘I realize that, Matti. I accept it. It’s not my area either. But I’m the bloody man’s minder, aren’t I?’

  ‘All those bent lobbyists and arms salesmen beavering away at the fault lines between the defence industry and procurement,’ Matti complains, as if Toby is familiar with the problem.

  But Toby isn’t, so he waits for more:

  ‘Licensed, of course. That was half the trouble. Licensed to rip off the Exchequer, bribe officials, offer them all the girls they can eat, holidays in Bali. Licensed to go private, go public, go any way they like, long as they’ve got a ministerial pass, which they all have.’

  ‘And Quinn had his snout in the trough with the rest of them, you’re saying?’

  ‘I’m not saying any bloody thing,’ Matti retorts sharply.

  ‘I know that. And I’m not hearing anything either. So Quinn stole. Is that it? All right, not exactly stole, perhaps, but diverted funds to certain projects in which he had an interest. Or his wife did. Or his cousin did. Or his aunt did. Is that it? Got caught, paid back the money, said he was awfully sorry, and the whole thing was swept under the carpet. Am I warm?’

  A nubile girl bellyflops into the water to shrieks of laughter.