To Play the King. Michael Dobbs

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       CHAPTER TWO

       A man should sleep uneasy in his palace if he wishes to keep it.

      It hadn’t been as he had expected. The crowds had been much thinner than in years gone by; indeed, fewer than two dozen people standing outside the Palace gates, skulking tortoise-like beneath umbrellas and plastic raincoats, could scarcely be counted as a crowd at all. Maybe the great British public simply didn’t give a damn any more who their Prime Minister was.

      He sat back in the car, a man of bearing and distinction amidst the leather, his tired smile implying a casual, almost reluctant acceptance of his lot. He had a long face, the skin ageing but still taut beneath the chin, austere like a Roman bust with lank silver-sandy hair carefully combed away from the face. He was dressed in his habitual charcoal-grey suit with two buttons and a brightly coloured, almost foppish silk handkerchief which erupted out of the breast pocket, an affectation he had adopted to distance himself from the Westminster hordes in their banal Christmas-stocking ties and Marks & Spencer suits. Every few seconds he would bend low, stretching down behind the seat to suck at the cigarette he kept hidden below the window line, the only outward show of the tension and excitement which bubbled within. He took a deep lungful of nicotine and for a while didn’t move, feeling his throat go dry as he waited for his heart to slow.

      The Right Honourable Francis Ewan Urquhart, MP, gave a perfunctory wave to the huddled group of onlookers from the rear seat of his new ministerial Jaguar as it passed into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. His wife Mortima had wanted to lower the window in order for the assorted cameramen to obtain a better view of them both, but discovered that the windows on the official car were more than an inch thick and cemented in place. She had been assured by the driver that nothing less than a direct hit from a mortar with armour-piercing shells would open them.

      The last few hours had seemed all but comic. After the result of the leadership ballot had been announced at six o’clock the previous evening, he had rushed back to his house in Cambridge Street and waited there with his wife. For what, they hadn’t quite known. What was he supposed to do now? There had been no one to tell him. He had hovered beside the phone but it stubbornly refused to ring. He’d rather expected a call of congratulation from some of his parliamentary colleagues, perhaps from the President of the United States or at the very least his aunt, but already the new caution of his colleagues towards a man formerly their equal and now their master was beginning to exert itself; the President wouldn’t call until he’d been confirmed as Prime Minister and his aged aunt apparently thought his telephone would be permanently engaged for days. In desperation for someone with whom to share their joy, he and Mortima took to posing for photo calls at the front door and chatting with the journalists on the pavement outside.

      Urquhart, or FU as he was often known, was not naturally gregarious, a childhood spent roaming alone with no more than a dog and a satchelful of books across the heathers of the family estates in Scotland had attuned him well to his own company, but it was never enough. He needed others, not simply to mix with but against whom to measure himself. It was what had driven him South, that and the financial despair of the Scottish Highlands. A grandfather who had died with no thought of how to avoid the venality of the Exchequer; a father whose painful sentimentality and attachment towards tradition had brought the estate’s finances to their knees. He had watched his parents’ fortunes and their social position wither like apple blossom in snow. Urquhart had got out while there was still something to extract from the heavily mortgaged moors, ignoring his father’s entreaties on family honour which in despair had turned to tearful denunciation. It had been scarcely better at Oxford. His childhood companionship СКАЧАТЬ