The Final Cut. Michael Dobbs

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ about retirement yet?’

      ‘Not this week, my diary is simply too full.’

      Their slings and arrows were resisted with apparent good humour; he even managed to produce a chuckle to indicate that he remained unpricked. Politics is perhaps the unkindest, least charitable form of ritualized abuse allowed within the law; the trick is to pretend it doesn’t hurt.

      ‘So, what do you think of today’s poll?’ It was Dicky Withers of the Daily Telegraph, an experienced hand known for concealing an acute instinct behind a deceptively friendly pint of draught Guinness.

      ‘The poll.’

      ‘Yes, the one we carried today.’

      Drabble began an unscheduled jig, bouncing from foot to foot as though testing hot coals. He hadn’t included the poll in his digest, or the intemperate editorial in the Mirror entitled IT’S TIME TO GO. Christ, it was the man’s birthday, one day of the year to celebrate, to relax a little. And it wasn’t that Drabble was an inveterate yes-man, simply that he found it easier to accept the arguments in favour of circumspection, – all too frequently messengers who hurried to bring bad news from the battlefield were accused of desertion and shot.

      ‘Forty-three per cent of your own party supporters think you should retire before the next election,’ Withers elaborated.

      ‘Which means a substantial majority insisting that I stay on.’

      ‘And the most popular man to succeed you is Tom Makepeace. Would you like him to, when the time comes?’

      ‘My dear Dicky, when that time comes I’m sure that Tom will fight it out with many other hopefuls, including the bus driver.’

      Makepeace = bus driver, Withers scribbled, noting the uncomplimentary equivalence. ‘So you intend to go on, and on, and on?’

      ‘You might say that,’ Urquhart began, ‘but I wish you wouldn’t. I’m enjoying a good innings and, though I’m not greedy for power, so long as I have my wits and my teeth and can be of service…’

      ‘What do you intend to do when eventually you retire, Mr Urquhart?’ Pinch Face was thrusting at him again.

      ‘Do?’ The creases of forced bonhomie turned to a rivulet of uncertainty. ‘Do? Do? Why, be anguished and morose like the rest of them, I suppose. Now, you’ll excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. I have a Cabinet meeting to attend.’

      He turned and embarked upon what he hoped was a dignified retreat back across the street – like a lion regaining his den, Drabble decided, tail thrashing ominously. He declined to follow.

      Urquhart brushed into his wife as she was emerging from the lift to their private apartment. ‘Everything went well?’ she enquired before she had noticed his eyes.

      ‘They say it’s time for a change, Mortima,’ he spat, grinding his teeth. ‘So I’m going to give ’em change. Starting with that bloody fool of a press secretary.’

      ‘Astonishing,’ Urquhart thought to himself as the Cabinet filed in around the great table, ‘how politicians come to resemble their constituencies.’

      Annita Burke, for instance, an unplanned Jewish suburb full of entangling one-way systems. Richard Grieve, a seedy run-down sea front (which he had once plastered with election posters stating GRIEVE FOR RUSHPOOL and had somehow managed to live it down). Arthur Bollingbroke, a no-frills Northern workingmen’s club with a strong tang of Federation bitter. Colin Catchpole, the member for the City of Westminster, a ruddy face with the red-brick architectural style of the Cathedral, while other parts of his anatomy were rumoured to linger in the backstreets of Soho. Geoffrey Booza-Pitt – yes, Geoffrey, an invented showman for the invented showtown of New Spalden. Middle class and entirely manufactured, lacking in roots or history – at least any history Geoffrey wished to acknowledge. He had been born plain Master Pitt to an accountant father with a drinking problem; the schoolboy Geoff had invented an extended name and some mythical South African origin to explain away untidy gossip about his father which had been overheard by friends across a local coffee shop. And it had stuck, like so many other imaginative fictions about his origins and achievements. You could fool some of the people all of the time, and Geoffrey reckoned that was enough.

      Then there was Tom Makepeace. With the flat humour of the East Anglian fens, the stubbornness of its clays and the moralizing tendencies of its Puritan past. He was an Old Etonian with a social conscience which Urquhart ascribed to an overdeveloped sense of guilt, unearned privilege in search of unidentified purpose. The man had undoubted talent but was not from Urquhart’s mould, which is the reason he had been despatched to the Foreign Office where his stubbornness and flat humour could bore for Britain and help fight the cause in the tedious councils of Brussels, and where his moralizing could do little harm.

      Urquhart’s Cabinet. ‘And few of you seem to be keeping your eye on the ball, if I may be frank.’ The mood was all flint; Drabble had gone missing, the ghost of his folly not yet exorcized.

      ‘We must finish in ten minutes, I have to be at the Palace for the arrival of the Sultan of Oman.’ He looked slowly around the long table. ‘I trust it will be rather more of a success than the start of the last state visit.’

      His gaze set upon Annita Burke, Secretary of State for the Environment. She was both Jew and female, which meant that the doors of power started off double-locked for her. She had stormed the drawbridge by sheer exuberance but now she sat rigid, head lowered. Something on her blotter appeared to have become of sudden importance, monopolizing her attention.

      ‘Yes, it was a great pity, Environment Secretary. Was it not?’

      Burke, the Cabinet’s sole female, raised her head defiantly but struggled for words. Had it been her fault? For months she had planned a great campaign to promote the virtues and dispel the tawdry myths surrounding the nation’s capital; from their corners and quiet tables in some of London’s finest restaurants the publicity men had examined the runes and pronounced – a press conference and brass band had been organized, a fleet of mobile poster hoardings assembled and seven million leaflets printed for distribution around the city on launch day: MAKING A GREAT CITY GREATER.

      What they had not foreseen – could not have foreseen, no matter how many slices of corn-fed chicken and loch-reared salmon they had sacrificed – was that launch day would also coincide with the most catastrophic failure of London’s sewer system, a progressive collapse of an entire section of Victorian brickwork which had flooded the Underground and shorted the electrical control network. Points failure, and humour failure, too. A million angry commuter ants had erupted onto the streets, creating a gridlock that had extended beyond the city to all major feed roads. On one of those feed roads, the M4 from Heathrow Airport, had sat the newly arrived President of Mexico, expecting a forty-minute drive to the royal and political dignitaries already assembled for him at Buckingham Palace. But nothing had moved. The truck-borne poster hoardings had been stuck and defaced. Most of the leaflets had been dumped undelivered in back streets. The press conference had been cancelled, the brass band had not arrived. And neither had the Mexican President, for more than three hours.

      It was a day on which the dignity of the capital died, swept away in a torrent of anger and effluent. Failure required its scapegoat, and ‘Burke’ fitted the tabloid headlines so well.

      ‘Great pity,’ she concurred with Urquhart, her embarrassment exhumed. ‘The Ides were against us.’

      ‘And you’ve come up with a new СКАЧАТЬ