To Play the King. Michael Dobbs

inside. Their marriage had been nothing but a rat’s maze within which both led unrelated lives, meeting only as if by accident before passing on their separate ways. Now she was leaping for the exit.

      ‘Fiona, can’t we—’

      ‘No, David. We can’t.’

      The telephone had started ringing in its insistent, irresistible manner, summoning him to his duty, a task to which he had dedicated his life and to which he was now asked to surrender his marriage. We’ve had some great times, haven’t we, he wanted to argue, but he could only remember times which were good rather than great and those were long, long ago. She had always come a distant second, not consciously but now, in their new mood of truth, undeniably. He looked at Fiona through watery eyes which expressed sorrow and begged forgiveness; there was no spite. But there was fear. Marriage had been like a great sheet anchor in strong emotional seas, preventing him from being tossed about by tempestuous winds and blown in directions which were reckless and lacking in restraint. Wedlock. It had worked precisely because it had been form without substance, like the repetitive chanting of psalms that had been forced on him during his miserable school years at Ampleforth. Marriage had been a burden but, for him, a necessary one, a distraction, a diversion. Self-denial, but also self-protection. And now the anchor chains were being cut.

      Fiona sat motionless across a table littered with toast and fragments of eggshell and bone china, the household clutter and crumbs which represented the total sum of their life together. The telephone still demanded him. Without a further word he rose to answer it.

       CHAPTER FOUR

       The scent of victory blinds many men. The game isn’t over until the bayonet has been run in and twisted.

      ‘Come in, Tim, and close the door.’

      Urquhart was sitting in the Cabinet Room, alone except for the new arrival, occupying the only chair around the coffin-shaped table which had arms. Before him was a simple leather folder and a telephone. The rest of the table stood bare.

      ‘Not exactly luxurious, is it? But I’m beginning to like it.’ Urquhart chuckled.

      Tim Stamper looked around, surprised to discover no one else present. He was – or had been until half an hour ago when Urquhart had exchanged the commission of Chief Whip for that of Prime Minister – the other man’s loyal deputy. The role of Chief Whip is mysterious, that of his deputy invisible, but together they had combined into a force of incalculable influence, since the Whips Office is the base from where discipline within the parliamentary party is maintained through a judicious mixture of team spirit, arm twisting and outright thuggery. Stamper had ideal qualities for the job: a lean, pinched face with protruding nose and dark eyes of exceptional brightness that served to give him the appearance of a ferret, and a capacity for rummaging about in the dark corners of his colleagues’ private lives to uncover their personal and political weaknesses. It was a job of vulnerabilities, guarding one’s own while exploiting others’. He had long been Urquhart’s protégé; fifteen years younger, a former estate agent from Essex, it was an attraction of opposites. Urquhart was sophisticated, elegant, academic, highly polished; Stamper was none of these and wore off-the-peg suits from British Home Stores. Yet what they shared was perhaps more important: ambition, an arrogance that for one was intellectual and for the other instinctive, and an understanding of power. The combination had proved stunningly effective in plotting Urquhart’s path to the premiership. Stamper’s turn would come, that had been the implicit promise to the younger man. Now he was here to collect.

      ‘Prime Minister.’ He offered a theatrical bow of respect. ‘Prime Minister,’ Stamper repeated, practising a different intonation as if trying to sell him the freehold. He had a familiar, almost camp manner which hid the steel beneath, and the two colleagues began to laugh in a fashion which managed to be both mocking and conspiratorial, like two burglars after a successful night out. Stamper was careful to ensure he stopped laughing first; it wouldn’t do to outmock a Prime Minister. They had shared so much over recent months but he was aware that Prime Ministers have a tendency to hold back from their colleagues, even their fellow conspirators, and Urquhart didn’t continue laughing for long.

      ‘Tim, I wanted to see you entirely à deux.’

      ‘Probably means I’m due to get a bollocking. What’ve I done, anyway?’ His tone was light, yet Urquhart noticed the anxious downward cast at the corner of Stamper’s mouth and discovered he was enjoying the feeling of mastery implied by his colleague’s discomfort.

      ‘Sit down, Tim. Opposite me.’

      Stamper took the chair and looked across at his old friend. The sight confirmed just how much their relationship had changed. Urquhart sat before a large oil portrait of Robert Walpole, the first modern and arguably greatest Prime Minister who had watched for two centuries over the deliberations in this room of the mighty and mendacious, the woeful and miserably weak. Urquhart was his successor, elevated by his peers, anointed by his Monarch and now installed. The telephone beside him could summon statesmen to their fate or command the country to war. It was a power shared with no other man in the realm; indeed, he was no longer just a man but, for better or worse, was now the stuff of history. Whether in that history he would rate a footnote or an entire chapter only time would tell.

      Urquhart sensed the swirling emotions of the other man. ‘Different, isn’t it, Tim? And we shall never be able to turn back the clock. It didn’t hit me until a moment ago, not while I was at the Palace, not with the media at the front door here, not even when I walked inside. It all seemed like a great theatre piece and I’d simply been assigned one of the roles. Yet as I stepped across the threshold, every worker in Downing Street was assembled in the hallway, from the highest civil servant in the land to the cleaners and telephonists, perhaps two hundred of them. They greeted me with such enthusiasm that I almost expected bouquets to be thrown. The exhilaration of applause,’ he sighed. ‘It was beginning to go to my head, until I remembered that scarcely an hour beforehand they’d gone through the same routine with my predecessor as he drove off to oblivion. That lot’ll probably applaud at their own funerals.’ He moistened his thin lips, as was his habit when reflecting. ‘Then they brought me here, to the Cabinet Room, and left me on my own. It was completely silent, as though I’d fallen into a time capsule. Everything in order, meticulous, except for the Prime Minister’s chair which had been drawn back. For me! It was only when I touched it, ran my finger across its back, realized no one was going to shout at me if I sat down, that finally it dawned on me. It isn’t just another chair or another job, but the only one of its kind. You know I’m not by nature a humble man yet, dammit, for a moment it got to me.’ There was a moment of prolonged silence, before his palm smacked down on the table. ‘But don’t worry. I’ve recovered!’

      Urquhart laughed that conspiratorial laugh once more, while Stamper could only manage a tight smile as he waited for the reminiscing to stop and for his fate to be pronounced.

      ‘To business, Tim. There’s much to be done and I shall want you, as always, right by my side.’

      Stamper’s smile broadened.

      ‘You’re going to be my Party Chairman.’

      The smile rapidly disappeared. Stamper couldn’t hide his confusion and disappointment.

      ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find you some ministerial sinecure to get you a seat around the Cabinet table – Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or some such nonsense. But for the moment I want your mittens firmly on the Party machine.’

      Stamper’s jaw was working furiously, trying to marshal his arguments. ‘But it’s been scarcely six months since the last election, and a long haul before the next one. Three, maybe four years. Counting paper clips and sorting out squabbles amongst local constituency chairmen is scarcely my strong suit, Francis. You should know that after what we’ve been through together.’ It was an appeal to their old friendship.

      ‘Think it through, Tim. We’ve a parliamentary