A Very British Coup (13 page)

The British were on the run. Morgan planned to make them run even faster.

Sir Philip Norton, the Co-ordinator of Intelligence in the Cabinet Office, had just returned from lunching at the Reform Club when he was summoned by the Prime Minister. “PM's in a bit of a flap,” said Tweed as he ushered Sir Philip into the presence.

“Ah, there you are, Norton,” said Perkins, indicating the seat in front of his desk. “I've got a little job for your fellows.”

Perkins paused to take off his reading spectacles. It was the first time Sir Philip had seen Perkins wearing glasses. They made him look more of an intellectual than his public image suggested. “I've had reports,” Perkins went on, “that civil servants in the Treasury have been privately advising foreign finance ministries not to provide the stand-by credit we have been trying to negotiate. Do you know anything about that?”

Inwardly Sir Philip was aghast, but his face betrayed not a flicker of emotion. “New one on me, Prime Minister.”

Perkins placed both hands palm downwards on the desk. “As far as I am concerned there is one word to describe a situation where a servant of His Majesty's government conspires with officials of a foreign government against the British national interest:
treason
.” Sir Philip winced at the
word. Really, this was laying it on a bit thick. “Tell DI5 I want the names of those involved. Tap the phones at the Treasury if necessary.” Perkins paused and then added with a smile, “About time DI5 had something useful to do. A change from photographing CND demonstrators and spying on trade union officials.”

Sir Philip did not share Perkins' amusement.

“May I enquire what your source is for this information, Prime Minister?”

“The source is my affair, but you can take it from me it's reliable.”

Too damn reliable, thought Sir Philip.

“While you're here,” said Perkins, “perhaps you can tell me, do DI5 keep files on members of my government?”

“These days, Prime Minister, it's all on computer. Curzon Street will have something on every Member of Parliament. Mostly just name, age, school, assets. Standard procedure.”

“How do I get at them?” Perkins took a Kleenex tissue from a box on his desk and started to clean his glasses.

“I beg your pardon, Prime Minister.” Sir Philip was sitting bolt upright.

“The files, tapes or whatever you call them. How do I get them? It's the ones on Cabinet ministers I'm interested in.” He breathed on the lenses of his spectacles, causing them to mist over.

“Prime Minister, I must advise you that it would be most irregular for any member of the government to see those files.”

Perkins cocked an eyebrow. “But I thought the Prime Minister is supposed to be the head of the security services. Surely I can see what I like?”

In eight years as Co-ordinator of Intelligence and before that as head of DI5 Sir Philip had served three Prime Ministers and four Home Secretaries. Never had any of them asked to see files except on the recommendation of the security chiefs. Sir Philip was embarrassed, but firm. “Prime Minister, there is a convention that ministers do not concern themselves with particular cases. It was set out in a directive by the former
Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, in 1952. I can provide you with a copy.”

Perkins was incredulous. “You are not seriously suggesting I should be bound by a memorandum from some Tory Home Secretary nearly forty years ago?”

Sir Philip wrung his hands. That was precisely what he was suggesting.

“Because if so,” Perkins replaced his glasses and leaned across the desk, “you are quite mistaken. I want copies of everything that damn computer has on members of my Cabinet. And I want it today.”

Four hours later Tweed wheeled in twenty-four small bundles of computer print-out. One for each Cabinet minister. Perkins sent each minister his own and asked for comments. What he did not know is that before parting with print-outs, DI5 had carefully weeded out juicier snippets such as the Foreign Secretary's affair with the girl in the Hampstead Labour party. The reference to the photograph of the Overseas Development Minister marching alongside the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers' Party was also missing. It turned up a few weeks later on the front page of
The Times
. The photo was published under the headline “A Trot in the Cabinet” and the story underneath went on to imply that he was just one of many.
The Times
had even managed to dredge up a couple of Curran's old SWP colleagues who reminisced at length about the minister's days as a revolutionary Marxist.

The story caused a mild flurry in the popular newspapers and the
Daily Telegraph
, and Tory backbenchers had some fun at question time in the House. By and large, however, the only people who were shocked were those who wanted to be, since Curran had never made any secret of his political past.

“That'll do for starters,” said Sir Peregrine when Fiennes placed the press cuttings in his in-tray. Then he added, with the nearest he ever came to a smile, “Next we'll give the Foreign Secretary's love life an airing.”

*

The first thing Sir Philip Norton did when he got back to the Cabinet Office was to ring his brother. The phone rang for a full minute before a refined voice said, “Watlington Priory.”

“Andrew.” As Sir Philip spoke his secretary placed a cup of tea on the desk in front of him. “Andrew, I wanted to thank you for that awfully nice dinner the other evening.”

From the other end of the telephone came a couple of minutes of “Jolly decent of you to come, old boy …” Sir Philip clasped the telephone receiver with one hand, stirred his tea with a spoon in the other, and, occasionally, uttered a “Yes” or “No”. When the babble at the other end subsided, he replaced the teaspoon in the saucer and came to the point. “Who was that girl with Roger?”

“What girl? Oh, you mean Elizabeth? Fain's girl. Charming …”

Sir Philip had taken from an inside jacket pocket a gold-topped fountain pen.
Fain
he wrote on a sheet of Cabinet Office notepaper. “Any idea what she does for a living?”

“Not a clue. Father was an equerry to the King.” There was a silence at the other end of the phone and then, “I say, old boy, nothing wrong?”

“Of course not. Just curious, that's all.” Sir Philip laid the pen on the desk and reached for his tea. “Sorry Andrew, must rush. Thanks again for dinner.”

He replaced the receiver and put the top back on his fountain pen which he returned to his inside pocket. On the Cabinet Office notepaper Sir Philip had written under
Fain
the words
Equerry
and
King
.

His next call was to Sir Peregrine Craddock to whom he related the details of his conversation with Perkins. When that was done he flipped a switch on his desk intercom. “Get me some background on Lady Elizabeth F-A-I-N,” he said into the machine. “And when you've found out where she lives tell Ebury Bridge Road to put a tap on her phone.”

The men from the IMF arrived two days later. They checked into Brown's Hotel in Mayfair under assumed names. Their anonymity did not last long. A story in the
Financial Times
the
next day blew their cover. News of their arrival caused the pound to rally by half a cent, but the recovery did not last long.

There were five of them: an American, a Dutchman, a Japanese, a German and an Englishman, Bill Whittaker, a former deputy chief cashier at the Bank of England. Whittaker was a hard, humourless man, who had not come to look up old friends. He was here to look at the books and offer a diagnosis. He was not concerned with the political consequences of this diagnosis, only with the facts. The facts in this case were that Britain was asking for the biggest loan in the IMF's history. Inevitably the price would be high.

Everywhere the IMF team went they were trailed by pressmen. Photographers were waiting outside the Treasury, the Bank of England and Downing Street. As if to underline the gravity of the mission, rain started soon after the IMF team arrived in London and continued almost without respite until they left. Every day the newspapers published pictures of five unsmiling men in mackintoshes, getting in and out of chauffeur-driven cars, king-sized umbrellas held aloft. And with every day that passed the pound continued to fall until the reserves were nearly exhausted.

Only a three per cent increase in Minimum Lending Rate staved sterling's complete collapse.

One rain-sodden night after the IMF team had been two weeks in Britain a Royal Air Force DC10 took off from Northolt in Middlesex. On board were three men whose identity was known only to the captain and the steward who were sworn to secrecy. The three passengers boarded the plane after darkness from a car which was driven to the aircraft steps. The DC10 left Northolt at 2100 GMT and flew west over the Atlantic until it was well clear of European airspace. Then it veered south, skirting Spain and Portugal. Just before the Canary Islands the DC10 turned east towards Morocco. It crossed Morocco behind the Atlas Mountains and then turned north east. At 0130 GMT the DC10 landed at Dar El Beidah airport, Algiers.

The plane taxied to a dark corner of the airport and stopped. Two black Mercedes, one containing a high official of the Algerian government, were waiting. Even before the engines were switched off, a gangway was in place. The doors opened and the three passengers emerged, each carrying a briefcase and a small suitcase.

While a chauffeur put their luggage in the boot of the first Mercedes the three men each shook hands with the Algerian official. Then they climbed into the car and were driven away to a secluded villa on the Mediterranean coast. The crew of the plane followed in the second Mercedes.

The three Englishmen were the Foreign Secretary, Tom Newsome; his parliamentary private secretary, Len Fuller; and a political adviser, Ray Morse.

In London the IMF team were commuting between the Bank of England and the Treasury. At the Bank they talked about interest rates and devaluation. At the Treasury they discussed the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement and income policies.

Between officials at the Bank, the Treasury and the men from the IMF there was little disagreement about what was necessary. They had all been brought up to believe that borrowing was basically immoral and should be heavily penalised. They believed that government spending was far too high and that free trade was sacred. The only problem was how to convince the government. As Sir Peter Kennedy said, “The government has just won a huge election victory based on exactly the opposite analysis of the situation.”

When, after two weeks of deliberation, the IMF men unveiled their terms for a loan, even Wainwright was taken aback. They wanted £10,000 million off public spending in two years. Even on Treasury estimates that would add another million to the dole queues. It would also require a rigid incomes policy, something the government was pledged not to introduce. On top of this the IMF also wanted guarantees that the government would not introduce import controls
or any other restrictions on free trade. “I'll never get that through the Cabinet,” Wainwright told them.

“Your problem, not ours,” said the American member of the IMF team, and it was he who did most of the talking. He went on, “We're bankers, not politicians. We don't make any distinction whether we are dealing with British social democrats or Turkish Generals.”

“All very well,” replied Wainwright, “but Turkish Generals have ways of dealing with public opinion that aren't open to British social democrats.”

At 0800 GMT (ten o'clock local time) Tom Newsome had an audience with the Algerian President at the Casr Es Shaab Palace. Later he spent an hour with the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister after which he was driven to the airport. At noon local time Newsome was airborne again, this time bound for Tripoli.

In London Annette Newsome phoned the private office and said that her husband was unwell and would work from home. She added that since he had lost his voice he could not be contacted by telephone. Arrangements were made for the red despatch boxes to be delivered by car to his home in Camberwell.

The Foreign Office press department issued a short statement saying that the Foreign Secretary was indisposed and had cancelled all engagements until further notice.

When the IMF terms were put to the Cabinet there was uproar. “What do they think we are, some banana republic?” raged Jock Steeples.

“Tell them where they can stuff their bloody money,” said Jim Evans, the Defence Secretary.

The Home Secretary, Mrs Joan Cook, was more rational. “Even if we wanted to, we couldn't get a package like that through the Parliamentary Labour Party, let alone the National Executive Committee,” she said quietly.

In the end it was agreed to defer any decision until Wainwright and the Prime Minister had had another talk with the
IMF. If necessary the managing director of the Fund was to be invited over from Washington.

Evans was asked to prepare a paper outlining drastic cuts in Britain's NATO budget, including the complete withdrawal of the British Army on the Rhine. News of this decision was to be leaked to the lobby correspondents when Perkins had them in for an off-the-record briefing later that day. As Perkins told Fred Thompson over a whisky in the Prime Minister's study that evening, “When our friends in NATO realise that defence will be the first casualty of any cuts, they may take more interest in getting the IMF off our backs.”

In Libya Newsome lunched with the young colonel who had succeeded Gaddafi in a bloody coup two years before. Then he was driven back to the airport by the colonel's personal chauffeur. There was an awkward moment when it was discovered that the British ambassador was there seeing his wife off to London on a shopping trip. Fortunately the ambassador did not notice the DC10 with British markings parked a discreet distance from the terminal buildings. Heaven knows what he would have said had he known his Foreign Secretary was hiding from him in the Men's lavatory of the VIP lounge.