A Very British Coup (9 page)

“Why not?”

“Prime Minister, I was advised …”

“Don't give me that crap.” Still Perkins did not raise his voice. “I'll tell you why you haven't intervened. Because you thought you'd give me a bit of a scare, didn't you? ‘New Prime Minister with all sorts of crazy Socialist ideas. We'll soon teach him a lesson.' That's what you thought, isn't it? Let sterling slide for a few hours and then rush round to Downing Street with a list of demands in return for calling a halt.”

Perkins turned to face the Governor. “Those days are over. If you know what's good for you, you'll get back in your Rolls-Royce, return immediately to your office and start buying. Fast. If the pound hasn't gained two cents by close of business, I want your resignation.”

With that Perkins strode over to the double doors and pulled them open, indicating the exit with a gesture of his left hand. The Governor, his face drained of colour, swept past and on to the landing. He went down the main staircase almost at a trot. Past the portraits of former Prime Ministers, through the entrance lobby with its bust of Disraeli and into the back of his green Rolls-Royce.

By close of business sterling had recovered 2.16 cents against the dollar.

Fiennes was pouring himself a coffee from the office percolator when the telex machine in the far corner came to life. Coffee cup in hand he went and stood over the telex. It was the Downing Street press office with the details of Perkins' Cabinet.

As the machine tapped out the first name Fiennes gave a low whistle. The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House was to be Jock Steeples. Steeples was a former East End docker and veteran left-winger. Despite his undoubted ability he had never been given office of any kind during his thirty years in Parliament, largely because DI5 had fingered him as a possible Communist agent. Steeples would be in charge of pushing the new government's programme through Parliament.

Next out of the machine was the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lawrence Wainwright. Wainwright was Oxford educated and had once been a merchant banker. Not an obvious choice for a left-wing government. Fiennes was pleasantly surprised. Maybe Perkins was going to play safe after all.

Any illusions about Perkins being overcome by a sudden fit of moderation were, however, quickly dispelled by his choice of Home Secretary, Mrs Joan Cook. Mrs Cook was one of only a handful of women MPs, an honorary vice president of the National Council for Civil Liberties. She had campaigned for greater public control of the police and the intelligence services. DI5 also suspected she was a crypto Communist. Fiennes groaned.

The Foreign Secretary, Tom Newsome, had been a Yorkshire schoolmaster. DI5 had a file an inch thick on him. In 1968 he had led the huge march to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. He had been Chairman of the Chile Solidarity Campaign and led numerous deputations to the
Foreign Office to protest against just about every military régime with which Britain traded.

Fiennes placed his coffee cup on the windowsill and with unnecessary vigour ripped the first page of the telex from the machine.

The Defence Secretary headed the second page. This was to be Jim Evans, a Welshman with a fine line in fiery rhetoric. Evans had been a ban-the-bomber since the early days of CND. By now Fiennes was beside himself. This was it. The revolution was unfolding before his very eyes.

So it went on. Four pages of new appointments. Extremists almost to a man. The Northern Ireland Secretary was known to favour British withdrawal. The Minister of Agriculture was a former farm labourer.

“This will send the pound through the floor,” said Fiennes half out loud as he tore the final sheet from the telex. He had to restrain himself from running as he went to tell Sir Peregrine the awful news.

Sir Peregrine was composing a memorandum when Fiennes entered. He always composed in long hand, using a blue felt-tipped pen, and he did not like being interrupted. “Yes, Fiennes, what is it?” The irritation in his voice was barely concealed.

“The new Cabinet, sir.”

“Oh, yes; bad as we thought?”

“Worse,” said Fiennes, handing over the sheaf of telex pages.

There was a full minute's silence as Sir Peregrine ran his eyes slowly down the list. When he looked up there was no hint of dismay in his voice. “Well, Fiennes, we've had a stroke of luck.”

“Luck, sir?”

“Wainwright, the new Chancellor. He's on our payroll. We signed him up soon after he got into Parliament. He's been reporting to us ever since.”

With a flourish Sir Peregrine returned the telex pages to Fiennes and added, “Perkins has made his first mistake.”

*

Fred Thompson was already in bed at his flat in Camden Town when the phone rang. Putting on his dressing gown he stumbled into the living room.

“Sorry to ring at this hour,” said a cheerful Yorkshire voice at the other end of the line.

Suddenly Thompson was wide awake. “Harry, or should I say
Prime Minister
?”

“Never mind about that, lad. Listen, I've got a job for you.” Perkins paused and then went on, “How would you like to work in my Private Office? I need someone to keep an eye on all these damn civil servants.”

For a moment Thompson was stunned into silence. “Will you or won't you?” said Perkins impatiently.

“Of course, Harry, I'd be delighted. What do you want me to do?”

“Just answer a few letters and generally keep your eyes open. I'll tell you more when you start on Monday.”

“Monday? But what about the
Independent
? I've got to give notice.”

“I've already had a word with your editor. He says he's been trying to get rid of you for years,” said Perkins drily.

“What time on Monday?”

“If you come to Downing Street at 8.30 in the morning we can have a cup of tea and I'll show you what's what.”

“Okay, Harry,” said Thompson, who could think of nothing else to say, so overwhelmed was he by the dramatic change in his circumstances.

“Right, lad, see you Monday.” And with that Perkins was gone, leaving Thompson still holding the receiver.

Fred Thompson was one of those journalists who hover on the fringe of the big time, but never quite make it. He had started out on one of George Fison's provincial papers and drifted in the general direction of Fleet Street via a publication called
Municipal News
which operated out of two rooms in Chancery Lane and which folded six months after he joined the staff. After a spot of freelancing, a euphemism for the dole, Thompson landed a poorly paid job with the
Independent Socialist
. It was the sort of journal that everyone had
heard of, but nobody seemed to read. If long-serving members of its staff were to be believed, there was a time when the
Independent
had been required reading for every serious left-winger, but those days were long passed. By the time Thompson arrived it was tired and clapped out, snapping harmlessly at the ankles of the parliamentary establishment.

His first encounter with Harry Perkins had been inauspicious. Perkins had telephoned to lambast the editor for transposing a paragraph in an article he had contributed the previous week on the steel industry. In the absence of the editor he lambasted Thompson instead. Next thing he knew Perkins had invited him for a drink at the House.

It was a hot summer evening six months after Labour's second successive election defeat and they sat on the terrace supping half pints of Guinness. Perkins did most of the talking. He was seething with anger at the way the election had been handled. “Serves us bloody right.” His brow glistened in the last rays of the sun. “We offer the electorate a choice between two Tory parties and they choose the real one. Now we find ourselves back in the wilderness for five years and the country's going down the plughole.” For a moment they sat in silence looking out over the river. A police launch sped past throwing a cloud of spray in its wake. Perkins rested a hand lightly on Thompson's arm in the manner of someone about to impart a great secret. “You mark my words, lad, come the conference heads will roll.”

Six days later Perkins announced his intention to challenge the leader. The media had a minor bout of hysteria. Most of his colleagues were mildly amused. For some reason Perkins had never been taken seriously by the clever young lawyers and polytechnic lecturers who seemed to account for about half the Parliamentary Labour Party. In any case, it was whispered that the trade union leaders had met the Shadow Cabinet and agreed to back the status quo.

But if there had been a stitch-up, it came unstitched. Looking back it was amazing that no one saw it coming. Not until the Transport and General Workers' Union delegation met on the morning of the election and threw out the recommendation
of their executive, was it clear something was up. In the hours that followed, at delegation meetings in clubs and hotel suites all over Blackpool, the block votes began to shift. By evening Perkins was home and dry. In the elections for the National Executive Committee which followed, the left cleaned up. Heads had rolled, just as Perkins had predicted. From that day on he was taken very seriously indeed.

Fred Thompson was the only journalist to tip a victory for Perkins. Week after week the
Independent Socialist
had carried articles documenting the rising tide of anger in the constituencies and at the lower levels of the trade unions. Since no one took the
Independent
seriously, it was not really surprising that Thompson's articles had gone unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, by all save Perkins.

For some time before he became Labour leader, Perkins had been employing Thompson for occasional bits of research. It was not uncommon for Thompson to spend a morning burrowing in the House of Commons library for figures on West German coal subsidies or imports of special steels from Scandinavia. More and more they would be seen talking earnestly over a cup of coffee in one of the Commons cafeterias or poring together over notes in one of the dark recesses of the Committee Room corridor. After he became leader Perkins gradually came to look more and more to Thompson as his eyes and ears in the party. It was not uncommon, after a ten o'clock division, to see Thompson making his way across the Star Chamber court to the leader of the opposition's rooms for a late-night whisky and a chat about the way the world turned round. So frequent a visitor had Thompson become that the policemen on duty in the lobbies no longer bothered to ask for his pass.

The arrangement was never formalised but by and by it came to be taken for granted that if you wanted access to Harry Perkins, Fred Thompson was the man to speak to. This being so, it should have come as no surprise to Thompson to be awakened from his bed in the early hours by a telephone call from the Prime Minister with an offer of a job in Downing Street. Nonetheless Thompson was surprised and trembled
slightly as he replaced the receiver and went back to bed. It was nearly dawn by the time he fell asleep.

The sun shone brightly over Chelsea as Lady Elizabeth Fain left for her weekend in the country. On the back seat of her new Volkswagen (assembled by robots at the old Rover plant in Solihull) was a small blue suitcase containing two changes of clothes and an evening dress. Beside the case a wicker shopping basket covered by a teacloth contained an apple pie she had baked herself and a bottle of Beaujolais. Walpole the spaniel was upright on the front passenger seat.

Kensington High Street was jammed with Saturday shoppers, but the traffic flowed smoothly. Within twenty minutes Elizabeth was through Hammersmith and on to the M40 motorway. As grey suburbs turned into green countryside she found herself thinking of Fred. On paper at least he was not her type. Had a bit of a chip on his shoulder; always going on about his being working class and how he came from another planet from the one on which she lived. She had a very easy life. Like most of her friends she had a private income and only worked when she felt like doing so. Now she came to think about it, she hadn't a single friend, apart from Fred, who would answer to the description of ‘working class'.

Fred was always going on about how corrupt and violent the police were. She had protested that all the policemen she had ever met were kind and courteous. He had replied that the police existed to protect people like her from people like him. At the time she had laughed at him, but as the riots crept closer to Sloane Square she began to think that there might be a grain of truth in what Fred had said.

Walpole curled up on the front seat and fell asleep. Elizabeth exerted pressure on the accelerator. The motorway cut a swathe through lush Oxfordshire pastureland sloping away to a river valley and, beyond, a clump of forest which parted to reveal a country house not unlike the one in which her parents lived. What a contrast with life in one of the great grey skyscrapers in Battersea, where she had once worked for six months in a private nursery school. Somehow people in
Battersea even looked different from those she mixed with. The women were pale, pasty, often with unwashed straggly hair and tired eyes. Girls her own age were weighed down with children and shopping baskets and push chairs. Was that what being working class meant? Would she have been like that if she had been born on a council estate in Battersea instead of a country house in Somerset?

About ten miles from Oxford Elizabeth left the motorway at an exit signposted to Watlington. Before reaching the village she turned into an avenue marked ‘private'. The avenue was lined on either side by beech trees which united overhead to form a long tunnel. After a thousand yards it swerved sharply right and, suddenly, there was the house.

Watlington Priory was the seat of the Nortons, an ancient Catholic family which traced its ancestry back to the time of King John. The house was a Tudor mansion with two main wings branching off from a centrepiece to which clung several centuries' growth of ivy. The Volkswagen crunched across the gravel forecourt and came to a halt by a walled vegetable garden. As it did so two golden labradors came bounding from the house and rushed in excited circles round the car. From the passenger seat Walpole eyed them cautiously.