The Bell Ringers (28 page)

‘Not in the least: I knew the police were being idiotic. These things happen – no blame attaches to you, Kate.'

‘Tell that to the newspapers.'

‘Our cross to bear in this country: they get worse as they get more
desperate for sales. Look, I rang because Eden White wants to meet you for a longer session. He's interested in acquiring your services.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘That seems rather surprising.'

‘I'll see him at Chequers and—'

‘At Chequers!'

‘Yes, he'll be there and I'd like to be able to say that you'd be willing to have a chat with him next week, while he's still in London. He leaves on Thursday.'

‘That sounds fine,' she said.

‘Great news! I know he'll be pleased.'

‘Oliver, do you mind me asking what you're doing at Chequers?'

‘The election, Kate! Temple is taking soundings before making his decision when to go to the country. It's one of the great advantages of a political system without fixed terms.'

‘For the man that calls the election, yes.'

‘A finely balanced judgement, as you say.'

She smiled at the vintage Mermagen return, which typically failed to acknowledge her point; a technique that always provided Mermagen with the account of the world that suited him best. ‘Then I'll expect to hear from you,' she said.

There was just one more communication with the world outside Dove Cottage that morning. A postman arrived, parked his van at the track and delivered a bundle of letters, bills and mail-shots held together by two red rubber bands. When she took it from him in the garden, he said: ‘Good to see the old place being used again. You will be wanting to look at the first one now – it's special delivery.'

On top of the pile was a plain white envelope without a name or address.

‘The issue is this,' said Temple, looking round the Great Hall at Chequers. ‘Should we wait for better signs in the economic indicators, or play our hand now?'

Philip Cannon surveyed the prime minister's group of political intimates – the men and women he relied on to keep him in power. Each served a distinct purpose in Temple's life, though this seemed to be rarely appreciated by the individual. He had scooped up and shed
individuals over the last two decades, gradually refining the inner circle with a cold certainty that he would one day be holding court at the Elizabethan manor that had been left by Arthur Lee to the nation for the sole use of the prime minister. There were the stalwarts from the beginning of his political career like his constituency agent and chief whip; the admen, media strategists and pollsters; and the people from Number Ten, Temple's chief of staff and head of strategy and his chief economic adviser, the head of his Policy Unit and Temple's principal private secretary Dawn Gruppo. There was no overlap, no repetition and little love lost between them.

Set apart both physically and in status from this group, which had gathered on the sofas at the centre of the room, were Eden White, sitting by the great window that looked out on the remains of the Tudor courtyard, and the press baron Bryant Maclean, who had sunk into a chair underneath the portraits of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria in the corner of the room, and watched the proceedings with a look of rubbery, wrinkled impatience.

No one heard Temple's opening remark because June, his second wife, a former weather girl and latterly television cook and author of the bestselling
Discreet Charm
, a study of modern etiquette, had allowed the business of welcoming the guests to spill into the meeting. She moved around the room, lightly touching people's shoulders with the end of her splayed fingertips. Tall and athletically trim with a helmet of blonde hair and a particle-beam smile, she possessed a glamour that was both remote and neighbourly. As one of the junior press officers in Cannon's department had observed, she was one of Temple's key assets, because women wanted to be like her and men wanted to have her. Whatever they thought of Temple, they admired him for laying siege and winning the hand of his Teutonic beauty. And of course June Temple had totally erased the memory of poor Judith Temple in her dowdy suburb near Leeds, her problem children and her career in sociology.

‘Thank you so much, dear,' Temple said, the parentheses spreading wider than usual to emphasise that the glow of a newly married couple had not dimmed. June clasped her hands in an expression of hospitable satisfaction and took herself off. ‘The election,' he said, ‘is upon us.'

Cannon's heart sank. Weekends at Chequers were like the bonding
sessions for the BBC's management he used to attend in hotels that always seemed to be near Watford. In fact this great square room with its chandelier, heavy table lamps and June's flower arrangements very much reminded him of the lobby of one of the posher country hotels. At Chequers he was reduced to an inmate, at the beck and call of the prime minister, unable to take a walk when he wanted, go for a pint without permission, have a nap or flick a fly over some unsuspecting trout. But he stayed in the job and put up with Chequers because of a straightforward fascination with Temple, who was in many ways the weirdest human being he had ever encountered. And at the end of it all would be a damned good memoir, a pension and the speaking circuit, where he would reveal John Temple, the man who took time off from the affairs of state to watch a daytime TV chat show, who once went missing at a G20 summit and was found – by the US Secret Service – in a railway museum, who wanted nothing more than to turn Britain into a republic and replace the monarchy with a president, presumably with an eye to his own retirement.

He drained the lukewarm coffee and withdrew into himself. Everyone in the room would have their say and to a man and woman they would opt for an October election. It was the orthodoxy, the unchallenged product of group-think: you couldn't find anyone in the media or political establishment who favoured an election now, although six months before the spring offensive had been all anyone talked about. Cannon knew that, the prime minister knew that, but still they had to sit there on a beautiful morning as the bloody economic adviser went through his predictions for lending activity and interest rates, food and oil prices, public spending, growth and employment in the second half of the year.

From his chair beside the arcaded minstrel's gallery he gazed at his boss with objective wonder. Like Lloyd George, Churchill, Thatcher and Blair, John Temple had energy and endurance. Having spent most of the night up with the American secretary of state, he'd completed forty lengths of the indoor pool donated to Chequers during the Nixon presidency, read all his papers and made notes for a speech. He did not stop and he never looked down – or back, perhaps another
characteristic shared with the big names that had spent their weekends on this Buckinghamshire estate.

Two hours elapsed. No drink, no food. Thank God for Bryant Maclean, who rose to leave, but said he was doing so knowing that the prime minister had got the answer he wanted: October was the only sensible choice.

‘I'm not persuaded of that,' said Eden White from the window. ‘A spring election looks very doable.' The voice was flat and curiously unimpressive. This was the answer Temple wanted. He needed to dive off the high board now, get it over with and settle into another term. Heads swung round. The two titans looked at each other across the room, grinning not with humour, but relish. Cannon remembered a poem by Ted Hughes about two wolves that meet in a forest – ‘Neither can make die the painful burning of the coal in its heart till the other's body and the whole wood is its own.'

White was utterly still; his face was polished alabaster in the reflected light from the courtyard. ‘From both the security as well as economic points of view,' he continued, ‘I believe it's better to go now. Prime minister, you know the circumstances you have to deal with, the criticisms you will face. Things are already beginning to improve. After years of the slump, difficulties with lending, there are signs that the public is feeling a little safer economically, yet they are still afraid for their physical well-being – two powerful reasons to support the status quo.'

‘That's not what my papers have been saying,' growled Maclean. ‘The polls are bad; the country is beset by problems that never get any better. You've got riots; you've got rot – a total breakdown of society in some of the big cities. You've all read what the bloody liberal columnists are saying about the country's malaise. Look, John, people are beginning to like you; they appreciate your calm and competence. It's taken time for them to get to know you, but now they are daring to think you're doing a good job. But you need more time to prove it.' He turned, shrugged and slipped a hand inside his cashmere jacket to knead the back of his hip. ‘And don't forget you still have the option to go to the country next year.'

‘That would be a death wish,' said White.

‘Not half as dangerous as going now,' returned Bryant, and then he looked back at Temple and grinned. ‘But hey, prime minister, it's your picnic; you choose the ant hill.'

Was that a threat, or was Maclean disowning his power in the land? Everyone in the room knew that if Maclean were not onside the election would probably be lost, and if he defected to the Opposition with the full panoply of broadcast and print media plus the range of ‘independent' attack dogs that he financed in the blogosphere, Temple would be crushed. But they also knew that Bryant Maclean faced scrutiny of his tax status as well as a monopoly inquiry if the Opposition won.

A couple of beats later – the famously unnerving Temple pause – the prime minister rose with an unreadable expression. ‘You're right to say what you have, Bryant. I appreciate your candour and your wisdom. You know how much we all value your advice. It was really very good of you to come all this way.' He took him by the elbow and steered him under the minstrel's gallery. ‘Are sure you won't stay for lunch?'

‘No, I gotta be going. Gotta talk to the Chinese.' Then he called out as they disappeared from view. ‘Cheerio, Eden. See you soon I hope. My regards to your wife.' The wife that Eden had unceremoniously ditched after she suffered a nervous breakdown several years before.

Cannon got up and followed. At that moment he was not so much dismayed as mystified by Temple bringing his two main supporters – both of whom lived abroad and so rarely saw each other – to come face to face and fall out. Now, whichever way he jumped he'd risk angering one of them. For a reason that remained totally obscure to Cannon, Temple seemed to have decided that would be Bryant Maclean.

They reached the entrance. Temple signalled for Cannon to stay back and walked Maclean over the lawn to his helicopter. They stopped short of it, about a hundred yards from the house. Temple was having the last word, gesturing and craning to look Maclean in the eye. Maclean stared at the ground, then at the trees and after a minute or so began shaking his head. This he did not stop until he reached the door held open for him by one of the helicopter crew.

Later, during the abysmal lunch of sandwiches in the Great Parlour conference room, the chief pollster used two screens to show the results
of secret polling from the marginal constituencies, which – though few knew it – had been financed by Eden White. Because of the peculiarities of the British electoral system, the election would be decided by between 120,000 and 200,000 voters. The pollster team had names and addresses for that target group and every detail you could wish to know about their lives, from the brand of toothpaste they used to the number of times family members had visited hospital in the last four years. He knew the religion, the performance of the children at school, where they went on holiday, their commitment to the community – a particular obsession in these days of pro-social programmes for the responsible citizen. It was, he said, the most refined voter profiling in the history of elections: if you could get to these people – and there were ways of doing that which he wasn't going to bore the prime minister with – he could guarantee a workable majority of twenty-five to thirty-five seats.

They rose at three p.m. and all except Eden White, who went off to his room, moved to the western end of the Long Gallery for coffee. Through the window decorated with coats of arms, June Temple could be glimpsed beyond the bare trees flying about on the tennis court with a female member of the security detail. Temple watched fondly. It was Cannon's moment.

‘Am I going to have to calm Maclean's people down?' he asked. ‘We don't want them jumping all over this in tomorrow's papers. Maclean is a hack first of all and he'll leak if you parted on bad terms.'

‘Yes, I imagined he would,' said Temple without interest.

‘Then we are going to have some trouble if he believes you're going to call a snap election.'

‘Yes,' said Temple, ‘but we needed to prepare the country somehow, even though a spring election has always been on the cards. Might as well have Maclean do it.'

‘You don't want those bastards going over to the other side. I can talk to a couple of political editors this afternoon.'

Temple put down his cup, spun the nearest of a pair of antique globes and gave an imperceptible nod of his head. ‘You look like you need a walk, Philip.' He moved to the bookcases and opened a panel of shelves lined from top to bottom with dummy books. Behind it was an old linen-fold carved door, which he unlatched and closed behind them.
Before the rest of the party knew what had happened they had vanished into a corridor of portraits. Cannon had seen the trick before and was amazed at the pleasure it still seemed to give Temple. ‘I'd like one of these in Number Ten – in the Cabinet Room preferably,' he said.

They stopped by Robert Walker's portrait of Oliver Cromwell in armour. ‘I need to get going on Maclean now,' said Cannon. ‘If he's really pissed off he will start running stuff on the web tonight.'