Read Corridors of Death Online

Authors: Ruth Dudley Edwards

Tags: #Mystery

Corridors of Death (3 page)

BOOK: Corridors of Death
5.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

‘It would be civil servants. They develop highly trained bladders to save them ever missing any part of a meeting lest their departmental interests suffer from their absence. So who’s on the present short list?’

Milton pushed a list over to him.

Norman Grewe, Chairman, Industrial Electronics Ltd

Gerald Hunter, Secretary of State for Energy

Martin Jenkins, President, Fitters’ Union

Harvey Nixon, Secretary of State for Conservation

Richard Parkinson, Assistant Secretary, Department of Conservation

Alfred Shaw, President, Plastics Extrusion Workers’ Union

Archibald Stafford, Chairman, Plastics Conversion Company

William Wells, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Conservation

‘Terrific,’ said Amiss. ‘Our department provides three – Nixon, Wells and Parkinson. The government – already shaky and with a small majority – provides three as well – Hunter, and Nixon and Wells again.’

‘Obviously we want to minimize the dislocation to government. I’ve had a lot of heavy breathing from my superiors about this already. The real difficulty now is to find motives, because if the eight are to be believed, there wasn’t one amongst them who had even the most rudimentary of reasons to want to see Sir Nicholas off. Grewe, Jenkins and Hunter claim nodding acquaintance only and the others talked about him as a friend rather than a colleague.’

‘I can’t help you with the nodding acquaintances,’ said Amiss grimly, ‘but if three strong motives and one weak one are of any use, you’d better get out your notebook.’

4

‘Did any single one of those who attended IGGY this morning tell you anything about the fiasco which revealed that Harvey Nixon, while presenting a paper on an aspect of his department’s policy, hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about?’

‘Need you ask?’

‘No. It’s a complicated story which I spent some time this evening disentangling with the unsuspecting help of the Private Secretary network within Whitehall. You ought to know that Private Secretaries hear everything, see everything and tell only each other most of it. The fiasco itself was inexplicable as it occurred, unless you accept that Sir Nicholas was prepared to sacrifice his future career entirely for the sake of his malice towards Nixon and Wells. His machinations over the past few days make me assume that he had totally flipped. We’ll have to start with the characters of the two politicians involved – Nixon and Wells. What do you know about either of them?’

‘Very little. I saw so many people, and so quickly, this afternoon that they’re all a blur. But I know that Wells is some kind of junior minister with a radical reputation.’

‘You need to get his status clear. A Parliamentary Undersecretary of State is known for convenience – even in official documents – by the acronym PUSS. And that about sums up the general view of what his role should be. Our department has one Secretary of State, two Ministers of State, each of whom is basically his deputy for half the work, and each of them has a PUSS. The PUSS is normally without power, influence or honour, unless he happens to be very lucky in his superiors. His job is to stand in for ministers on unimportant occasions, see difficult but uninfluential deputations, do what he is told and shut up otherwise. I’ve even heard the PUSS described as being in office mainly for young officials to practise their burgeoning minister-controlling skills on. Every Whitehall civil servant’s and most senior ministers’ nightmare is a PUSS who gets too big for his boots and starts showing initiative, reminding ministers of manifesto commitments and trying to score at their expense in the party. Wells is a pain in the arse to everyone who works in the Department of Conservation.’

‘Why? Because he’s independent-minded?’

‘No. We’re not that bad. Independence of mind may often be an irritant, but it takes more than that to incur actual dislike. Wells is disliked because he is ambitious and unprincipled, while setting himself up as a principled man surrounded by time-servers. His radicalism gives him a power-base within his party which makes him difficult to sack; so he loses no opportunity of upstaging his colleagues and showing his contempt for civil servants, whom he never ceases to treat as subverters of the will of the people. Hardly fair – most of the time we merely try to enact the wishes of the Cabinet. We may be seen as the sinister undemocratic secret rulers of the country, but in fact we’re usually pretty loyal to our governments. That bugger treats us like the secret police and fuddy-duddy obscurantists by turns. And when you get choked off with the unhelpfulness you are likely to meet during this enquiry, remember that civil servants, too, have to put up with a lot of shit. Pass the chutney.’

‘Right. I’ve got Wells clear. Now Nixon always seems from press accounts to be a modest and competent sort of fellow.’

‘Modest he is. Competent he’s not. He’s a prime example of the power of the civil-service machine. He was made a senior minister for two good reasons. First, he was intensely loyal, and could be relied on to do anything the Prime Minister told him to do. Second, as a Scot, he helps to maintain a regional balance within the Cabinet.’

‘Surely that wouldn’t be enough to compensate for lack of ability?’

‘My God, have you any idea how many conflicting pressures a Prime Minister faces in getting a Cabinet together? Lobbies, regional
amour propre
, left/right/centre balance to be struck, no class or profession to dominate, personal debts of gratitude to be paid, magnanimity to be shown by the inclusion of erstwhile opponents, and more. When all that’s been taken account of, a Prime Minister would appoint to a vacant senior post someone who couldn’t read and write if his loyalty could be counted on. As long as you can scrawl a signature, you don’t need to be literate, let alone intelligent, to be a Cabinet Minister. Sorry – correction. You need to be able to read your speeches, but you’ll certainly never have to write them or anything else if you don’t want to.’

Milton wiped his brow, but whether at these distressing revelations about the practicalities of government life or at the heat of the Meat Vindaloo he had incautiously ordered, Amiss couldn’t be sure.

‘Look at it the other way, Jim. Even if a Cabinet could be chosen on sheer merit, you’d be lucky to find a dozen people in the ruling party who could succeed at all aspects of the job. You need the stamina of a horse. Between party meetings, constituency responsibilities, House of Commons debates, routine ministerial duties, major speeches laying down government policy, Cabinet meetings and Cabinet committees, you’re lucky to have a couple of nights a week when you get home by ten. And even then, like every other night, you have one or two large boxes full of paper which, in theory, you digest and comment sensibly on. It’s an impossible load as it is, the way we run government. It’s almost unbearable when, as now, a small majority means that the minister has to be present to vote on even unimportant motions day and night in the House of Commons.’

‘I’m beginning to feel sorry for Nixon.’

‘So you should. A decent, compassionate M.P. Quite a good speaker when he knows what he’s talking about. Ambitions admittedly rather above his abilities, but for him most of the consequences of holding office turn out to be harassment round the clock, sniping in the House and perpetual terror of being asked detailed questions about policies he hasn’t initiated and hasn’t had time to grasp. On top of that, he has to nurse a marginal constituency in Glasgow.’

‘Why don’t people like that tell the Prime Minister that he can stuff his jobs?’

‘Because of loyalty or ambition, and because the glamour of office makes up for a lot. Everywhere you go you have cars to carry you, lavish offices to work in, minions – and intelligent ones at that – at your beck and call. People call you “minister” and treat you with deference. Play your cards right and you’ll end up in the House of Lords with a meal ticket and a platform for life. Only an exceptional man would give up all that for a half share in a scrubby little office in the House of Commons, a drop in salary of seventy per cent and a reduction in staff to half a secretary.’

‘I understand,’ said Milton, wondering if he would himself have the integrity to turn down the Commissioner’s job, arse-licking of politicians and pussy-footing with the press notwithstanding.

‘The late Sir Nicholas Clark despised Nixon and hated Wells. It looks as if last week he decided to nobble them both. It wasn’t a difficult job for him, because, as I said, he was prepared to risk his own career in the process. It merely required him to bypass a system of checks and balances which ensures most of the time that people turn up in the right places with the right kind of material.’

If Milton had been alert so far, he was quivering now.

‘Nixon would normally have attended IGGY, but he had a whole weekend of constituency appointments – in Glasgow, remember. It was some local party anniversary or other, and he had been advised by Sir Nicholas that another minister could attend this meeting since it was unlikely to be controversial. He left the office early last Friday evening intending not to return until mid-morning on Monday. He had asked his Private Secretary specifically to put in his despatch box only the most urgent papers. On some pretext Sir Nicholas borrowed the IGGY papers from Nixon’s office, saying the minister wouldn’t be needing them. The relevant Minister of State – that’s the next level down, remember – was away, so Wells, the PUSS, was going to stand in for Nixon. He was cock-a-hoop at the prospect of performing in front of the Chancellor and attracting more attention in twenty minutes than he could normally have hoped for in two years’ hard work. He had spent days demanding more and more briefing for the meeting, at which he was to present for discussion a paper on department policy on paper recycling. His introductory speech was drafted by a civil servant, savaged, rewritten, denounced, rewritten and then finally touched up by Wells himself on Friday. He also disappeared in the early evening, papers in hand, smirk on face, leaving a train of cursing officials in his wake hoping that he would over-reach himself and come a cropper on Monday.’

‘Don’t tell me. Sir Nicholas fixed it so Nixon had to turn up to IGGY unbriefed. But how?’

‘He used his rank and traded on the trust any politician or civil servant puts in the integrity and reliability of a Permanent Secretary. He rang up his opposite number in the Treasury and conveyed the worrying news that the TUC were going to mount a major protest against some hitherto uncontroversial aspect of the paper. Mightn’t the Chancellor feel in the circumstances that the Secretary of State should be there rather than an inexperienced junior of juniors? It wouldn’t look too good at the Press Conference, would it? “Christ, no,” said his opposite number, haring in to the Chancellor, starting a panic and getting back to Sir Nicholas to say “retrieve your man at all costs and cancel the PUSS”. “Don’t worry, my dear chap,” says Judas. “I’ll see to all that.” Exit Treasury-man with a sigh of relief, leaving to his old reliable friend the job of passing on the news.’

‘What did he do?’ asked Milton in fascination. ‘Nothing?’

‘Better than that. He rang Nixon on Sunday night, catching him in the middle of a constituency dinner in Glasgow and about to make a major speech. He told him he had to be on parade at IGGY at 10.00 next morning. God knows what excuses he made for the delay in letting him know – blamed it on the Private Secretary, probably. Nixon flaps. No way of getting back to London more than half an hour before the meeting starts. No briefing. “Tsch, tsch,” says Sir Nicholas, “how surprising that you haven’t got the papers. But the Chancellor was most insistent that you should be there. Don’t worry. I’ll meet your plane in the morning with all the bumf and you’ll have time to scan the brief and the speech and discuss them with me before we arrive at the meeting.” ’

‘And I suppose he didn’t turn up.’

‘Right. Although he did send Nixon’s Private Secretary with the briefing and a speech. They weren’t to know that it was the wrong speech, which Sir Nicholas had manufactured himself. It was about paper recycling, yes. But it was redolent with misunderstandings of the issues, mis-statements of what was in the paper to be discussed, wrong statistics, bits of Greek and French – neither of which Nixon can pronounce. By the time Nixon had got to his car, what-the-helled his secretary, looked despairingly at the huge pile of paper which he was supposed to be able to discuss intelligently, he had time, one assumes, only to give the most cursory glance at the speech. It was the first item on the IGGY agenda and the poor bastard never had a chance. He made a shambles of reading the speech and then went completely to pieces when the few present who knew something about the subject started to question him on the mis-statements and wrong facts in it.’

‘But surely he could have explained what had happened?’

‘Government doesn’t work like that. Haven’t you ever seen press reports about ministers being castigated in the House because they signed a letter with an error in it? It doesn’t matter that every week they sign hundreds of letters they’ve no time to read. The pretence is kept up that they know everything that’s going on. They are responsible if some Clerical Officer they’ve never met cocks up an official statistic. It’s known as ministerial accountability. Of course it’s nonsense, but it’s hallowed nonsense. No. He had no option but to soldier on and rely on whatever help he had to hand. In theory his political colleagues would try to protect him in discussion and his civil servants would pass him helpful notes when he didn’t know the answers to questions.’

‘Well, didn’t they?’

‘They would have. But Sir Nicholas had arranged it so that those present were himself and two others, Parkinson and me, neither of whom knew a blind thing about the subject. Sir Nicholas ignored the signals from Nixon, and at the crucial stage of the discussion left the room for ten minutes. Normally there would be someone there to act as a long-stop, but on this occasion no one was equipped to field the simplest question. By the time Sir Nicholas got back the Chancellor had managed to pass on to the next item with some mumble about pressure of time and Nixon was sitting there deathly pale, having seen himself revealed in front of a key group of his peers and superiors as a bumbling incompetent. And Sir Nicholas looked at him and smiled.’

BOOK: Corridors of Death
5.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees
Besieged by L.P. Lovell
Lush in Translation by Aimee Horton
Living With Miss G by Jordan, Mearene
The Fall of Never by Ronald Malfi