Fifty-First State (19 page)

He told Joshua everything he and Jeremy had found out in the two days following his meeting with Petherbridge. Gott and Jeremy had investigated in detail the pre-election donors to the Conservative Party.

From November 2012 up to the announcement of the upcoming election, donations to the party had amounted to a meagre £34,000, part of which had had to go to service a million pound overdraft, the rest not enough to cover anything like the cost of running the party. Then in August had come a two million pound contribution from Lord Haver, a very rich man and descendant of a long line of Conservative politicians, including a Victorian Prime Minister – and, incidentally, a man who had known and disliked Gott for fifteen years. And half a million from Mrs Caris Brookes. The mysterious Mr Finch-O'Brien had given £750,000. Two days later Sheikh Mohammed Khali came up with a million and a half. Lady Davina McCleod gave a million. As September opened the astonished Gott received a flood of donations – half a million pounds from Arthur Pelman of Pelman Building and Construction, a million from Perry Briggs-Anderson of MGA Light Engineering and another from Daniel Silverman of Opal Entertainment. And so it went on. Bewley Aeronautics, Fargo Records, Star Casinos, Mr Daniel Oakes, Mrs Maria Hughes, Halliwell Small Arms, Lord Greaves, Mr Jay Stanton, Jago Prefabricated Buildings – adding up, in all, to a little under thirty million pounds and all delivered when the election campaign was most in need of funds.

The corporate donors were largely entertainment companies, building firms, arms and plane manufacturers and oil companies. When Gott had rung the private donors to express thanks, what had they told him? Haver had said, ‘Must get the country on an even keel – try for a working majority.' Mrs Brookes, who was a middle-aged lady with a small estate in Wiltshire had said, ‘Now is the time for all good men – and women, too – to come to the aid of the party.' Dan Oakes – ‘Must break the stalemate.' The business donors
had told Gott much the same as Oakes – the new government must be a government which supported business and must have a working majority. The stasis over legislation was harming them. The stories were all much the same. Suspiciously so, thought Gott – the same tale over and over, and stiffly told. They might have been scripted. Now, after his lightning revelation at Downing Street, Gott thought they probably had been. So what was the pattern, if any? Arms, planes, oil and building (the reconstruction) spelt war, one way or another. Haver, he knew, had enormous holdings in oil and gas, much of the money in the States.

Jeremy went to work, following the money from bank accounts to offshore accounts and onwards. He looked into births, marriages and deaths, talked to people who knew people who knew other people. He called the USA, he called Switzerland, he called China, India and Japan. Mrs Caris Brookes of the Old Manor in a Wiltshire village, for example, turned out to be an oft-divorced lady, one of her ex-husbands being Harold Hambro, now a personal adviser to the US President. Mrs Maria Hughes was, in her public life, the Hughes of Hughes Hudson Hatt, PR consultants in New York and London. Pelman already had big building contracts in Iraq; Briggs-Anderson was in the arms trade and would be pleased to get any contracts he could from the US military; Opal Entertainments was partner in a big US entertainments consortium and, if the world were in ruins, there would still be TV networks set up.

The final giveaway was Jay Stanton, born in the USA, though a naturalized Briton, and living in yet another manor house in the British countryside. Jeremy found out that he was a retired CIA man. Though by that stage gaunt and very weary, he couldn't help laughing about that one.

Strings had been pulled by US businesses and, pushed or bribed by US politicians, Petherbridge had got the money. Petherbridge had used it to buy a British election. Gott wondered why he hadn't made the connection earlier. And Jeremy told him, ‘Because it's so extreme.'

‘Oh – James Bentley, Star Casinos,' Gott told Joshua in conclusion. ‘Mustn't forget him. You'll love this. Bentley owns several casinos and would like to get permission for more. But the British government is balky about casinos – they love them and they fear them. Bentley has good friends in Las Vegas and Atlantic City who would love to get into business with him here, if the government could be persuaded to give licences for another fifteen or twenty casinos. What do you think the deal is there?'

Joshua, believing but not believing, shook his head. ‘Petherbridge guarantees the permission and the friends in Vegas give the money to Bentley to give to the Conservative Party.'

‘When Jeremy worked that one out he panicked. He's afraid of finding his dog's head in his bed one night.'

Joshua had listened to the story silently. He still did not quite believe it. He had believed Gott, up to now, to be one of the sanest men he knew. Yet a sane man can turn into a monomaniac. A sane man in the grip of a conspiracy theory can still find all the evidence he needs to back the theory. But then there was the money – that cartload of money donated in the few short months before the election. His colleagues, the opposition, the political journalists had all been astonished by it.

Joshua was shaken. He said, ‘Edward – are you quite sure?'

‘Sure as death and taxes,' Gott told him.

A well-known actor came up and asked for a light for a cigar. He gazed deep into Joshua's eyes and saw something there he did not like. When he had gone, Joshua, still wrestling with his doubts, asked, ‘So where does this bill to sell the air force bases come in?'

‘The first payment on the debt,' Gott said. ‘Petherbridge has had the money. Like all creditors, unless he has to pay up from the off, he'll relax and forget. So here it is, written into the Queen's Speech, bloody hard to get through the House, but he has to do it.'

‘So why not just go to the press? One article in a respectable paper and the whole can of worms opens.'

‘Petherbridge had me in and threatened me,' Gott told him. ‘Bribed me, too – the Party Chairmanship when Barnsbury goes, as he may do soon. His wife's sick. Petherbridge needs me to deny everything and maybe cook the books when some clever bastard works it out.'

‘What did he threaten you with?'

‘An old misdemeanour – and something to do with my family. I'm pretty sure I can manage the misdemeanour. Jeremy's starting on it tomorrow, when he pulls himself together.' Jeremy would be at Ford Open Prison first thing in the morning, suggesting to Derek Vigo that he might prefer becoming the proprietor of a thriving bar and restaurant in Toronto, which Gott had taken in payment for a bad debt, to early parole based on telling the story of Gott's involvement in the financial scandal. Gott reasoned that serving his sentence in full and coming out of jail to emigrate and make a new life would appeal more to Vigo than early release, conversations with the Fraud Squad, the granny flat at his son's house presided over by a resentful daughter-in-law. ‘I don't like the threat concerning my personal life – but if Petherbridge follows through on it, I'll take the consequences, if I have to. I've thought it all over, Joshua. It's difficult. For one thing, it would be very hard for me to pull down the party I've worked for and supported all my life. If there's another way, I'll take it.'

‘Start by stopping the bill?'

‘As the first move to get rid of Petherbridge.'

Joshua drew in a deep breath. ‘Oh, shit,' he said.

‘Not easy, as I said. I've let Petherbridge think I've taken the bait about the Chairmanship. That buys a little time. But we need to be quick because I think Petherbridge has to push the first reading through by Christmas. I'm guessing the US wants everything in place before the Iraqis nationalize their own oil. Those bases will be crucial, and so will Petherbridge's sense that he has to go along with the American reinvasion.'

‘I'll start talking to people,' Joshua said. ‘Shall I drop a few hints on
Westminster Unplugged?
Nothing obvious.'

Gott shook his head. ‘Not at the moment, I think.'

Joshua, alarmed, looked at his watch. ‘I'm sorry. I have an engagement.'

‘And I have to get back to my office,' Gott said.

They both stood. Joshua again realized the enormity of what Gott had told him and asked, ‘Why do it?'

‘Power?' suggested Gott. ‘That's the usual story.'

But Joshua thought Gott knew more than he was willing to say. ‘I meant,' he said, ‘why are they doing it?'

‘The US economy is poor. They feel threatened. Like all countries they have a national myth about themselves which doesn't always tally with what observers from outside see. Their narrative is to do with expanding – go west young man – new horizons. When times get hard you saddle up and head for a new place. It's not that stupid.'

Joshua headed west to a dinner party. ‘What have I let myself in for?' said the voice in his head. ‘Oh my God – what am I doing?'

He found it hard to keep his attention on his hostess, a political hostess of a kind still to be found in London, and his host, the editor of a tabloid newspaper. There were six guests round the well-appointed table in a high dining room. Joshua had brought Saskia, who had not wanted to come and sat, saying little, throughout the meal. There were tiny portions on exquisite old plates, served by a couple from the Philippines.

Gott wanted Joshua to play a prominent part in the rebellion against his own government's bill. Instinctively, Joshua was against it – the Little Englander in him, no doubt. He was shocked by what Gott had told him about the campaign contributions. But he sensed that if he joined this particular dissident section of his own party, this time there would be no turning back. Whether they won or lost, while he was still PM, Petherbridge, energetic, efficient and determined, would seek to destroy him. He'd show no mercy. He'd make sure smears were published, he'd starve him of work and influence and, finally, make sure he would be deselected by his own constituency party.

What could Joshua do if he were no longer in Parliament? He'd started by abandoning a job as a lecturer at LSE to become a research economist with the party but there was little chance the LSE would want to
take him back. Farewell to the fleshpots, no more invitations from the knowledgable and influential. He'd be out. His wife would hate him for it. He flinched at the idea of telling her. He put his knife and fork together on the plate, unconscious of having eaten anything.

They might succeed, that was the point. They might win. And he, Joshua Crane would be at the front of the victory parade. He was still a young man – at that moment Joshua saw the premiership, like a holy vision, right before his eyes. What should he do now? To start with – no more high-maintenance Saskia. For the time being, while the campaign was running, he and she would have to keep their heads down. While he was looking at her, she stood up and left the table. Joshua realized he had half-noticed his old school friend, James, get up and go out of the room only moments earlier. Oh shit, Joshua thought, just as the pudding was coming round, they couldn't sodding well wait. Never mind, he told himself, this is a big moment. Make the wrong decision and you're fucked. Make the right one and you could go to the top, the real top, top of the world. And who could he talk to? Julia, he decided. Julia would understand all the issues and she wouldn't tell anyone. He'd ring her next day.

After the guests went home, his hostess said to her husband, ‘I'd no idea Joshua Crane would be so dull. Terribly bad value.'

‘Not a word to say for himself,' her husband agreed. ‘Don't ask him again.'

The Rose and Crown, Hamscott Common. November 18th, 2015. 8 p.m.

The Rose and Crown was one of two pubs in the short village street at Hamscott Common. It lay opposite a pretty row of 200-year-old cottages. Its interior, beamed and with a bright fire burning in a large grate at one side of the bar room, seemed to tell its customers that it reflected and preserved the values of the old, rural Hamscott Common.

The landlord, Geoff Armstrong, was a short, sturdy fifty-year-old ex-serviceman. On the pub door was a painted sign reading, ‘No travellers. No work clothes. No demonstrators.' Travellers, men in working clothes and demonstrators took their trade to the other pub in the village, the Goat.

That evening, the Rose and Crown was not crowded. At the bar, in their usual positions, were the regulars: Tom, the postman, Warren, the former market garden owner and John, a local handyman. At a table beside the bar was a group of mid-to-late twenties and, at another table nearer the windows, another older quartet in sensible clothing, the men in corduroys and plaid shirts, the women in tweed skirts and sweaters. ‘I still say, it's not good enough selling the base off. It's no less than putting a foreign army in our midst,' said one of the men, Julian Simms, to his friend, Harry Wainwright. Julian was an early-retired civil servant and Harry still employed at the Ministry of Health. Harry, with the responsible air of the still-employed, answered, ‘I'd say it was a lot less than that. It's a rational solution. It only acknowledges a fact, after all. And there's bound to be a cost benefit.'

‘Sell it off and the British government loses all control. They can fill the place with as many Yanks as they see fit – what's that but a foreign army based on British soil?' asked Julian.

At the second table Kevin Staithe, a young local estate agent, said to his girlfriend, Rosie Allen, ‘It's disgusting – Hamscott Common becomes American territory – what the bloody hell's all that about? What happens when one of their airmen rapes a local girl? We won't see him in court, you can bet on that.'

Art Newcombe said, ‘Cool it. Hamscott's been the Yanks' since the Second World War. Own schools, own shop and if a serviceman fucks up, they cover for him – look at what happened when that barn of Joe Bridges' went up in flames. No arrests, no trial and compensation paid. What difference will it make?'