Power Play

‘Well, it is different now,’ Fraser Davis responded, brushing aside the possibility of failure. ‘It’s not as if he is just some obscure senator. He is representing the American people. I promise you, Ambassador Price, that I will represent the interests of the British people, with every courtesy. Is that good enough for you?’

It was good enough. And so one day in late October it finally happened. Bobby Black’s White House motorcade swept into Lord Anstruther’s great house of Castle Dubh in the Scottish Highlands shortly before eight in the morning for the start of the grouse shoot. Castle Dubh is a massive Victorian pile with false battlements built over Jacobean foundations. From the faux-ramparts you can easily see twenty miles over the Scottish mountains, up into the hills and down to Loch Rowallan and Rowallan village, and even across to the royal estate at Balmoral. As the cars swept into the driveway, the leaves were turning autumnal reds and golds. The air was clear and cool, the skies that morning empty of cloud and full of the sounds of songbirds. The Americans arrived to the roar of a dozen police motorbikes, nine saloon cars, two stretched limousines, plus communications vehicles, and two identical four-by-fours scrunching up on Anstruther’s gravel drive, like a gigantic metal snake uncoiling in front of us.

‘You told me a small entourage,’ Anstruther whispered to me as we stood in front of the house and watched the cars arrive.

‘This is a small entourage,’ I replied. ‘You don’t want to see the full works, believe me.’

Anstruther blinked. I think it began to dawn on him what lay ahead. The Vice-President stepped out, not from one of the limousines as you might expect but, for security reasons, from one of the bulletproof four-by-fours. Anstruther greeted him warmly and invited Bobby Black and Johnny Lee inside for a quick breakfast, while the servants fussed around the Secret Service and other members of the vice-presidential party.

‘I can’t wait to get out on the mountains,’ Bobby Black said, clapping his pudgy hands together and looking genuinely happy.

‘Me too,’ Anstruther agreed with a nod of recognition. ‘Just a quick coffee then.’

The rest of us tried to look pleased. Diplomacy, like politics, requires acting ability. Blair knew it. Clinton knew it. So did Ronald Reagan, obviously. Reagan once said that politics was just like being on the stage–you have a helluva opening, you coast a little, and then you have a helluva close. You meet people you do not like, but you act in whatever way is necessary to win them over. You meet people who despise you, and you bear their hostility with fortitude.

On that day of Bobby Black’s hunting trip, we joked and laughed as we dressed in the shooting gear handed to us by Lord Anstruther: jaggy brown and green tweeds which abraded the skin and chafed the knees. We brought our own walking boots. We looked the part as we sipped coffee and watched the American communications teams set up in one of the large Castle Dubh outhouses, Bolfracks Bothy. Our mood was upbeat. We were doing the best for our countries and we were having fun doing it.

‘My daddy used to say that a man should avoid any enterprise that requires the purchase of new clothes,’ Johnny Lee quipped as he struggled to pull on his tweeds. ‘The old man had a point.’

‘You should pass it on to Arlo Luntz,’ I said. ‘Sounds like one of his pieces of wisdom.’

‘Arlo came out with a knockout phrase the other day,’ Johnny Lee smiled. ‘He said, “Sincerity in public life is the most important political virtue. Fake that, and you got it made.” Guy’s a freaking genius, you ask me.’

In a good mood of banter and fun we shouldered our day-hike rucksacks filled with food, water, and small metal flasks of whisky, then we strode out to the front of Castle Dubh and climbed into a fleet of freshly washed Land Rovers arranged by Anstruther. Secret Service and British police teams had spent the previous forty-eight hours checking the grounds, the neighbouring glens, and the mountainside as best they could. The presence of armed protection officers was to be kept to a discreet minimum and only on the perimeter of the shoot, for fear of scaring away the whole point of the trip, the grouse themselves. In our mood of jollity we behaved as if it were a Boys’ Own adventure, on which nothing could possibly go wrong. Anstruther had winked when he handed the whisky flask to me.

‘Salvation from Speyside,’ he said.

We parked the Land Rovers at the side of a muddy track and started hiking up the mountain as the sun split through a clear blue Highland sky. It was cold, with the edge of the moon visible over the hills, like a poster from the Scottish Tourist Board, and I was nervous. The Queen, the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, at least two other government ministers, staff from Number Ten, the Foreign Office, and the Office of the Vice-President were all being brought together over the next forty-eight hours in the Scottish wilderness, thanks to what Downing Street was calling Alex Price’s ‘great idea’. I wasn’t sure what would come of it, but I hoped for a footnote in the history books, if I was lucky, and a few headlines for my own Ego Wall. The Balmoral Understanding. The Aberdeenshire Entente. The Scottish Special Relationship. Something had come of it already.

In the thaw leading up to the trip, the Americans had announced that Muhammad Asif Khan, the British detainee we had all made so much of a fuss about, was to be released. The release of Khan was privately regarded as very useful by the British security service, MI5. They wanted him out of jail so they could watch him. They needed to know if he was indeed connected to what they were now convinced was a major conspiracy that included his cousins, a plot that was leading towards what Andy Carnwath told me was an imminent attack involving Heathrow Airport.

‘Imminent?’

‘Within the next month or so,’ he responded. ‘That’s what I’m told. That’s all I know.’

‘Not during Bobby Black’s visit?’

‘Not during the Vice-President’s fucking visit,’ Carnwath replied, exasperated, ‘as far as we know, Alex. Though I will obviously have to get bin Laden on the blower to ensure al-fucking-Qaeda cooperates so as not to interrupt your fucking plans.’

Carnwath repeated his instructions that on no account must I mention anything about the Heathrow plot or Khan’s family to any American, any member of the Carr administration, any US government official.

‘The Americans have no fucking patience when it comes to things like this,’ he said. ‘They will want to charge in and put their big boots all over everything. Our people say we need to give them time to get a result in court. The Prime Minister is putting everything on the line for this, Alex. You understand how important this is?’

I said that I did understand. If it went wrong, Fraser Davis’s political career would melt. Khan’s arrival in Britain was expected to include some kind of hero’s welcome from his handful of supporters. It was scheduled for the same day as the beginning of the Vice-President’s shooting trip.

‘Accidental timing,’ the Foreign Office said. ‘A coincidence.’

‘Coincidences,’ Johnny Lee whispered to me with a wink, ‘are God’s way of reminding folks he’s still around.’

Coincidental or otherwise, on the Scottish moors none of us thought very much about anything–except the grouse and whether Bobby Black was enjoying himself. Anstruther took the Vice-President with him to hunt on the right of the shooting party.

‘Best if we keep him on the far right,’ Anstruther whispered to me with a knowing wink. ‘If you see him or his gun heading leftwards, don’t forget to duck. I hear in the Carr administration that the right hand sometimes doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.’

‘Not so loud,’ I hissed, worried that all our good work might be undone with some feeble joke at Bobby Black’s expense. The Vice-President’s problems on shooting trips in the past had been well publicized. There had been a minor scandal in his first year in office when the Vice-President had mysteriously shot one of his hunting companions in the backside on a quail shoot in Texas.

The hunting companion had been Paul Comfort of Warburton, the long-time FOB, Friend of Bobby, who had to spend a painful night having buckshot removed from the cheeks of his bottom. Details were hard to come by, although Comfort appeared on TV and publicly blamed himself for stepping into Bobby Black’s line of fire. Kristina said to me at the time that it was a display of true loyalty.

‘Greater love hath no man’, she smiled, ‘than to lay down his ass for his friend.’

Princess Charlotte was also to be with Bobby Black on the right of the shooting party. I was pleased because she was a charmer, and Black warmed to her immediately. The Princess and Anstruther had a closeness that I never figured out, a closeness despite their marriages to other people and the fact that she was fifteen years his junior. There was gossip. Possibly it was an aristocratic affair that oiks and retainers like me would never be told about.

I looked around and thought how far I had come from my grandmother’s little three-bedroomed semi to this walk in the Highlands with the great and the good and the not-so-great and not-so-good. At least Bobby Black was on good form. He breathed the clean air and said how much he liked Scotland. It made him feel ‘at home.’ He smiled in his owlish way, and muttered about ‘ancestral roots’. When I saw him in his green and brown shooting gear I realized that I had never before seen him without a dark suit, white shirt, and sober tie, and I had never seen him happy either. For his age, mid-sixties, Black was fit, wiry, with a hint of a suntan on his face from the golf course and the quail hunts.

After an hour’s walk from where the Land Rovers dropped us off, we reached a high valley with a stream–a burn–flowing through the heather. Anstruther suggested that Prince Duncan and some of the others stay in the middle or move to the left. Prince Duncan had every sign of a hangover. We headed to the shooting butts at a place called Shap Fell. Everyone fell in line and deferred to Anstruther. I was told he could trace his ancestry back to Robert the Bruce and the de Brus family from Normandy sometime after 1066. In aristocratic circles this was regarded as more impressive than the Battenberg family of mere British monarchs who had been imported from Germany when the British royal line was in danger of dying out. Since I was unable to trace my own ancestry on my father’s side even by one generation, I suppose I should have been in awe of Anstruther, but I wasn’t. I liked him. He told me he had joined the Labour Party at university only because there were already ‘too many Anstruthers in the Conservative Party.’

When Fraser Davis was elected, Anstruther switched sides and was offered a job at the Ministry of Defence.

‘Ah,’ I told him, ‘we have something in common.’

‘Which is?’ Anstruther cocked his head sideways with curiosity.

‘We are both class traitors.’ He had the good grace to laugh.

Barbara Holmes, the Foreign Secretary, walked with us for the first couple of hours. She had a pair of worn hiking boots and an impressively battered Barbour jacket. She was a vegetarian, which meant she had to swallow some of her supposed principles for the pleasure of a hunting trip to meet Bobby Black and the Queen, though she seemed to manage the process of political indigestion with reasonable grace. Johnny Lee and I walked behind the main hunting party, alongside four of Bobby Black’s US Secret Service bodyguards and a couple of our own British protection people–the minimum possible. After their survey of the hills over the previous two days–mostly by helicopter–the security services said they were satisfied, as the Americans put it, that the probability of anything bad happening to the Vice-President ‘tended towards zero.’ It was a phrase of perfectly duplicitous precision.

* * *

Lord Anstruther and Vice-President Black hit it off immediately. Every time I looked to where they walked together or whispered in the shooting butts, they were deep in animated conversation, sometimes pointing out local landmarks and sometimes jabbing their fingers towards where they thought the grouse might be. Anstruther is a tall, handsome man, early forties, a contemporary of Fraser Davis’s at Eton. Davis and Anstruther both have Scottish ancestry, but they fit perfectly into the English upper classes. Anstruther, with a shock of black hair that flicks across his forehead, has a passing resemblance to the actor Hugh Grant, but instead of Grant’s blinky-stuttering foppishness, Anstruther has steel about him. He had served in a Guards regiment in Northern Ireland and the 1991 Gulf War, and was famous for being a member of the Dangerous Sports Club. Apparently it involves jumping off mountains, leaping down waterfalls, and sitting in underwater cages waiting for great white sharks to appear. As I watched him and Black in conversation it occurred to me that Anstruther might be in line for promotion. We could use him in the Foreign Office, in charge of the Americas. I’d put in a word with Downing Street.

He was telling Black that the grouse season began in Scotland on 12 August–the ‘Glorious Twelfth’–and lasted until December.

‘How Glorious is this Glorious Twelfth?’ Black wondered.

‘A bloody nonsense,’ Anstruther scoffed. ‘Marketing ploy. Not the best time to shoot.’

‘When is the best time?’

‘Right now,’ Lord Anstruther said, looking proudly over the endless expanse of purple heather that formed his estate. ‘When the birds are fat, sleek, and fast. These are the best days on the moors, Mr Vice-President. I’ve been shooting since I was a wee lad, and these are the best days …’

‘Bobby,’ Black said. ‘Please call me Bobby.’

‘Dickie,’ Anstruther replied, with a smile and a handshake, immediately reciprocated by Black. ‘You can never be sure when you will have a good day or a bad day with shooting, but …’