Power Play

‘No problem, Mr Prime Minister.’

A chill ran through me. Of course, Fraser Davis should have held his tongue. He should have listened to Black and nodded without being so sarcastic and condescending. For his part, Bobby Black should not have been so foul mouthed and imperious. You can bring people together, but you cannot make them like each other. The Prime Minister headed towards his study muttering under his breath about that ‘awful bloody man’. Bobby Black strode briskly out of the room and across the grass to the helicopter, his lopsided grin firmly in place. On the way out, Johnny Lee shook my hand and whispered to me: ‘Well, Ambassador, looks like we got ourselves a problem.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘We’ll talk.’

‘Unless we lose,’ Johnny Lee responded. ‘In which case you’ll never have to deal with either of us again.’ He started to laugh. ‘Which I guess Prime Minister Davis must be praying for right now.’

I smiled awkwardly and nodded. You won’t win, I thought, as the helicopter took off. Ten points behind in the opinion polls with just a few weeks to go until polling day: without some kind of miracle you can’t possibly win.

TWO (#ulink_b2d87ec7-ef4b-5435-b74d-88493d5d2544)

It wasn’t a miracle, but it had the same transformative effect on the fortunes of Theo Carr and Bobby Black. The day after that catastrophic meeting at Chequers, I was woken early by Andy Carnwath, who called with the news that a bomb had exploded in an American airliner taking off from Manila Airport in the Philippines and bound for Los Angeles, killing everyone on board.

‘You’re going to be busy,’ Carnwath said. ‘Fraser wants you back in DC today.’

‘Why?’

‘The suicide bomber was British.’

I prepared to leave for the airport immediately. Fiona said she intended to stay in London for a few days longer.

‘But Fiona …’

She pushed a strand of strawberry-blonde hair behind her ear and gave me the kind of pout that reminded me of her brother. I felt her slipping away from me.

‘Don’t start this, Alex. Don’t do that “but you are my wife” stuff again. I have given up almost everything to follow you to Washington–almost everything–but I am entitled to hold on to something of my own life. I promised to meet Haley and Georgia for lunch, and that is what I am going to do.’

Haley and Georgia were Fiona’s business partners in an interior-design consultancy they had set up after leaving Oxford, which owed at least some of its success to the idea that people could employ a company connected to the Prime Minister to renovate their homes.

‘Fine,’ I said, accepting the inevitable. ‘That’s fine.’

I headed to the airport alone, calling Andy Carnwath on the way for a further briefing about the Manila attack. It was the day we woke up to the possibility that every one of our nightmares might become true. All through the presidential election campaign, Carr and Black had consistently argued that the United States government and the President in particular were complacent about the terrorist threat. There had been no significant incident in the United States since 11 September 2001, and to many of us Carr and Black sounded like a pair of wackos: shrill, scaremongering, out of touch.

‘Who was the bomber?’

‘Name of Rashid Ali Fuad,’ Carnwath said, ‘from Yorkshire. Leeds.’

‘Acting alone?’

‘Our people doubt it, but that’s all we have.’

‘Definitely British?’

‘Oh yeah. Definitely one of ours. Lucky us.’

As we drove into Heathrow, I could see, all around the perimeter, armoured troop carriers and fully armed soldiers. There were groups of police officers with Heckler & Koch sub-machine-guns at the terminal building, long lines at the check-in desks and serious flight delays as every piece of electronic equipment was checked. I skipped through the priority channel and into the first-class lounge where I sat in front of the BBC’s 24-hour news channel. It said that Rashid Ali Fuad had climbed on board an American Boeing 747 aircraft at Manila, sat in a window seat and detonated a bomb in his laptop computer. It punched a hole in the plane and caused a crash on take-off followed by a catastrophic explosion. The aviation fuel caught fire and the blaze incinerated everyone on board.

It was like being on the hinge of history. Everything after that moment was changed. The Manila atrocity confirmed to tens of millions of American voters that the world was just as dangerous a place as Governor Theo Carr and Senator Bobby Black had always insisted it was, and that the dangers came not just from countries with a long record of hating America, but also from people like Fuad who were citizens of the country most Americans thought of as a friend and ally, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was as if a switch went off in the heads of tens of millions of voters and, in that one instant, the out-of-touch scaremongerers, Governor Theo Carr and Senator Bobby Black, suddenly seemed prescient and timely. Bobby Black cancelled the rest of his European trip. He skipped Paris and Berlin and flew instead to the Philippines. He stood on the tarmac in front of the charred hulk of the jumbo jet promising, ‘No More Manilas.’ It became the slogan that won the election. He pointed at the wreckage and at the body bags laid out on the tarmac, ready to be loaded on to a US Air Force C-5 transport plane with the ashes and dust of the American dead. With tears misting his glasses, Bobby Black promised that, ‘America is grieving now, but there will come a time for vengeance, and that vengeance will be swift, brutal and just.’ He stared straight at the cameras.

‘There will be No More Manilas,’ he repeated. ‘I want everyone round the world to hear me. No More Manilas.’

‘No More Manilas’, they chanted in Boston and Houston and Fresno and Tallahassee and Atlanta and Baton Rouge in the closing days of the presidential campaign. ‘No More Manilas’ tee shirts, buttons and bumper stickers became bestsellers for street vendors from New York City to San Diego. The funerals of the dead from the Manila atrocity began just before election day, and America went to the polls in mourning: resolute, defiant, wounded–and determined to secure justice. I admired, as I always do, the resilience and good sense of the American people, but I looked at the tracking polls with a degree of concern. The opinion polls measured a profound switch to Carr and Black, enough to win the presidency of the United States against all the predictions of the supposed experts. Bobby Black was about to become Vice-President of the United States.

On Inauguration Day the following January, I watched from the diplomatic stand on Capitol Hill as President Carr and Vice-President Black were sworn in at a sombre ceremony in a country that felt itself definitively at war. The crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue and around the Capitol carried American flags and thousands upon thousands of banners repeating the same slogan time after time.

‘NO MORE MANILAS. NO MORE MANILAS.’

President Theo Carr said as much in his Inauguration speech. He promised that his administration had ‘no higher ideal, no greater purpose, than to ensure the life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness of every American citizen by freeing our people from the shadow of the gunman, bomber, and terrorist. We will, as John F. Kennedy said on his Inauguration at this very spot, bear any burden, pay any price, to secure our great nation from those who would destroy us. They will not succeed. They will never succeed. They shall not pass.’

I stood to applaud when President Carr finished. After Manila, the whole world stood to applaud. We were, yet again, absolutely shoulder to shoulder with the Americans in their time of trouble; until, of course, the Carr administration settled into power with all the confidence of sleepwalkers, and the issue of Rashid Ali Fuad’s British citizenship started to become part of the wedge between us, most especially in the mind of Vice-President Black. I could not believe how quickly relations deteriorated.

Just one day after the Inauguration, while the bleachers for the spectators watching the parade were still being dismantled all along Pennsylvania Avenue, the Washington Post published details of the argument between Prime Minister Fraser Davis and Vice-President Black at their Chequers meeting the day before the Manila bombing. The way the story was written made it look as if Fraser Davis and the British government were soft on terror, and that this weakness somehow contributed to the loss of all those innocent lives at the hands of what the paper kept calling ‘the British suicide bomber, Fuad.’ The reporter, James Byrne, claimed to have received a transcript of the Davis-Black row at Chequers from ‘reliable Carr administration sources.’ The report highlighted the section where Bobby Black said, ‘Fuck the United Nations.’

The Washington Post story caused uproar in Britain, across Europe and at the United Nations. Black and Carr’s popularity in the United States–which was very high in those first days–actually increased. Curiously, Fraser Davis’s popularity in Britain increased too. I suspected it was because, unlike Tony Blair, nobody reading the story could accuse Davis of being an American poodle. But how did Byrne get the story, based on secret transcripts of a private conversation more than three months earlier? I considered the options and then called the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff, Johnny Lee Ironside. I told him that it was very unhelpful to have this kind of leak.

‘Makes it sound like someone in the White House is anti-British.’

‘We didn’t leak it, Alex.’

‘But you benefited from it,’ I told him. ‘And it didn’t come from us. The Prime Minister is livid. Cui bono?’

‘C’mon, you guys did okay,’ Johnny Lee retorted. He was in good humour. There was not a problem between the two of us. ‘I read the British papers. Davis comes out of this just fine. Maybe you leaked it?’

‘Me? For goodness sake, Johnny Lee, I am not a leaker—’

‘Listen, Alex, lighten up. Who cares, all right? I mean, we both come out ahead. My man says fuck the UN, which plays to our home crowd. Your man says fuck the Americans, which plays to yours. So everybody wins.’

I didn’t think so. But I let it rest.

I could not escape the thought that maybe Johnny Lee had leaked the transcript himself. He clearly suspected the same about me because I knew the reporter James Byrne quite well. Welcome to the Washington House of Mirrors. What you see reflects only upon where you decide to look. After just one day of the Carr-Black administration, I was beginning to worry that the next four years were going to be difficult. In that judgement, at least, I was correct.

THREE (#ulink_ce64f255-ee81-556f-afc0-9b4191b9f7fb)

‘Fear’, Vice-President Bobby Black said to me, ‘works.’

It was now a week after the Inauguration and a week after the Washington Post had published the story about the row between Davis and Black. We were in the White House, and things were getting worse.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Fear … works,’ he repeated, separating the words in his whispering drawl.

The Vice-President of the United States shrugged and blinked behind his glasses, as if that were explanation enough. I had been invited to the White House–‘summoned’ might be a better word–for a bollocking. I had left early from the Ambassador’s living quarters at the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. I’d said goodbye to Fiona, kissed her and told her that I would be late–a long day at the White House followed by planned meetings with the new people in Congress, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Betty Furedi, plus two sessions on Capitol Hill, and then finally, around 6 p.m., a cocktail party to welcome the new Turkish Ambassador.

‘Dinner? Eight?’ I said as I kissed her. ‘That’s what we scheduled?’

‘Yes,’ she said, without enthusiasm. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ears. ‘See you for dinner at eight.’

We entertained most evenings. That night I had planned a small dinner for a visiting delegation of representatives of British airlines to bring them together with two key members of a Congressional committee that was proving difficult about landing rights at JFK and O’Hare Airport in Chicago. There was no direct relationship between the problems we were having and the Manila attack, but Rashid Ali Fuad’s British citizenship was mentioned repeatedly in the committee hearings, and constantly talked about on the US TV news networks.