‘Sadly, kept from me by more pressing letters of state,’ Urquhart equivocated. Damn it, Drabble’s notes were so tedious, and if a Prime Minister couldn’t rely on professionals to sort out the details…
The great door swung open and Urquhart stepped into the light, blinked, smiled and raised a hand to greet the onlookers as though the street were filled with a cheering crowd rather than a minor pack of world-weary journalists huddled across the street. A group of fifteen pensioners drawn from different parts of the country were gathered round him, arranged by Drabble, who was giving an advanced simulation of a mother hen. The mechanics were always the same: Urquhart asked their names, listened with serious-smiling face, nodded sympathetically before passing on to the next. Soon they would be whisked off by one of Drabble’s staff and a junior Minister from an appropriate department to be plied with instant coffee and understanding in a suitably impressive Whitehall setting. A week later they would receive a photograph of themselves shaking hands with the Prime Minister and a typed note bearing what appeared to be his signature thanking them for taking the trouble to visit. Their local newspapers would be sent copies. Occasionally, the discussions raised points or individual cases which were of interest to the system; almost invariably the majority of those involved went back to their pubs and clubs to spread stories of goodwill. A minor skirmish in the great war to win the hearts and votes of the people, but a useful one. Usually.
On this occasion, Urquhart had all but completed the ritual of greeting, moving on to the last member of the group. A large package almost five foot in height was leaning against the railings behind him and, as Urquhart swung towards him, so the pensioner shuffled the package to the fore. It turned out to be a huge envelope, addressed simply: TO THE PRIME MINISTER.
‘Many happy returns, Mr Urquhart,’ the pensioner warbled.
Urquhart turned round to look for Drabble, but the press officer was across the street priming the cameramen. Urquhart was on his own.
‘Aren’t you going to open it then?’ another pensioner enquired.
To Urquhart’s mind the flap came away all too easily, the card slipped out in front of him.
WE ARE FOR YOU, FU was emblazoned in large red letters across the top. Across the bottom: 65 TODAY!
The group of pensioners applauded, while one who was no taller than the card itself opened it to reveal the message inside.
WELCOME TO THE PENSIONERS’ CLUB, it stated in gaudy handscript. OAP POWER! The whole thing was decorated with crossed walking sticks.
Urquhart’s eyes glazed like marble. Rarely had the photographers seen the Prime Minister’s smile so wide, yet so unmoving, as if a chisel had been taken to hack the feature across his face. The expression lingered as he was drawn across the street, more to lay his hands upon the wretched Drabble than to go through the ritual of bantering with the press.
A chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ mingled with shouts of ‘Any retirement announcement yet, Francis?’ and ‘Will you be drawing your pension?’ He nodded and shook his head in turn. The mood was jovial and Drabble enthusiastic; the fool had no idea what he’d done.
‘Are you too old for such a demanding job at sixty-five?’ one pinched-faced woman enquired, thrusting a tape recorder at him.
‘Churchill didn’t seem to think so. He was sixty-five when he started.’
‘The American President is only forty-three,’ another voice emerged from the scrum.
‘China’s is over ninety.’
‘So, no discussions about retirement yet?’
‘Not this week, my diary is simply too full.’
Their slings and arrows were resisted with apparent good humour; he even managed to produce a chuckle to indicate that he remained unpricked. Politics is perhaps the unkindest, least charitable form of ritualized abuse allowed within the law; the trick is to pretend it doesn’t hurt.
‘So, what do you think of today’s poll?’ It was Dicky Withers of the Daily Telegraph, an experienced hand known for concealing an acute instinct behind a deceptively friendly pint of draught Guinness.
‘The poll.’
‘Yes, the one we carried today.’
Drabble began an unscheduled jig, bouncing from foot to foot as though testing hot coals. He hadn’t included the poll in his digest, or the intemperate editorial in the Mirror entitled IT’S TIME TO GO. Christ, it was the man’s birthday, one day of the year to celebrate, to relax a little. And it wasn’t that Drabble was an inveterate yes-man, simply that he found it easier to accept the arguments in favour of circumspection, – all too frequently messengers who hurried to bring bad news from the battlefield were accused of desertion and shot.
‘Forty-three per cent of your own party supporters think you should retire before the next election,’ Withers elaborated.
‘Which means a substantial majority insisting that I stay on.’
‘And the most popular man to succeed you is Tom Makepeace. Would you like him to, when the time comes?’
‘My dear Dicky, when that time comes I’m sure that Tom will fight it out with many other hopefuls, including the bus driver.’
Makepeace = bus driver, Withers scribbled, noting the uncomplimentary equivalence. ‘So you intend to go on, and on, and on?’
‘You might say that,’ Urquhart began, ‘but I wish you wouldn’t. I’m enjoying a good innings and, though I’m not greedy for power, so long as I have my wits and my teeth and can be of service…’
‘What do you intend to do when eventually you retire, Mr Urquhart?’ Pinch Face was thrusting at him again.
‘Do?’ The creases of forced bonhomie turned to a rivulet of uncertainty. ‘Do? Do? Why, be anguished and morose like the rest of them, I suppose. Now, you’ll excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. I have a Cabinet meeting to attend.’
He turned and embarked upon what he hoped was a dignified retreat back across the street – like a lion regaining his den, Drabble decided, tail thrashing ominously. He declined to follow.
Urquhart brushed into his wife as she was emerging from the lift to their private apartment. ‘Everything went well?’ she enquired before she had noticed his eyes.
‘They say it’s time for a change, Mortima,’ he spat, grinding his teeth. ‘So I’m going to give ’em change. Starting with that bloody fool of a press secretary.’
‘Astonishing,’ Urquhart thought to himself as the Cabinet filed in around the great table, ‘how politicians come to resemble their constituencies.’
Annita Burke, for instance, an unplanned Jewish suburb full of entangling one-way systems. Richard Grieve, a seedy run-down sea front (which he had once plastered with election posters stating GRIEVE FOR RUSHPOOL and had somehow managed to live it down). Arthur Bollingbroke, a no-frills Northern workingmen’s club with a strong tang of Federation bitter. Colin Catchpole, the member for the City of Westminster, a ruddy face with the red-brick architectural style of the Cathedral, while other parts of his anatomy were rumoured to linger in the backstreets of Soho. Geoffrey Booza-Pitt – yes, Geoffrey, an invented showman for the invented showtown of New Spalden. Middle class and entirely manufactured, lacking in roots or history – at least any history Geoffrey wished to acknowledge. He had been born plain Master Pitt to an accountant father with a drinking problem; the schoolboy Geoff had invented an extended name and some mythical South African origin to explain away untidy gossip about his father which had been overheard by friends across a local coffee shop. And it had stuck, like so many other imaginative fictions about his origins and achievements. You could fool some of the people all of the time, and Geoffrey reckoned that was enough.
Then there was Tom Makepeace. With the flat humour of the East Anglian fens, the stubbornness of its clays and the moralizing