Power Play. Gavin Esler
people made bad decisions.
‘Is that jazz?’ Kristina said.
I turned it down.
‘Charlie Parker.’
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Just perfect.’
Kristina was on her way home. President Carr and the First Lady, Rosa Carr, had invited her to the private White House movie theatre to watch a film with the Carr family, Bobby Black and his wife Susan, Arlo Luntz, and a couple of Democratic senators that Theo Carr had decided he should get to know better. The senators were on the Armed Services Committee, and Carr was still after more money for the Pentagon budget. It was a huge mark of confidence in Kristina to be invited to share private time with the President, and she was bubbling with enthusiasm. I wasn’t really listening. I had something I had been meaning to say, and that night I said it.
‘Instead of going home, Kristina, why not come here right now. Spend the night with me.’
She giggled. Then the line went quiet.
‘You mean it, Alex?’
‘Yes, I mean it,’ I said. ‘I have meant it for months.’
The visit of Bobby Black to Scotland took so long to organize I sometimes thought it would never happen. But it did happen, almost exactly two years after he and Prime Minister Davis had their first row at Chequers and just two weeks before the US mid-term elections which, yet again, all the experts, polls, and pundits claimed were going to offer a very sharp rebuke to the Carr administration. In preparation for the shooting trip, Vice-President Black insisted that the visit be kept as private as possible, and that his entourage be as small as possible. I spent hours on the telephone with Andy Carnwath in Downing Street and Sir Hamish Martin at Buckingham Palace fixing exactly who would meet Bobby Black at which point, who would shoot grouse, when he would meet Her Majesty the Queen, when Susan Black would go off to see the horses, and when Fraser Davis would turn up. I also talked repeatedly with Lord Anstruther, who was a Junior Defence Minister in Fraser Davis’s government and whose estate was right next to the royal estate at Balmoral.
Anstruther had agreed to host the visit, though if he had realized exactly what he was in for, he would have told me to get lost. I tried to explain that when the President or Vice-President of the United States moves anywhere, it is rather like a medieval pope moving around Christendom–up to a thousand staff, journalists, hangers-on, advisers of all kinds–but, until Anstruther experienced it, I don’t think he quite understood how big a ‘small entourage’ really was going to be. In the week before the visit I had called the Prime Minister to warn him, yet again, that it must not fail.
‘We cannot afford a repeat of the row at Chequers,’ I said. ‘You and Bobby Black are fated to like one another, whether you want to or not.’
Fraser Davis was very positive. He asked me to go over the arguments he should use with Bobby Black to deflect him from a confrontation with Iran without causing a row, and the kinds of things he should say if the question of special visas for British citizens of Pakistani origin were to be raised.
‘We say it is unfair, unworkable, discriminatory and the twenty-first century equivalent of the Jim Crow laws,’ I said. Then I reminded the PM that the policy details were not significant. What was significant was the tone. The policy would come right as long as he was nice. Very nice.
‘But I’m always nice, Alex,’ Fraser Davis replied, sounding rather hurt. I could imagine his wet, pouty lip. ‘As you well know.’
‘It has taken us months to bring this off.’ I refused to be deflected. ‘We mustn’t blow it. You mustn’t blow it.’
‘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