The Final Cut. Michael Dobbs

      ‘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 tendencies of its Puritan past. He was an Old Etonian with a social conscience which Urquhart ascribed to an overdeveloped sense of guilt, unearned privilege in search of unidentified purpose. The man had undoubted talent but was not from Urquhart’s mould, which is the reason he had been despatched to the Foreign Office where his stubbornness and flat humour could bore for Britain and help fight the cause in the tedious councils of Brussels, and where his moralizing could do little harm.

      Urquhart’s Cabinet. ‘And few of you seem to be keeping your eye on the ball, if I may be frank.’ The mood was all flint; Drabble had gone missing, the ghost of his folly not yet exorcized.

      ‘We must finish in ten minutes, I have to be at the Palace for the arrival of the Sultan of Oman.’ He looked slowly around the long table. ‘I trust it will be rather more of a success than the start of the last state visit.’

      His gaze set upon Annita Burke, Secretary of State for the Environment. She was both Jew and female, which meant that the doors of power started off double-locked for her. She had stormed the drawbridge by sheer exuberance but now she sat rigid, head lowered. Something on her blotter appeared to have become of sudden importance, monopolizing her attention.

      ‘Yes, it was a great pity, Environment Secretary. Was it not?’

      Burke, the Cabinet’s sole female, raised her head defiantly but struggled for words. Had it been her fault? For months she had planned a great campaign to promote the virtues and dispel the tawdry myths surrounding the nation’s capital; from their corners and quiet