Gavin Esler - Power Play

I said, ‘Get your dick out of my wife.’

Byrne looked at me and stepped away from her. Fiona turned too. She stood up slowly and put her hands to her face in shock. She gasped something which I did not catch, clasped her breasts and ran towards the bathroom. I heard her slam the door, but all the time I was watching Byrne. I walked towards him and hit him once, hard, in the throat with my fist. He fell to the floor like a puppet whose strings have been cut, gasping for breath. I stood for a moment and thought about killing him, but the moment passed. Instead I turned him over with my foot and looked at him gagging on the floor, then I walked out of the room. I had to step over the flowers, which were scattered all over the floor. Despite the ice storm, Fiona left for London that very same day, on the overnight flight from Dulles to Heathrow. Tulips. The flowers were definitely tulips.

Some people are in the fund-raising business. I am in the friend-raising business. When you are a British diplomat in the United States, you look around and decide who the future leaders and opinion-formers might be, and in the words of Prime Minister Davis’s Communications Director, Andy Carnwath, ‘You get up their arse, Alex, and you stay there.’ Diplomacy is political proctology. Up the arse and stay there.

I am regarded as being good at it. A few years back, just before Fiona and I were married, I was Number Three at the Washington embassy. I sensed that Governor Theo Carr was preparing a run for the presidency as soon as I heard he had hired Arlo Luntz as his Chief Political Adviser. Luntz is a world-class operative. Like Bobby Black, I don’t much like him, but I do respect him. All three of us–Black, Luntz and me–have one thing in common: we came from nowhere, we were born to nothing, and we try to do the best we can. I respect that. Anyway, at the time I persuaded the then British Ambassador in Washington that I should go down and meet this Theo Carr before he hit the big time. Luntz called me back straight away.

‘Sure,’ he said, sensing an opportunity of his own. ‘Governor Carr always makes time for our British friends.’

I hurriedly made arrangements. Luntz greeted me at the Governor’s Mansion. He is unimpressive to look at, a badly dressed, shambling figure with scuffed shoes and an appalling jet-black wig, but what lies beneath the bad wig has made him one of the most sought-after political consultants anywhere in the United States. Luntz walked down the central staircase in the mansion towards me wearing a stained blue suit, which fitted him the way a horsebox fits a horse. We shook hands and I followed him upstairs to meet Governor Theo Carr. We sat on the porch at the back of the mansion, the three of us, drinking iced tea and chewing over world affairs.

‘To what do we owe this honour, Mr Price?’

‘Please call me Alex, Governor. I was just passing through on my way west and I thought it would be good to say hello.’

I offered to host a visit to London, guaranteeing that Governor Carr could speak to Members of Parliament, my future brother-in-law (who was then the Leader of the Opposition,) government ministers, and maybe even the then Prime Minister, Fraser Davis’s predecessor.

Carr and Luntz nodded that it would be a good idea. Of course it was a good idea. A convenient friendship was born.

‘Passing through our state capital? No way,’ Theo Carr told me as I prepared to leave. He had that famous twinkling in his eyes and a cheeky grin. ‘Delighted as we are to see you, Mr Price, no one just passes through here.’

Theo Carr was Governor of a state of ‘flyover people’–the people you fly over on the way between the east and west coasts.

‘Busted,’ I admitted, holding my hands up in mock surrender. ‘I made a point of coming to see you, Governor Carr. You are worth a deliberate detour, as they say in the tourist guidebooks.’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, like a National Park. And why might the–what’s that title again?–Minister Counsellor at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Washington be sufficiently interested in Governor Theo Carr to make a detour?’

‘Talent spotting,’ I laughed along with him. ‘I think you might be President of the United States one day …’

‘You–and Arlo here–and my momma, God bless her,’ he interrupted with more twinkling and more of a grin. ‘Makes three of you. Just a couple of hundred million American voters to go.’

‘… and I thought we should do what dogs do in the street, and sniff noses.’

Theo Carr laughed uproariously. So did Luntz.

‘Let’s just leave it at noses,’ he guffawed, and slapped me on the shoulder. It was a Gateway Moment. Fast-forward a few years, and now here I am promoted to Ambassador and he is what the US Secret Service calls POTUS, President of the United States, and Arlo Luntz is the most highly regarded and devious political consultant on the planet. It was worth the deliberate detour.

‘We didn’t do so badly, Alex,’ Theo Carr told me at the White House reception for the Inauguration, ‘for a coupla country boys.’

In those first months of his presidency–and despite all the trouble I was having with Vice-President Black–President Carr, building on that early familiarity, always called me by my first name.

At diplomatic functions or G8 Summits he would point at me in that friendly way of his, and call out, ‘Yo, Brit Guy, how’s the nose-sniffin’ comin’ along?’

None of this bonhomie made any impression on the Vice-President. Month after month it seemed to me that Black had a moat around him, like an old-fashioned castle.

‘The drawbridge is up, the portcullis down, defences primed to repel invaders, Alex,’ Johnny Lee Ironside once told me. Johnny Lee has many talents, of course, including a fine turn of phrase. He’s loyal. Discreet. Clever. And unlike those who talk behind the Vice-President’s back, Johnny Lee genuinely admired and respected Black, yet even he sometimes called his boss by the Churchillian phrase once applied to Soviet Russia–a riddle inside an enigma, wrapped in a mystery. What makes Johnny Lee special is that he is part of a dying breed within American politics, a gut-instinct Anglophile who does not just think relations between Britain and America are the most important rock for the United States, he breathes and eats it. Once when we were talking about the aloof nature of his boss, Johnny Lee confided that he had been reading the works of Evelyn Waugh and they provided a clue.

‘The Vice-President is an Englishman,’ Johnny Lee informed me, bizarrely.

I did not understand. ‘The Vice-President is from Montana,’ I blurted out. ‘Couldn’t be further from English in every way.’ The centre of gravity in American politics had shifted from East Coast anglophiles like Johnny Lee to people like Theo Carr, Bobby Black, and Kristina Taft. They were all from the West or Midwest. Johnny Lee shook his head.

‘Your Mr Waugh says that an English gentleman understands two social states–Intimacy and Formality. Intimacy is for family, lovers, and close friends. Formality is for everybody else.’ Johnny Lee smiled. He delights in being more learned about English culture than those of us who happen to be British. ‘Whereas we colonial-American types are capable of three social attitudes–Intimacy, Formality–but also Familiarity.’

I congratulated him. It was a great insight into Bobby Black’s character. Unlike many Americans, he could not do Familiarity. Theo Carr is the administration’s backslapping baby kisser. Bobby Black isn’t.

‘So how do you explain it?’ I wondered.

‘British genes,’ Johnny Lee said. ‘The Black family is from Scotland, ‘parently.’