Gavin Esler - Power Play

We began talking about the eccentric ways of those we were paid to serve.

‘I mean, Davis and Black,’ Johnny Lee went on, ‘two men, great on their own, who just can’t stand each other. You know what the Vice-President said to me the other day?

He said the British are even more of a pain in the ass than the French. You hear me? How does anyone handle that?’

I swallowed a few mouthfuls of beer and asked Johnny Lee whether he thought the Vice-President of the United States and the British Prime Minister–men who spend their whole adult lives seeking the highest levels of power and then obtain it–were truly different from the rest of us.

‘You bet,’ Johnny Lee said, pulling the beer bottle from his mouth. ‘Different as spare ribs from a spare tyre.’

‘But how come?’ I persisted. ‘Do they start different or do they become that way because of the job?’

‘The rich are different from you and me,’ Johnny Lee suggested, ‘because they have more money. Presidents and Prime Ministers are different from you and me, because they have more—’

‘Juice,’ I said. ‘They have more juice.’

‘Hang-ups,’ Johnny Lee contradicted, with a laugh. He made a sign with his finger at the side of his head to suggest mental illness. ‘More psychoses. Frickin’ nut jobs. All of them.’

‘Okay, nut jobs,’ I agreed. ‘But does power attract nut jobs, or does it create them?’

‘Hmmm, we’re getting in deep here, brother,’ Johnny Lee nodded vigorously, grabbing yet another beer. ‘For my money, they start off fucking weird. They might get weirder, sure. But they always start off fucking weird. You never really know them, you know?’

I disagreed. After years of watching government ministers close up, members of Parliament, prime ministers, Congressmen and presidents, I had concluded that normal people do want to serve their country, but they became peculiar when they achieved power.

‘I have never met an evil politician,’ I said, ‘but I have met plenty who are delusional. The chief delusion is that they need to stay in power otherwise the country will go to hell.’

Johnny Lee laughed.

‘In this town,’ he gestured with the beer-bottle neck towards the lights of Washington DC, ‘politics attracts freaks just like your light here attracts bugs. Normal folks have lives. Abnormal folks have political ambitions. Normal folks go to bars. Abnormal folks go to political meetings. My mama always told me politics is just show business for ugly people.’

‘Then your mama was as cynical as you are,’ I scolded him. ‘Plenty of decent people enter public service, but it twists them inside out. It’s like living in a fishbowl or a cocoon.’

Now it definitely was the beer talking. It was near midnight and I was getting drunk. I poured us two fingers of Jack Daniels over ice.

‘ Fishy-bowl? Co-coon? Ambassador Price, I do believe you are talking what we Washington Tribesmen call bullshit.’

‘No, no, hear me out,’ I protested, passing him the whisky. ‘Hear me out. A fishbowl because people in power have no privacy any more. None. Everything Vice-President Black or President Carr or Prime Minister Davis says or does, is written down, photographed, recorded, and dissected. They got blamed for the great food they ate at the IMF banquet, right? Because half the world is going hungry. But if Davis or Carr refused to eat the fancy food set in front of them, they’d get blamed for lousy gesture politics, a stunt that makes no difference to the poor. Politicians can’t win, Johnny Lee. The press asked President Reagan about a cancerous polyp in his colon, for God’s sake.’

Johnny Lee took a sip of the Jack Daniels. ‘United States media–finest in world,’ he responded, jabbing the whisky glass at me. ‘Our journalists have a goddamn constitutional right to peer up the president’s ass.’

A doctor or psychologist would say that Johnny Lee and I were engaged in ‘relief drinking’ as a way of dealing with stress. Like me, Johnny Lee was in theory married but in practice separated. The rumour was that his wife, Carly, had remained in Charleston to pursue her career as a lawyer, but mostly–or so I was told–to pursue her golf instructor, her tennis coach, her pool boy, and various other diversions. Johnny Lee and I never discussed this, or Fiona leaving me. Some things are best left unsaid.

When you are married to the younger sister of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, you cannot afford a scandal. When you are the Chief of Staff to the Vice-President of the United States, you cannot get a divorce until it is politically acceptable to get one. The two of us argued in good-humoured drunkenness until Johnny Lee got up to leave. I walked him to where his car and driver were waiting. He burped.

‘So what we gonna do, Alex? We can’t go on trying to keep your man and mine apart. And we can’t get them together without worrying about it coming to a fistfight. So what we going to do?’

Suddenly, standing unsteadily in the embassy driveway, I explained an idea I had been turning over in some dull recess of my brain. Johnny Lee listened and said it sounded like a ‘neat idea’. He burped again and told me we should sleep on it and talk in the morning. We said goodbye and I sat on the porch for another half-hour, having one more beer and one more whisky, thinking through the idea. Early the following day, when I still had a pounding head and a bad stomach, Johnny Lee Ironside called and said he had been thinking over my idea, and we should try to make it work. I had suggested–though it would take months to organize–that we should invite Vice-President Bobby Black to Scotland for a private visit, to shoot grouse in the Highlands with members of the British royal family. He could explore his roots, and along the way meet the Queen and key members of the British government, including the Prime Minister. He and Fraser Davis would be told that mutual self-interest meant they had to kiss and make up. Had to. Imperative. They would be instructed to joke about their rough words at Chequers and to insist that, despite the occasional differences, they were truly the best of friends.

‘Let’s do it,’ Johnny Lee said. And so we did.

Plans involving heads of state, kings, queens, presidents, vicepresidents and prime ministers are like plans involving oil tankers. They take a long time to execute. The idea of bringing Bobby Black over for a kiss-and-make-up trip to the Scottish Highlands took a while to ferment, and then required agreement from everyone you can think of: the Office of the Vice-President, the White House, the State Department, Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and Buckingham Palace.

The date was eventually set for the October of the Carr administration’s second year, two weeks before the mid-term elections when most of Congress is up for re-election. It seemed a long way in the future, but just the fact of the acceptance by Bobby Black helped improve relations between London and Washington. The Vice-President was interested. Enthusiastic. He asked Johnny Lee to get him books on grouse shooting. He knew that the birds fly at speeds of up to eighty miles an hour and he wanted to prepare himself as best he could. He commissioned family research from a genealogy company and instructed Johnny Lee that he needed to visit churches in the Aberdeenshire area to find graves of his ancestors. Perhaps most importantly, the plan to require British citizens of Pakistani origin to apply for special visas if they wanted to travel to the United States was quietly dropped.

‘At least for now,’ Johnny Lee Ironside told me. For me, ‘for now’ was good enough.

Susan Fein Black’s desire for the trip also helped. She quickly realized that the Queen was genuinely interested in horses and called me one evening to ask if Her Majesty would like to know about Mrs Black’s own rare-breeds programme for horses on her ranch in Montana. I said I would find out. It is one of the curiosities of the world that the more republican the country, the more fascinated the citizens are about the British royal family. After all their exertions to get rid of the monarchy, you might have thought Americans would be different, but they are not. Susan Black sounded unbelievably girlish on the phone.