Gavin Esler - Power Play

‘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 from Speyside,’ he said.

We parked the Land Rovers at the side of a muddy track and started hiking up the mountain as the sun split through a clear blue Highland sky. It was cold, with the edge of the moon visible over the hills, like a poster from the Scottish Tourist Board, and I was nervous. The Queen, the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, at least two other government ministers, staff from Number Ten, the Foreign Office, and the Office of the Vice-President were all being brought together over the next forty-eight hours in the Scottish wilderness, thanks to what Downing Street was calling Alex Price’s ‘great idea’. I wasn’t sure what would come of it, but I hoped for a footnote in the history books, if I was lucky, and a few headlines for my own Ego Wall. The Balmoral Understanding. The Aberdeenshire Entente. The Scottish Special Relationship. Something had come of it already.

In the thaw leading up to the trip, the Americans had announced that Muhammad Asif Khan, the British detainee we had all made so much of a fuss about, was to be released. The release of Khan was privately regarded as very useful by the British security service, MI5. They wanted him out of jail so they could watch him. They needed to know if he was indeed connected to what they were now convinced was a major conspiracy that included his cousins, a plot that was leading towards what Andy Carnwath told me was an imminent attack involving Heathrow Airport.

‘Imminent?’

‘Within the next month or so,’ he responded. ‘That’s what I’m told. That’s all I know.’

‘Not during Bobby Black’s visit?’

‘Not during the Vice-President’s fucking visit,’ Carnwath replied, exasperated, ‘as far as we know, Alex. Though I will obviously have to get bin Laden on the blower to ensure al-fucking-Qaeda cooperates so as not to interrupt your fucking plans.’

Carnwath repeated his instructions that on no account must I mention anything about the Heathrow plot or Khan’s family to any American, any member of the Carr administration, any US government official.

‘The Americans have no fucking patience when it comes to things like this,’ he said. ‘They will want to charge in and put their big boots all over everything. Our people say we need to give them time to get a result in court. The Prime Minister is putting everything on the line for this, Alex. You understand how important this is?’

I said that I did understand. If it went wrong, Fraser Davis’s political career would melt. Khan’s arrival in Britain was expected to include some kind of hero’s welcome from his handful of supporters. It was scheduled for the same day as the beginning of the Vice-President’s shooting trip.

‘Accidental timing,’ the Foreign Office said. ‘A coincidence.’

‘Coincidences,’ Johnny Lee whispered to me with a wink, ‘are God’s way of reminding folks he’s still around.’

Coincidental or otherwise, on the Scottish moors none of us thought very much about anything–except the grouse and whether Bobby Black was enjoying himself. Anstruther took the Vice-President with him to hunt on the right of the shooting party.

‘Best if we keep him on the far right,’ Anstruther whispered to me with a knowing wink. ‘If you see him or his gun heading leftwards, don’t forget to duck. I hear in the Carr administration that the right hand sometimes doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.’

‘Not so loud,’ I hissed, worried that all our good work might be undone with some feeble joke at Bobby Black’s expense. The Vice-President’s problems on shooting trips in the past had been well publicized. There had been a minor scandal in his first year in office when the Vice-President had mysteriously shot one of his hunting companions in the backside on a quail shoot in Texas.

The hunting companion had been Paul Comfort of Warburton, the long-time FOB, Friend of Bobby, who had to spend a painful night having buckshot removed from the cheeks of his bottom. Details were hard to come by, although Comfort appeared on TV and publicly blamed himself for stepping into Bobby Black’s line of fire. Kristina said to me at the time that it was a display of true loyalty.

‘Greater love hath no man’, she smiled, ‘than to lay down his ass for his friend.’

Princess Charlotte was also to be with Bobby Black on the right of the shooting party. I was pleased because she was a charmer, and Black warmed to her immediately. The Princess and Anstruther had a closeness that I never figured out, a closeness despite their marriages to other people and the fact that she was fifteen years his junior. There was gossip. Possibly it was an aristocratic affair that oiks and retainers like me would never be told about.