Gavin Esler - Power Play

I looked around and thought how far I had come from my grandmother’s little three-bedroomed semi to this walk in the Highlands with the great and the good and the not-so-great and not-so-good. At least Bobby Black was on good form. He breathed the clean air and said how much he liked Scotland. It made him feel ‘at home.’ He smiled in his owlish way, and muttered about ‘ancestral roots’. When I saw him in his green and brown shooting gear I realized that I had never before seen him without a dark suit, white shirt, and sober tie, and I had never seen him happy either. For his age, mid-sixties, Black was fit, wiry, with a hint of a suntan on his face from the golf course and the quail hunts.

After an hour’s walk from where the Land Rovers dropped us off, we reached a high valley with a stream–a burn–flowing through the heather. Anstruther suggested that Prince Duncan and some of the others stay in the middle or move to the left. Prince Duncan had every sign of a hangover. We headed to the shooting butts at a place called Shap Fell. Everyone fell in line and deferred to Anstruther. I was told he could trace his ancestry back to Robert the Bruce and the de Brus family from Normandy sometime after 1066. In aristocratic circles this was regarded as more impressive than the Battenberg family of mere British monarchs who had been imported from Germany when the British royal line was in danger of dying out. Since I was unable to trace my own ancestry on my father’s side even by one generation, I suppose I should have been in awe of Anstruther, but I wasn’t. I liked him. He told me he had joined the Labour Party at university only because there were already ‘too many Anstruthers in the Conservative Party.’

When Fraser Davis was elected, Anstruther switched sides and was offered a job at the Ministry of Defence.

‘Ah,’ I told him, ‘we have something in common.’

‘Which is?’ Anstruther cocked his head sideways with curiosity.

‘We are both class traitors.’ He had the good grace to laugh.

Barbara Holmes, the Foreign Secretary, walked with us for the first couple of hours. She had a pair of worn hiking boots and an impressively battered Barbour jacket. She was a vegetarian, which meant she had to swallow some of her supposed principles for the pleasure of a hunting trip to meet Bobby Black and the Queen, though she seemed to manage the process of political indigestion with reasonable grace. Johnny Lee and I walked behind the main hunting party, alongside four of Bobby Black’s US Secret Service bodyguards and a couple of our own British protection people–the minimum possible. After their survey of the hills over the previous two days–mostly by helicopter–the security services said they were satisfied, as the Americans put it, that the probability of anything bad happening to the Vice-President ‘tended towards zero.’ It was a phrase of perfectly duplicitous precision.

* * *

Lord Anstruther and Vice-President Black hit it off immediately. Every time I looked to where they walked together or whispered in the shooting butts, they were deep in animated conversation, sometimes pointing out local landmarks and sometimes jabbing their fingers towards where they thought the grouse might be. Anstruther is a tall, handsome man, early forties, a contemporary of Fraser Davis’s at Eton. Davis and Anstruther both have Scottish ancestry, but they fit perfectly into the English upper classes. Anstruther, with a shock of black hair that flicks across his forehead, has a passing resemblance to the actor Hugh Grant, but instead of Grant’s blinky-stuttering foppishness, Anstruther has steel about him. He had served in a Guards regiment in Northern Ireland and the 1991 Gulf War, and was famous for being a member of the Dangerous Sports Club. Apparently it involves jumping off mountains, leaping down waterfalls, and sitting in underwater cages waiting for great white sharks to appear. As I watched him and Black in conversation it occurred to me that Anstruther might be in line for promotion. We could use him in the Foreign Office, in charge of the Americas. I’d put in a word with Downing Street.

He was telling Black that the grouse season began in Scotland on 12 August–the ‘Glorious Twelfth’–and lasted until December.

‘How Glorious is this Glorious Twelfth?’ Black wondered.

‘A bloody nonsense,’ Anstruther scoffed. ‘Marketing ploy. Not the best time to shoot.’

‘When is the best time?’

‘Right now,’ Lord Anstruther said, looking proudly over the endless expanse of purple heather that formed his estate. ‘When the birds are fat, sleek, and fast. These are the best days on the moors, Mr Vice-President. I’ve been shooting since I was a wee lad, and these are the best days …’

‘Bobby,’ Black said. ‘Please call me Bobby.’

‘Dickie,’ Anstruther replied, with a smile and a handshake, immediately reciprocated by Black. ‘You can never be sure when you will have a good day or a bad day with shooting, but …’

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