Paul Torday: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

‘Thank God, it’s not too late,’ he said. ‘There I was thinking that the real spin-off for the project was all those guys out there who don’t agree with our various military interventions. You’ve seen the placards on demonstrations: ‘Troops out of Iraq ’, ‘Troops out of Saudi Arabia ’, ‘Troops out of Kazakhstan ’. I mean, it’s becoming like a bad geography lesson. The original idea was we were going to provide a distraction to all these protest groups by doing something a bit different in the Yemen -fish, not guns. You understood that, didn’t you, Fred?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I got the general idea. I’m afraid I’ve been concentrating on the technical side of the project and haven’t given enough thought to the other aspects, but yes, I think I had grasped the basis of your interest. Is that no longer the case?’

‘Oh, it is still the case. Very much the case. We still want the media coverage and the ‘fish, not war’ story. We still want to go ahead with the PM’s visit, and we still want the goodwill we think we will bank from that. But there’s so much more. Don’t you see?’

‘I’m still not sure I do,’ I said, feeling stupid and slow.

Maxwell stood up again and began pacing up and down the carpet in front of three vast, silent, flickering TV screens. ‘Well, here’s the maths,’ he said. ‘We think there might still be a hard core of half a million people out there who are troubled by our various Middle Eastern wars, especially the ones in Iraq. Half of them are probably our natural voters but now they might not vote for us at the next election. So, when we launch the project, we win some of them back. Maybe half of them, so that’s-are you following me-just over one hundred thousand votes which could swing our way. Plus a lot of advantages if we could get the media off our case for a few days.

‘Now, let’s look at the angling community. There are four million of them, and we don’t have the research that tells us how they vote. It’s not in our database. Isn’t that incredible! We analyse our voters by socio-economic class, by geography, by whether they own their own home or not, by whether they had a university education or not, by age, by income group, by whether they drink wine or beer, by what their skin colour and sexual preference is, and by what their religion is. They’re so analysed it isn’t true. But we don’t know whether they fish or not. The biggest popular sport in the country, and we don’t know how many of them are, or could be, our voters.’

I was beginning to see the point.

‘But I tell you this, Fred,’ said Maxwell, stopping in mid-pace, wheeling round and pointing a finger at me, ‘by the time I’m finished we’ll know everything we need to know about them. They’ll be the best-analysed voter group of the lot. And I’ll tell you the other thing about them: they will see and read stories, starting with this project, of just what a keen angler the PM is. He said so last year in the House. We’ll build on that statement. We’ll repeat it in all the papers and on TV. And then we’ll show the people that we are the government for anglers. There’ll be more money for fisheries. There’ll be angling academies. There’ll be a fishing rod for every child over the age of ten. I haven’t worked it all out yet, Fred, but by God if less than three million of those anglers don’t vote for us at the next election, then I will have lost my touch.’

I nodded my head and said, ‘Well, we will do the best we can with our part of it.’

Peter Maxwell sat down behind his desk again. ‘I know you will, Fred; I have great faith that you will deliver on the project. But, just one thing’-here the finger pointed at me again-‘the boss has got to catch a fish. And our schedule still says he has only twenty minutes to do it in. But it is crucial that we have that photo opportunity. Fred, you, and you alone, have to guarantee he gets that salmon. Can you do it?’

I had been preparing for this question and I knew the answer. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can make the sure the prime minister has a fish on the end of his line by the time he has to leave.’

Peter Maxwell looked relieved, and impressed. I think he was expecting to have to fight a battle with me over this.

‘How will you do it?’ he asked curiously. ‘I’m told it’s not that easy to catch these things.’

‘You don’t want to know,’ I told him.

The rest of the conversation was all about the prime minister’s schedule, his private meetings in Sana’a and the press arrangements, and I didn’t repeat any of it to Harriet and the sheikh because they had helped arrange all that part of it anyway.

Interrogator:

This has nothing to do with anything except my personal curiosity, but how would you get a fish on the end of someone’s line?

Alfred Jones:

That’s exactly what Harriet asked me at dinner that night: ‘How on earth can you guarantee that the prime minister catches a fish?’

I smiled. The sheikh leaned forward, his face full of interest.

‘When I was a boy my father played a trick on me once. He put a fly several sizes too large on the end of my line. He knew that the fly would sink too fast into the water and that I was bound to snag the fly on a stone. And he knew that, because I was so inexperienced, I would think the stone I had caught was a fish. It takes a while before you know the difference.’

‘It is true,’ said the sheikh. ‘I made the same mistake myself once or twice, when I started fishing.’

‘So then he went out with the net and pretended he was having difficulty landing the fish. But actually what he did was stand with his back to me, get a salmon he’d caught earlier out of the poaching pocket in his jacket, take it out of the newspaper he had wrapped it in, pull my fly from under the stone where it was caught, hook it into the salmon’s mouth, and jerk the line and splash about to give the impression there was a bit of a fight and there was the fish in the net.’

The sheikh and Harriet laughed.

‘But did he tell you?’ asked Harriet.

‘Oh yes, he told me. I’d caught a couple of fish by then and the point of the joke was to teach me the difference between the pull of a fish on the line, and the pull of the weight of water on the line, when the fly is simply stuck on a rock or in a bit of weed.’

‘Your prime minister must never know,’ said the sheikh seriously. ‘I do not want to give offence or distress to a guest, no matter what happens.’

‘He won’t know,’ I promised him.

Dinner was over, and the sheikh said he would sit in the foyer to wait for his car. Harriet and I agreed we would like a walk before finding taxis to take us to our homes. It was a beautiful evening, and the sky was still light. We walked slowly along Piccadilly together.

‘What a good evening,’ said Harriet. ‘I do love the sheikh. I will miss him.’

‘Won’t you see him next time he comes to Glen Tulloch?’

‘He won’t be coming back for a long while. He wants to stay and attend to the future success of the salmon project, and he knows the launch is just the beginning and there will be many, many problems and crises to deal with after that. And you, I hope, will go there and help whenever he needs it.’

‘Of course I will,’ I agreed, ‘but won’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Harriet. ‘Maybe it’s time for me to move on. I’ve put a lot of myself into the project, and really there isn’t that much more for me to do. And Robert’s death, as you know better than most people, has been a very heavy blow. I just need to take stock. I need a break.’

‘Of course you need a break, Harriet,’ I told her. ‘No one deserves it more than you.’ We had stopped by the railings that ran alongside Green Park, absorbed in our conversation. The evening traffic was still busy. The park gates were still open, so we stepped inside for a moment to get away from the noise of traffic.