John Carré - A Delicate Truth

Thus the duo continues. In Madrid, Toby – like it or not, and mainly he likes it – becomes a leading player in the intelligence marketplace, commuting weekly to London, where Oakley flits in the middle air between the Queen’s spies on one side of the river and the Queen’s Foreign Office on the other.

In coded discussions in Whitehall’s sealed basement rooms, new rules of engagement with suspected terrorist prisoners are cautiously thrashed out. Improbably, given Toby’s rank, he attends. Oakley presides. The word enhance , once used to convey spiritual exaltation, has entered the new American dictionary, but its meaning remains wilfully imprecise to the uninitiated, of whom Toby is one. All the same, he has his suspicions. Can these so-called new rules in reality be the old barbaric ones, dusted off and reinstated, he wonders? And if he is right, which increasingly he believes he is, what is the moral distinction, if any, between the man who applies the electrodes and the man who sits behind a desk and pretends he doesn’t know it’s happening, although he knows very well?

But when Toby, nobly struggling to reconcile these questions with his conscience and upbringing, ventures to air them – purely academically, you understand – to Giles over a cosy dinner at Oakley’s club to celebrate Toby’s thrilling new appointment on promotion to the British Embassy in Cairo, Oakley, from whom no secrets are hidden, responds with one of his doting smiles and hides himself behind his beloved La Rochefoucauld:

‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, dear man. In an imperfect world, I fear it’s the best we can manage.’

And Toby smiles back appreciatively at Oakley’s wit, and tells himself sternly yet again that he must learn to live with compromise – dear man being by now a permanent addition to Oakley’s vocabulary, and further evidence, were it needed, of his singular affection for his protégé.

Cairo.

Toby Bell is the British Embassy’s blue-eyed boy – ask anyone from the ambassador down! A six-month immersion course in Arabic and, blow me, the lad’s already halfway to speaking it! Hits it off with Egyptian generals and never once gives vent to his callow personal opinions – a phrase that has lodged itself permanently in his consciousness. Goes diligently about the business in which he has almost accidentally acquired expertise; barters intelligence with his Egyptian opposite numbers; and under instruction feeds them names of Egyptian Islamists in London who are plotting against the regime.

At weekends, he enjoys jolly camel rides with debonair military officers and secret policemen and lavish parties with the super-rich in their guarded desert condominiums. And at dawn, after flirting with their glamorous daughters, drives home with car windows closed to keep out the stench of burning plastic and rotting food as the ragged ghosts of children and their shrouded mothers forage for scraps in filthy acres of unsorted rubbish at the city’s edge.

And who is the guiding light in London who presides over this pragmatic trade in human destinies, sends cosy personal letters of appreciation to the reigning head of Mubarak’s secret police? – none other than Giles Oakley, Foreign Office intelligence broker extraordinaire and mandarin at large.

So it’s no surprise to anyone, except perhaps young Bell himself, that even while popular unrest throughout Egypt over Hosni Mubarak’s persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood is showing signs of erupting into violence four months ahead of the municipal elections, Toby should find himself whisked back to London and yet again promoted ahead of his years, to the post of Private Secretary, minder and confidential counsellor to the newly appointed Junior Minister of State to the Foreign Office, Fergus Quinn, MP, latterly of the Ministry of Defence.

‘From where I sit, you two are an ideal match,’ says Diana, his new Director of Regional Services, as she hacks away manfully at her open tuna sandwich over a dry self-service lunch at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. She is small, pretty and Anglo-Indian and talks in the heroic anachronisms of the Punjabi officers’ mess. Her shy smile, however, belies an iron purpose. Somewhere she has a husband and two children, but makes no mention of them in office hours.

‘You’re both young for your jobs – all right, he’s got ten years on you – but both ambitious as all get-out,’ she declares, unaware that the description applies equally to herself. ‘And don’t be fooled by appearances. He’s a thug, he beats the working-class drum, but he’s also ex-Catholic, ex-communist and New Labour – or what’s left of it now that its champion has moved on to richer pastures.’

Pause for a judicious munch.

‘Fergus hates ideology and thinks he’s invented pragmatism. And of course he hates the Tories, although half the time he’s to the right of them. He’s got a serious supporters’ club in Downing Street, and I don’t mean just the big beasts but the courtiers and spinmeisters. Fergus is their boy and they’re putting their shirts on him for as long as he runs. Pro-Atlantic to a fault, but if Washington thinks he’s the cat’s pyjamas, who are we to complain? Eurosceptic, that goes without saying. Doesn’t like us flunkies, but what politician does? And watch out for him when he bangs on about the G-WOT ’ – the prevailing in-word for the Global War on Terror. ‘It’s out of style and I don’t need to tell you of all people that decent Arabs are getting awfully pissed off with it. He’s been told that already. Your job will be the usual. Stick to him like glue and don’t let him make any more puddles.’

‘ More puddles, Diana?’ Toby asks, already troubled by some fairly loud rumours doing the rounds of the Whitehall gossip mill.

‘Ignore totally,’ she commands sternly, after another pause for accelerated mastication. ‘Judge a politician by what he did or didn’t do at Defence, you’d be stringing up half tomorrow’s Cabinet.’ And finding Toby’s eyes still on her: ‘Man made a horse’s arse of himself and got his wrist smacked. Case totally closed.’ And as a final afterthought: ‘The only surprising thing is that for once in its life Defence managed to hush up a force-twelve scandal.’

And with that, the loud rumours are officially declared dead and buried – until, in a concluding speech over coffee, Diana elects to exhume them and bury them all over again.

‘And just in case anyone should tell you different, both Defence and Treasury held a grand-slam internal inquiry with the gloves off, and concluded unanimously that Fergus had absolutely no case to answer. At worst, ill advised by his hopeless officials. Which is good enough for me, and I trust for you. Why are you looking at me like that?’

He isn’t looking at her in any way he is aware of, but he is certainly thinking that the lady is protesting too much.

Toby Bell, newly anointed Private Secretary to Her Majesty’s newly anointed Minister takes up his seals of office. Fergus Quinn, MP, marooned Blairite of the new Gordon Brown era, may not on the face of it be the sort of minister he would have chosen for his master. Born the only child of an old Glaswegian engineering family fallen on hard times, Fergus made an early name for himself in left-wing student politics, leading protest marches, confronting the police and generally getting his photograph in the newspapers. Having graduated in Economics from Edinburgh University, he disappears into the mists of Scottish Labour Party politics. Three years on, somewhat inexplicably, he resurfaces at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he meets and marries his present wife, a wealthy but troubled Canadian woman. He returns to Scotland, where a safe seat awaits him. The Party spin doctors quickly rate his wife unfit for presentation. An alcohol addiction is rumoured.