• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

760P_tx.qxd 5/20/09 2:59 PM Page 1 ONE Please call me Alex. When you ask what happened to Bobby Black, I have a long and a short answer, depending on how much truth you think you can handle. The short answer is that the Vice-President of the United States wandered off. Whether this was by mistake, on a whim or some tempor- ary insanity, the result is the same – we lost him out there in the mist in the Scottish Highlands. Now that the mist has cleared, this quiet little patch of Scotland is under American occupation, or so it would appear. From my bedroom window here on the top floor of Castle Dubh I can see a line of several hundred yellow-jacketed British police and Mountain Rescue teams on the heather. Above them four US Army Apache helicopters are beating across the hillsides. In the distance there is another line of perhaps a thousand or more British and American soldiers plus black-uniformed US Secret Service personnel quartering the bogland stretching down to Rowallan Loch. In the castle and its outbuildings there are teams from Scotland Yard, Grampian Police, the British government, the Scottish Executive, the US State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and an alphabet soup of other American agencies, all searching for the Vice-President, or – more likely given 1 760P_tx.qxd 5/20/09 2:59 PM Page 2 the time that has elapsed since the disappearance – they are searching for his body. I try to remain calm. It’s what diplomats do. I console myself with the thought that even great public figures can die a banal death, or disappear on a Scottish hillside in the fog. Princess Diana was in a car that hit an underpass in Paris. President George W. Bush once almost choked on a pretzel. The world would be a very different place if George W. Bush’s oesopha- gus had permanently embraced those awkward crumbs and Vice-President Dick Cheney had become President. It would have taken just a few weeks for the accidental death of the President to be turned into the Pretzelgate scandal, with a series of commissions of inquiry investigating the conspiracy and naming the usual shadowy figures – the CIA, the Cubans, the Communists, al Qaeda, Mossad and the pretzel bakery – as having connived at the killing. As I watch the Apache helicop- ters hover in mid-air or sweep down over the heather and, as still more busloads of American military personnel arrive at the castle, I also console myself with another thought, this one beaten into me since childhood: inside every crisis there is an opportunity, if you have the wit to seize it. That’s the big question. Do I? The longer answer about the disappearance of the Vice- President begins two years ago with a hurriedly arranged meeting between Bobby Black – who was then Senator Black from Montana – and Prime Minister Fraser Davis. I remember trying to persuade Davis to make time in his schedule, at first without success. It was just four weeks before the American presidential elections, and we had no sense of how profoundly the tectonic plates of history were about to shift. Prime Minister Fraser Davis was enjoying a honeymoon of sorts from the voters. They had not figured him out yet. Davis is, among other things, my brother-in-law. ‘You have charm, Alex,’ he told me when his youngest 2 760P_tx.qxd 5/20/09 2:59 PM Page 3 sister, Fiona, accepted my proposal of marriage. ‘And an air of menace. The combination appears to work on women. Perhaps it works on men too. It even works on me, up to a point.’ It was always ‘perhaps’ and ‘up to a point’ with Fraser Davis, and finding exactly where that point might be was a special skill of mine. I guessed that he never thought I was good enough for his sister, although it took some time for Fiona to come round to her brother’s opinion. In those first days of October two years ago, no one expected Theo Carr and Bobby Black to win the White House. The opinion polls had been consistent for months. Carr was way behind, more than ten points adrift against a comfortable, competent incumbent President. The American economy had at last picked up, and the smart people I knew in Washington – diplomats, journalists, members of Congress – dismissed Carr and Black as too extreme, too right wing, too out of touch with the mood of America. Their rhetoric was all from the past, talk of taking the War on Terror to ‘the Bad Guys’ and ‘the Worst of the Worst’, whoever they happened to be. When I raised the prospect of a meeting we were in the private sitting room in Number Ten Downing Street – the Prime Minister, me, his special adviser, Janey Masters, and the Director of Communications, Andy Carnwath. Fraser Davis joked that Theo Carr and Bobby Black talked as if they had an ‘Enemy of the Month Club’. ‘Y’know, a calendar of men with beards they plan to bomb. One Dead Beard a Month until the War on Terror is won.’ Fraser Davis prided himself on his sensitive political antennae and expertise on the United States. He turned to me. ‘Forget Bobby Black, Alex. Waste of my time.’ ‘Meeting Bobby Black is never a waste of time, Prime Minister,’ I contradicted him. ‘Trust me.’ 3 760P_tx.qxd 5/20/09 2:59 PM Page 4 You can get away with contradicting the PM’s judgement about once per meeting. More can be perilous. ‘I simply don’t see why I should bother with Losers,’ he responded, looking up from his briefing papers and pouting a moist lip in my direction, the way he did when he was annoyed. ‘Fix me up with the Winners, for God’s sake. Get the President or Vice-President in here. That’s what we pay you for.’ I pointed out that unfortunately the incumbent President and Vice-President were not coming through London. Bobby Black was. ‘Thirty minutes of your time,’ I persisted. ‘At Chequers.’ Chequers is the Prime Minister’s private retreat in the country- side just outside London. ‘Tea and biscuits. A chat. It can do no harm, and it could do a lot of good. It will raise your profile in Washington and—’ ‘Nonsense,’ he snapped, arching a prime ministerial eyebrow and pouting once more. Davis is a toff, of course, even though he tries to hide it. He makes a big thing of his love of foot- ball and is forever telling newspaper feature writers that his iPod is full of Kill Hannah and Nickelback, though I have never once heard him enquire about football match results, nor have I ever seen him listen to his supposedly beloved rock music. He’s Eton to the core, Oxford PPE, once a City smoothie, a stint as a management consultant, and then time in a hedge fund where he made a lot of money and decided that he understood ‘how the market works.’ At moments when we disagree he and I are like two different species sizing each other up. My own background as a soldier in Northern Ireland gives me a bit of an edge. Davis likes to joke that his brother- in-law had ‘strangled IRA terrorists with his bare hands.’ Perhaps he likes this joke because the closest the Prime Minister ever came to serving his country in uniform was wearing a tailcoat at Eton and the Bullingdon dining club. ‘Look, I simply haven’t got time to listen to Yesterday’s 4 760P_tx.qxd 5/20/09 2:59 PM Page 5 Man.’ Davis smiled that way he has which looks like a smirk. ‘Black and Carr want to continue making the same mistakes in their War on Terror that we made thirty years ago in Ulster. Why, oh why, do these bloody Americans persist in thinking you can wage war on a tactic, for goodness sake?’ The British ability to suck up to the Americans and to patronize them simultaneously should not be underestimated. Janey Masters and Andy Carnwath shook with laughter at this Prime Ministerial aperçu. I didn’t. ‘Prime Minister, you are making a serious mistake,’ I contra- dicted them all firmly. The chorus of laughter stopped. I was now on the edge of being rude, but I had the floor and so I used it. ‘You should not make unnecessary enemies.’ ‘Unnecessary enemies?’ Davis repeated, rolling the words around his mouth like a sip of unexpectedly good wine. ‘Bobby Black wants to meet you,’ I explained. ‘And he is a man who plays favourites and bears grudges.’ I advised that even if Black and Carr lost the presidential election, Senator Black would eventually have a position of considerable leader- ship, one day Senate Majority Leader. ‘A good friend and a bad enemy. His reputation is as Washington’s silent throat- slitter.’ All eyes were on me now. Very busy people in power remind me of children: self-obsessed, in their own little world. Any device that catches their attention is legitimate. ‘You cross Bobby Black at your peril. He’s coming to London and we should be nice.’ The Prime Minister sighed and then agreed. Reluctantly. ‘Very well then, Alex. If you say so. Fix it. Fix it. Please ruin my weekend at Chequers.’ And so I fixed it. I felt confident that ruining his weekend was the right thing to do and that Fraser Davis would soon be grateful.

Load more

  12

Copy Link