House of Cards (20 page)

Collingridge threw his napkin down on the table and kicked back his chair. He left the table even as his wife was still discussing the finer advantages of January in Antigua.

It did n
ot improve the Prime Minister's
temper when he had to retrieve the copy of the
Telegraph
from among the cigarette ash in the waste bin.

'Over the bloody breakfast table, Grahame. May I, just occasionally, not be the last to know?'

‘I
am sorry, Prime Minister. We were going to show it to you just as soon as you had finished,' came the meek response.

It's just not good enough, not good eno
...
What the hell's this rubbish?'

He had arrived at the point in the
Telegraph
report when the hard news - if opinion polls can eve
r be considered to qualify as h
ard' news - had been superseded by sheer speculation and hype.

The latest slump revealed in the Party's own private opinion polls is bound to put intense pressure on the Prime Minister, whose conference speech tomorrow is awaited anxiously by party representatives in Bournemouth. Rumblings about the style and effectiveness of the Prime Minister's leadership have increased in intensity since the election, when
his
performance disappointed many of his colleagues.

These doubts are certain to be fuelled by the latest poll, which gives him the lowest personal rating any Prime Minister has achieved since these polls began nearly forty years ago.

Last night, a leading Minister commented, 'There is a lack of grip around the Cabinet table and in the House of Commons. The Party is restive. Our basically excellent position is being undermined by the leader's lack of appeal
’

Harsher views were being expressed in some Government quarters. Senior party sources were speculating that the Party was fast coming to a crossroad. 'We have to decide between making a new start or sliding gently into decline and defeat
’
one source said. 'We have had too many unnecessary setbacks since the election. We cannot afford any more.'

A less sanguine view was that Collingridge was 'like a catastrophe threatening to engulf the Government at any moment'.

The
result of today's parliamentary by-election in Dorset East, reckoned to be a safe Government seat, is now being seen as crucial to the Prime Minister's future.

Collingridge was by now almost consumed with fury. His face had flushed and he gripped the newspaper like a drowning man, yet his years of experience in the political trenches kept him in control.

‘I
want to find out who's behind this, Grahame. I want to know who wrote it. Who spoke to them. Who leaked the poll. And for breakfast tomorrow I want their balls on toast!'

'Shall I give Lord Williams a call?' the political secretary offered as a tentative suggestion.
;

'Lord Williams!' Collingridge exploded. It's his bloody poll that's leaked! I don't want apologies, I want answers. Get me the Chief Whip. Find him, and whatever he is doing get him here right now
’

The secretary summoned his courage for the next hurdle. 'Before he arrives, Prime Minister, could I suggest that we have another look at your speech. There may be various things you want to change as a result of the morning press, and we don't have too much time
.’

'Grahame, the speech stays, just as it is. I'm not ripping up a perfectly good speech just in order to run in front of a pack of bloody news hounds. That's just what they want, and that is just what will make us most vulnerable. Maybe we can have another look at it later, but what is top priority at the moment is that we stop the leaks right now, otherwise they will turn into a flood. So find Mr Urquhart, and get him here immediately!'

With a look of resignation, the political secretary reached for the phone.

Urquhart was sitting in his bungalow waiting for a telephone call, which came not from the Prime Minister but from the Foreign Secretary. When Woolton got through, much to Urquhart's relief he was chuckling.

'Damned fool. I must put more water in your whisky next time. You walked off with one of my boxes yesterday and left your own behind. I've got your sandwiches and you've got a copy of the latest secret plans to invade Papua New Guinea, or whatever other damn fool thing they are trying to convince me of this week. I suggest we swap before I get arrested for losing confidential Government property. I'll be round in twenty seconds.'

Less than a minute later Urquhart was smiling his way through an apology to his Ministerial colleague, who was still in high spirits as he left, having thanked Urquhart for - as he put it - 'an exceptionally stimulating evening'.

As soon as Woolton had stepped outside, Urquhart's mood changed. His brow furrowed with concern as he locked the door from the inside, testing the handle to make absolutely certain it was closed. He wasted no time in pulling the blinds down over the windows, and only when he was certain that he could not be observed did he place the red box gingerly on the desk.

He examined the box carefully for any signs of tampering, and then selected a key from the large bunch which he produced from his pocket, sliding it carefully into the lock. As the lid came up, it exposed a thick slab of polystyrene packing which entirely filled the box. He extracted the polystyrene and laid it to one side before turning the box on its end. Delicately he eased up the corner of a strip of four-inch surgical tape which had been stuck across most of the side wall of the box, gently peeling it back until it revealed a small recess carved right through the wooden wall until only the rough red leather covering stood between the recess and the outside world.

Externally there was no sign that the leather covered anything other than a solid piece of wood, and he complimented himself that he had not forgotten the art of using a wood chisel which he had learned at school nearly fifty years before. The recess measured no more than two inches square, and snuggling neatly in its middle was a radio transmitter complete with its own miniaturised mercury power pack, compliments of its Japanese manufacturer.

The manager of the security shop just off the Tottenham Court Road which he had visited two weeks earlier had displayed a carefully practised mask of indifference as Urquhart had explained his need to check up on a dishonest employee, yet had shown great enthusiasm in describing the full capabilities of the equipment he could supply. This was one of the simplest yet most sensitive transmitters on the market, he had explained, which was guaranteed to pick up almost any unobstructed sound within a distance of fifty metres and relay it back to the custom-built receiver and voice-activated tape recorder, which he also highly recommended.

‘J
ust make sure the microphone is pointing generally towards the source of the sound, sir, and I guarantee it will sound like a Mahler Symphony
’

Urquhart went over to his wardrobe and from the back pulled out another Ministerial red box. Like all such boxes, this one was secured with a precision-made, high-security tungsten lock for which he alone had the keys. Inside, nestling in another protective wrapping of polystyrene, sat a modified FM portable radio with inbuilt cassette recorder which was tuned to the wavelength of the transmitter. Urquhart noticed with satisfaction that the long-playing tape he had installed was all but exhausted. He had left the radio transmitter in Woolton's room pointing towards the bed.

‘I
hope it's not simply because he snores,' Urquhart joked with himself. As he did so, the equipment clicked once more into action, ran for ten seconds, and stopped.

He pressed the rewind button and was watching the twin reels spin round when the telephone rang, summoning him to the Prime Minister for yet another 'plumbing lesson', as he called it.

'Never mind, you'll wait,' he whispered, and relocked both boxes before concealing them in the back of his wardrobe. He was reliving the explosion of excitement he had felt when he had set his first rabbit trap on his father's estate with the help of the gillie. They had gone out into the warm evening air to lay the trap together, but Urquhart could not contain his impatience and had returned alone before dawn the following morning, to find the creature swinging helplessly from the snare.

'Got you!' he exclaimed in triumph.

S
ATURDAY 16
th
OCTOBER

It was not just the
Telegraph
which, the day after the Prime Minister's speech, declared it to be a disaster. It was joined in varying degrees by all the other newspapers, several Government backbenchers, and the Leader of the Opposition. Particularly the Leader of the Opposition, whose animated braying appeared for all the world like a hound which had just scented the first sign of real vulnerability in its prey.

The loss of the Dorset East by-election, when the news had burst on the conference in the early hours of Friday morning, had at first numbed the party faithful. It had taken them until breakfast time before they began to vent their frustration and disillusionment, and there had been only one target - Henry Collingridge.

Correspondents in Bournemouth seemed to have been inundated with nameless senior Party officials, each of whom claimed personally to have warned the Prime Minister not to hold the by-election in conference week and who were now absolving themselves of responsibility for the disastrous defeat. In turn, the Prime Minister's office retaliated - unattributably, of course - that the blame was really in the organisational deficiencies of the party headquarters for which, of course. Lord Williams was responsible. The explanation, however, fell on deaf ears. The pack instinct had taken hold of the press as well as the Leader of the Opposition, as the scarcely restrained phrases of one normally pro-Government newspaper indicated.

The Prime Minister yesterday failed to quell growing doubts being expressed within his Party about his leadership with a closing speech to his party conference in Bournemouth which one Cabinet colleague described as 'inept and inappropriate'. Following this week's leaking of disastrous internal opinion polls and the humiliating by-election defeat in one of the Party's safest seats, conference representatives were looking for a realistic acknowledgement of the problems which have caused the collapse of voter support for the Government.

Instead, in the words of one representative, 'we got a stale rehash of an old election speech'.

The open disenchantment with the Prime Minister is no longer being voiced with traditional caution within Government circles, particularly amongst anxious backbenchers with marginal seats. Peter Bearstead, MP for Leicester North, said last night: The electorate gave us a warning slap across the knuckles at the election, and we should be responding with fresh initiatives and a much clearer statement of our policies. But all we got was more of the same, cliches and suffocating complacency. It may be time for the Prime Minister to think about handing over.'

In an office tower on the South Bank of the Thames, near the spot where Wat Tyler 600 years before had gathered disenchanted rebels to launch his attempt at overthrowing the Establishment, the editor of
Weekend Watch,
the leading current affairs programme, studied the newspapers and called a hurried conference of all his staff. Twenty minutes later, the programme planned for the following day on racketeering landlords had been shelved and the entire sixty-minute slot had been recast. Bearstead was going to be invited to participate, as were several opinion pollsters and pundits, in a new programme entitled 'Collingridge - Time To Go?' From his home in the leafy suburbs near Epsom, the senior manager of market makers Barclays de Zoete Wedd telephoned two colleagues. They agreed to be in the office very early on Monday. 'All this political nonsense is going to upset the markets, and we mustn't be caught holding on to stock when every other bastard is selling.'

The Chief Whip, at his magnificent Palladian country home in the New Forest of Hampshire, received several calls from worried Cabinet colleagues and senior backbenchers, none wishing to make a break from cover but all of them expressing concern. The chairman of the Party's grass-roots executive committee also called him from Yorkshire reporting similar worries.
‘
I
would normally pass these on to the Party Chairman,' the bluff Yorkshire-man explained, 'but with relations between Downing Street and party headquarters so poor, I just don't want to get caught in the middle of that particular battle.'

The defeated candidate in Thursday's by-election was contacted by the
Mail on Sunday
just after a lunch spent drowning his sorrows, and showed no reticence in his br
oadside against Collingridge. H
e cost me my seat. Can he feel safe in his?'

At Chequers, the Prime Minister's official country residence set amidst rolling lawns and massive security in rural Buckinghamshire, Collingridge just sat, ignoring his official papers and devoid of inspiration. The rock had begun to roll down hill, and he had no idea how to stop it.

When it hit later that afternoon, the news caught almost everyone by surprise. Even Urquhart. He had expected the
Observer
to take at least a couple more weeks checking the bundle of papers and photostats he had sent them and obtaining their lawyers' clearance. Clearly, however, they had felt pressured by the growing political clamour and feared that a competitor might also be on the trail. 'Damned if we don't publish, damned if we do. So let's go!' the editor had shouted at his investigative reporters.