Joseph Anton: A Memoir (77 page)

Mike was mortified and apologized over and over again. He was
taken off the protection and never reappeared, and that was a loss. One of the other new protection officers, Mark Edwards, said, in an attempt at reassurance, “In the future, the cleaning and checking procedure will take place against the far wall of the house, never near the inner door. What was done was against regulations.” Oh, he said, so the next time you’ll blow a hole in the side of the house and perhaps kill one of the neighbors? No, thank you. He had been so trusting that he had never even dreamed of such an error, but now it had happened and his trust would not easily be renewed. “The simple fact is,” he said, “that I can no longer have armed men in my home.” There was a new bigwig on his case at Scotland Yard, Detective Superintendent Frank Armstrong (who would later become Tony Blair’s personal protection officer and then temporary assistant commissioner “in charge of the operations portfolio,” which meant, essentially, that he would be the person running the Metropolitan Police). A meeting with Armstrong had been scheduled in a month’s time. “I can’t wait that long,” he told his shamefaced team. “I want that meeting now.”

He got Rab Connolly, who came up to the house to make his official report. He told Rab he had no wish to make a complaint against Mike or anyone else but the event had created a new imperative for him. The guns had to leave the house, and that had to happen right away. Rab gave him the usual line about what would happen if the house became known, the “very heavy uniform operation,” the whole street closed to traffic, and there would be no protection anymore because “everyone would refuse to do it.” Then he said, “If someone else had been in charge at the beginning, and had taken a proper decision, you wouldn’t have had to hide at all, and you’d be in a completely different situation now.” Well, that made him feel a
lot
better. This was how the police talked to him. If he wanted this, they wouldn’t do that. If he wanted that, then they would get tough about this. Oh, and if this whole thing had been done right from the get-go then it wouldn’t be wrong now, but because it was wrong it couldn’t be put right.

He was in shock. A gun had been fired in his home. Elizabeth would be back soon. He had to calm down before she arrived so that he could talk to her about it properly. It would not help if they were both hysterical. He had to control himself.

Frank Armstrong, a man of thick eyebrows and a professionally cheery smile, a man of burliness, accustomed to command, came to the house with Rab and Dick Stark.

He was worried about something. Mr. Anton’s friend Ronnie Harwood was an old pal of the home secretary, Michael Howard, and had asked for a meeting to talk about the Rushdie protection. “What’s it about?” Frank Armstrong wanted to know. “I would suppose it’s about allowing me to live with some dignity,” he replied. “And to say, we must have a strategy for what happens if this house becomes known. That has to be a political decision as well as an operational one. I need everyone to focus on this subject and think it through. That’s what I’ve been saying to the Labour leadership, and that’s what Ronnie’s going to tell Michael Howard.”

Everything was political. Now that Armstrong saw that he had some political “muscle” he became cooperative, even deferential. The Branch was sympathetic to his request for armed personnel to be withdrawn from the property, he said. He had a proposal to make.
If you were prepared to hire a retiring Branch officer or driver to work with you, maybe even one of the officers you have come to know, we might perhaps withdraw from the house and allow that person to be in charge of all your private movements, and offer you protection only when you move into public spaces
.

Yes!
He thought at once.
Yes, please
. “All right,” Armstrong said. “That gives us something to work on.”

He spoke to Frank Bishop, Whispering Frank the cricket lover, the kindly protection officer with whom Elizabeth and he had forged the closest relationship. Frank was on the verge of retiring and was “up” for this new job. Dennis the Horse, also close to retirement, could be paid an additional retainer as a “backup man,” to stand in for Frank when he was unwell or on holiday. “I’ll have to run it by the wife, of course,” Frank said, and that seemed only fair.

Frances D’Souza had a “chum in MI6” who told her that the spooks were well aware of Elizabeth’s pregnancy and knew that as a result they
had “three years maximum to sort this out.” The idea that their baby was making policy made him smile. MI6, Frances’s chum said, had been showing the Foreign Office evidence of the extent of Iranian terrorism, “ten times as much as anyone else, the Saudis, the Nigerians, whoever” and as a result the British government now agreed there was no point in being nice to Iran, the “critical dialogue” was garbage, and all investment in and trade with that country had to cease. The French and Germans were stumbling blocks, but MI6 believed that the new “tough line” would “bring the mullahs to their knees in about two years.”
I’ll believe it when I see it
, he thought.

And always the wings of that giant blackbird, the exterminating angel, beating close at hand. Andrew called to say that Allen Ginsberg had inoperable liver cancer and a month to live. And even worse news. Nigella called. John Diamond had throat cancer. Doctors were trying to be reassuring. It was “curable, like skin cancer on the inside,” with radiation therapy. They had successfully treated Sean Connery for it seven years earlier. “I feel very unsafe,” Nigella sadly said.

Unsafe
was a feeling he was familiar with.

Isabel Fonseca had spoken to Elizabeth and offered her mother’s beautiful garden in East Hampton, with the dazzling field of pink, lilac, purple and white cosmos behind it, as a place for the wedding, and that sounded perfect. But a few days later Elizabeth did what people always did and read his journal when he wasn’t there and found out about his day in Paris with Caroline Lang and then they had the painful conversation people always had and Elizabeth was the one feeling wretched and
unsafe
and it was his fault.

They talked for the next two days and slowly, with setbacks, she began to be able to put it away. “Once I felt so confident with you,” she said, “I felt nothing could come between us.” And, at another time, “I don’t want any more trouble in our relationship. I think it would kill me.” And, later still, “It’s become really important to me to be married, because then you won’t have been unfaithful.” “You mean, in our marriage?” “Yes.”

She dreamed about his infidelity and he dreamed about meeting Marianne in an organic supermarket and asking her for the return of
his possessions. “I’ll never give them back,” she said, and wheeled her cart away.

The shock, the pain, the weeping, the anger came in waves, and then subsided. She was only a month away from giving birth. She decided the future was more important than the past. And forgave him, or at least agreed to forget.

“What was it you said your mother had instead of a memory, which helped her put up with your father?”

“A forgettery.”

“I need one of those as well.”

The general election had been called and apart from one rogue poll Labour were maintaining a 20 percent lead over the Conservatives. After the long sullen Tory epoch there was an excitement in the air. In the last days before the Blair victory Zafar began to do his A levels and his parents crossed their fingers, and Rab Connolly announced that he was off to look after Mrs. Thatcher and would be replaced by Paul Topper, who seemed smart and nice and eager and a bit less prickly than Rab. Meanwhile the European Union was offering to send ambassadors back to Iran without even bothering to get the slightest assurance about the
fatwa
. Iran, ever the more cynically skillful player, retaliated by not sending
its
ambassadors back, and barring the German envoy “for the time being,” just because it felt like doing so. He turned his thoughts away from politics and went to the first, and very cheering, table reading of his
Midnight’s Children
scripts at the BBC.

Journalists were nosing around the baby story, many of them convinced the child had already been born. The
Evening Standard
called Martin Amis. “Have you been around to see it yet?” He found it ridiculous to be asked to keep the secret, but in this matter Elizabeth agreed with the police. Meanwhile, a favored name was emerging. “Milan,” like Kundera, yes, but it was also a name with an Indian etymology, from the verb
milana
, to mix or mingle or blend; thus,
Milan
, a mingling, a coming together, a union. Not an inappropriate name for a boy in whom England and India were united.

Then it was election day and nobody was thinking about their baby. He sat at home and could not vote, because he was still unable to
register without giving a home address. He read in the papers that even homeless people had been given a special dispensation that allowed them to cast their ballots; but there was no special dispensation for him. He put bitter thoughts aside and went to his friends’ election night parties. Melvyn Bragg and Michael Foot were having one again, and this time there would be no awful anticlimax. The lawyer Helena Kennedy and her surgeon husband, Iain Hutchison, were having one too. The results came in: It was a big victory for Blair’s “New Labour.” Joy was unconfined. Party guests told stories of strangers talking happily to one another on the Tube—in England!—and of taxi drivers bursting into song.
The skies above were clear again
. Optimism, a sense of infinite possibility, was being reborn. Now there would be much-needed welfare reform, and £5 billion for new council housing to help replace the public housing stock that had been sold off to the private sector during the Thatcher years, and the European Convention on Human Rights would finally be incorporated into British law. Some months before the election at an arts award show he had challenged Blair, who was rumored to be uninterested in the arts, and by his own admission read books only about economics and political biographies, to recognize the arts’ value to British society, to understand that the arts were “the national imagination.” Blair had been at that ceremony and had responded that it was New Labour’s job to excite the nation with
its
imagination, and tonight, in the glow of the election victory, it was possible not to see that reply as an evasion. Tonight was for celebration. Reality could wait until morning. Years later on the night of Barack Obama’s election to the American presidency, he would feel those feelings again.

The three-thousandth day of the
fatwa
arrived two days later. Elizabeth was looking exceptionally beautiful, and the due date was very close. Clarissa’s car was broken into and her briefcase with all her credit cards in it was stolen, along with a pair of Zafar’s sunglasses, to which the thief had obviously taken a shine. And that night they went to a victory party given by the
Observer
for Tony Blair in a place called Bleeding Heart Crypt, a gathering that the newspaper’s Will Hutton called “a laying on of hands.” At the party the new Blairite elite welcomed him and treated him like a friend—Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Margaret Beckett, the two Tessas,
Blackstone and Jowell. Richard and Ruthie Rogers were there, and Neil and Glenys Kinnock. Neil drew him close and whispered into his ear, “Now we’ve got to make the buggers do it.” Yes indeed. “His” side was in power again. As Margaret Thatcher liked to say:
Rejoice
.

On the way to the victory party Dick Stark handed him a letter from Frank Armstrong asking him to “rethink” all his plans. He didn’t want the new child’s existence to be publicly acknowledged, he didn’t think the wedding was a good idea, he didn’t want Elizabeth’s name to be on the book she had coedited. It was a shaming aspect of his life that policemen felt able to talk to him like this. He sent a restrained reply to Armstrong. Police strategy, he said, must be based on what was humanly and decently possible.

He made the mistake of going on
Q&A with Riz Khan
on CNN, and the questions were uniformly hostile. From Tehran he was asked for the millionth time if he had “known what he was doing,” and from Switzerland a man asked, “After insulting the Brits, Thatcher and the queen, how can you still live in England?” and from Saudi Arabia a woman called in to say, “Nobody should pay you any attention, because we all know who God is,” and to ask, repeatedly, “But what did you gain from your book? What did you gain?” He tried to answer all these questions lightly, with good humor. This was his fate, to face hostility with a smile.

His phone rang. A woman from the
Daily Express
said, “I hear congratulations are in order, and your partner is expecting a baby.”
The Sunday Times
sent him a fax. “We hear you have had a baby! Congratulations! Notable development! Of course we won’t name the mother or child for security reasons but (a) how are you going to manage to be a parent? (b) will there have to be more security now?” Armstrong’s desire to keep the baby secret was an absurdity and he wished Elizabeth wasn’t feeling secretive as well. Damn it, he thought, they should just be open about it, and then there would be less of a story. When the press thought something was being hidden from them, it only made them hungrier. The next day the
Express
ran the story, although it omitted Elizabeth’s name. Who cares? he thought. He was glad it was out in the open, and the story was perfectly pleasant and well-wishing. One less secret.
Good
. But Elizabeth was angry,
and the stress levels rose. They were not understanding each other’s sentences, misunderstanding each other’s tone of voice, squabbling over nothings. He woke up at 4
A.M.
to find her crying. She was fearful about Carol’s health. She was alarmed about having her name in the papers. She was sad about his infidelity. She was worried about everything.