The Knives (4 page)

‘Now, Home Secretary, I have of course tried to speak to the society president, but he has been persistently avoiding me.’

‘I see.’ Blaylock shifted in his seat. ‘The issue, it seems to me, is the one you raise about the duty of care owed to your students. We don’t want to be painted as Orwellian bullies. But it may be that universities and student unions are a bit out of date on free speech issues – certainly if we’ve got parties who want to use free speech as a platform to argue that other people shouldn’t speak freely.’

Mark Tallis was clicking his pen. ‘Are female students welcome to attend these sorts of events?’

Hanifa winced. ‘They are, though lately there has been this business of separate seating, if the invited speaker wishes it so.’

Blaylock threw a pointed look to Tallis. ‘Well, then, it may be past time to look more closely at the validity of the invitations. It’s been on our minds, in fact – the idea of some second-level order to bar certain kinds of gatherings on campuses.’

‘On what grounds?’ Professor Mankad looked very alert.

‘On the grounds of their being un-collegiate. We won’t abide segregation. No union within a union, no state within a state.’ Blaylock turned to Geraldine, who sat taking notes. ‘I need a report done on the college societies, nationwide. And I want to see the Director of Counter-Extremism Strategy tomorrow for a catch-up.’

‘Shall I invite the Minister for Security?’

Blaylock knew why Geraldine asked. His Security Minister Paul Payne was zealous in his junior brief yet apparently unsatisfied, possibly seeing himself as a Laertes miscast as Osric. Blaylock preferred to keep Payne out of the way by tasking him with issues such as cyber-security, which Blaylock never really understood.

‘No, just me and Rory Inglis. Sheikh, Professor, forgive me but—’

The two visitors rose to go. Mankad, though, looked at Blaylock very directly. ‘Where I live in Stepney, I understand this “Free Briton Brigade” intend to march?’

‘Yes. I am just in receipt of a petition to ban it.’

‘You have a view?’

‘It’s the view of Scotland Yard that counts. You have a view yourself?’

‘I do. These rallies, they are an incitement to violence.’

‘Well, there is a right to demonstrate. But if, as you say, the intent is to provoke disorder then we won’t be having it. We treat thugs as thugs. No exceptions, no excuses.’

Sheikh Hanifa sighed loudly. ‘I am guilty, perhaps, of rosy spectacles? But when I first came to England, the seventies? It seemed to me that people could just get on with things in their own way,
following their custom. Then came all this anger, the attacks, the “Go home!”’

Mankad nodded, intensely. ‘The white fascists, they made a climate of intimidation. There had to be a defence of our rights. But, we were different communities. So how could we speak with one voice?’

‘Islam,’ Blaylock murmured.

‘That’s right. All the things we did anyway, believed anyway, we had to start shouting about. In the name of Islam.’

Mark Tallis, silent and seemingly restive until now, leapt in. ‘That’s interesting. God, yes, white people say the same, that’s the time it started going wrong, when integration went backward.’

Blaylock winced, not liking Tallis’s analysis or his choice of words.

‘So who is to blame?’ asked Mankad, eyes unblinking behind his thick lenses, seemingly very desirous of something other than a politician’s answer.

‘Evil in the hearts of men,’ said Blaylock. ‘What else?’ He extended his hand to Hanifa. ‘We fight on and fight to win, my friend.’

His courtesies having made Blaylock a few minutes late for Cabinet, he moved at pace to the private lift, but Mark Tallis stayed at his heels. Coming toward them from the Level Three kitchen were Mark’s fellow spads, Deborah Kerner and Ben Cotesworth – Deborah cupping her double-shot espresso, Ben bearing his chipped pint mug of tea.

‘Ride down with me,’ Blaylock said, gesturing to the opening lift. The three young people did as they were told. They were bright and ambitious, and Blaylock found them endlessly willing to surrender their time and privacy in return for his trust and preferment.

‘You’re all ready for some dust-ups this afternoon?’ he said.

‘Maybes not as ready as you, gaffer,’ offered Ben, the dogsbody of the team – a sharp, serious, recessive Geordie with an endearingly daffy laugh. Blaylock had handpicked Ben as an exemplary figure of the mission to rediscover Tory votes in northern cities. He was a large lad with a straight back and a sensible haircut and Blaylock saw in him a sort of loyalty that suggested a platoon commander in waiting.

‘Okay, Ben, so we do immigration figures after lunch, I’d be glad of your input there. Deb, I need you in with me for the team meet on the Identity Documents Bill.’

‘You want me to drop a bomb on that bunch of deadbeats?’ This in her Georgetown drawl, from over the rim of the espresso. ‘I saw some of the figures they’ve got, I told ’em it’s bullshit.’

‘Let’s see the lay of the land. I have to keep the troops motivated.’

Deborah rolled her eyes. There was a cosmetic appliqué aura around her – her mask of pale foundation and red lipstick, her long black hair worn in a visor-like fringe with long side bangs, her striped and belted dress. She was so overtly feminine Blaylock had to stop himself stealing second glances at her; and yet he had come to believe she neither cared nor noticed. Deborah was impervious to charm, intently focused and seemingly – like himself? – unencumbered by a private life. Her appearance seemed merely a sort of armour she donned to do battle. Blaylock wondered if her sexuality wasn’t wholly sublimated in politics.

They exited to the underground car park where Martin waited at the wheel of the Jag. Blaylock turned.

‘Listen, you all need to remember to respect the system. Geraldine is my voice, right? She’s the weapon of choice. Whatever noise I kick up, nothing much seems to work round here. But when Geraldine asks someone to do something for me, they do it. A lesson for us, eh?’

His praetorian guards nodded, in unison, however unhappily.

The implacable black door swung wide, admitting Blaylock to what he never failed to think of as Wonderland – a rabbit’s warren, a hall of mirrors, its chequered marble floor made for games. A glance to his wrist told him it was 9.39 a.m. and he was nearly back on schedule.

As he hastened down the plum carpet of the long corridor to the Cabinet anteroom, Downing Street Head of Comms Al Ramsay was sauntering across from the press room, fingers pressed to his slow-shaking head as if the world were really just too much this morning.

‘David, for your info, Scotland Yard have issued a statement about this morning’s … incident? That two young persons were arrested on suspicion of robbery and affray?’

‘That sounds as I remember it.’

‘I hear you’ve seen some trouble?’ Caroline Tennant, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had materialised at Blaylock’s side as if by magic, in a tailored black suit and extravagant heels that gave her ash-blonde head an inch over his. She addressed him as she addressed everyone, like an admired head teacher who wore her authority lightly.

‘No more than usual, Caroline.’

Since neither of them did small talk they were condemned to stride together silently down the hall – Blaylock, per his custom, nodding slightly toward Churchill’s old leather armchair – until they reached the anteroom, where Caroline swayed off ahead.

Her Majesty’s ministers were helping themselves to teas and coffees, some ducking in and out of the empty Cabinet Room.
Blaylock craned his neck to see who had already set out their stall and strewn their papers around a place setting. A few ministers already sat pensively, like candidates for examination. The cooler customers loitered and chattered. Loudest and most expansive, as usual – ‘So I said to him, “Come
off
it!”’ – was Business Secretary Jason Malahide, broad of shoulder and trim of beard, hands in the pockets of his double-breasted suit as he rocked and guffawed.

Needing a substitute for adrenalin, Blaylock poured a black coffee and knocked it back, then took care to exchange nods with those few ministers he counted as friends. There was Chas Finlayson, Employment Minister, lean and bloodhound-eyed. An ex-officer in the Territorials, Finlayson was big on schemes to put shiftless young men to work and had won Blaylock’s support for some new version of national service. Then there was Simon Webster, Justice Secretary, who seemed honestly to approve of Blaylock’s reform of British policing, at least to the degree that it saved money for the courts.

Now Peter Kitson, balding button-eyed Secretary for Health, stepped aside from a
sotto voce
exchange and hastened over to Blaylock.

‘David, did you
deck
someone this morning?’

‘Yep. A very, very minor ruck.’

Sir Alan Ruthven, Cabinet Secretary, with whom Kitson had been conferring, now stepped over too – crisply turned out as ever, in his pale spectacles, a look of freeze-dried patience under his parted grey fringe.

‘Yes, so we hear. It really is an admirable thing about you, David, this way you just – leap into the fray.’

Blaylock smiled, thinking how Ruthven might whisper a subtly transformed version into Patrick Vaughan’s ear. ‘
I have to say, Prime Minister, it does concern me somewhat, this keenness of the Home Secretary to just … leap into the fray?
’ Blaylock thought Ruthven simultaneously aloof and over-engaged, the
Prime Minister’s watchman–gatekeeper, forever on manoeuvres so as to preserve his own share of power.

‘Rocky!’ Jason Malahide, passing by, slapped Blaylock’s arm with a big phoney bonhomie. ‘That eye of the tiger of yours, I don’t know. Look alive, here comes the Captain.’

Malahide’s ears had been the first alerted to the sound of the Prime Minister and his entourage from down the hall. ‘The Captain’ now appeared, patiently at the centre of that buzzing retinue, and the ministers made their show of snapping to order. Patrick Vaughan dismissed his retainers and cocked his head as if to lead the officers into Cabinet. They filed in, took their places round the long table with much shuffling of the Gladstone chairs – the Captain in centre place under the gaze of the portrait of Walpole, Ruthven assuming his inviolable perch on the Captain’s right, Blaylock to the left.

Glancing right Blaylock appraised Vaughan’s familiar profile – the prominent nose, the well-tended fleshiness of his features, the hair stiff-brushed off the temples – like a top-order England batsman retired early to well-paid TV work and a newspaper column on wine.

Caroline Tennant sat composedly opposite Vaughan, as if to mirror him. It always seemed to Blaylock that they were symbiotic, complicit, sharing in the true loneliness of executive leadership, their fates entwined.
The rest of us are expendable
, thought Blaylock, glancing around the table.
We happy few, gathered in this seventeenth-century townhouse to turn our minds to the nation’s ills
.

There was an apparent ease to the table, it being largely a gathering of university contemporaries and schoolmates, Vaughan the
primus inter pares
. Though no class warrior, Blaylock had by far the humblest background of them all – his father a colliery mechanic, later a repairman running a hardware shop, but always a Conservative voter. ‘
Don’t rely on the state to put food on your
table, son. Elseways you’ll starve
.’ Back when he had gifted Blaylock his first promotion, to shadow Defence Minister, Vaughan had praised him as ‘a tough character, plain-speaking, with a common touch’.
What you mean
, Blaylock had mulled on leaving the room,
is ‘You’re from the north, you’re working class, you were in the army, and we could never,
ever
have too many of your sort.’

But now the Captain was calling the table to order with a sidelong look in Blaylock’s direction. ‘Okay, so first, we’re relieved to have the Home Secretary with us today, and not in Accident and Emergency. As I always say, it goes to show they shouldn’t get you angry …’

A rumble of perfunctory chuckles from heads bowed over paperwork. Vaughan sat back, never cheerier as leader – so it seemed to Blaylock – than when chairing a meeting. Yet it was Ruthven, relishing his role as lieutenant on deck, who now took over the running.

‘The Chancellor, Prime Minister.’

Caroline Tennant murmured her way through just-published and not-especially-terrible GDP figures, her expression one of mild satisfaction, though she cautioned fellow ministers with the continued need for all departments to practise ‘self-restraint’. For most of them, Blaylock included, this had meant cuts of a quarter or more to their annual departmental spending in the last twelve months.

The Captain chuckled, running a hand over one gleaming temple. ‘Well, the nation can be assured at least that the grown-ups are in charge …’

Minor guffaws. Vaughan sought Caroline’s cool smile in return. Blaylock glanced round.
Is that us? The grown-ups?
On the issue of spending he more often felt that he and his colleagues were like errant children, inasmuch as whenever they were insufficiently abstemious then Caroline Tennant did the job for them, wielding an axe of veto to policies that bore too high a price tag. She did so
very gracefully: not gratuitously, nearly apologetically. But axe them she surely did. Blaylock was never sure of her true motives. To save the taxpayers money, or massage some headline figures toward the higher calling of re-electing the Captain? Something in her style was unreadable.

‘The Foreign Secretary, Prime Minister?’

Ruthven now invited Dominic Moorhouse – an ageless boffin in black-rimmed specs, his thick hair in meringue-like waves – to brief the table on the state of the game of nations. France had been pressed into a military operation in a former colony: the Palais de l’Elysée had politely asked after the possibility of British boots on the ground and, instead, had been politely offered advice from the counterinsurgency manual. US Special Forces, meanwhile, were conducting targeted drone strikes against alleged Islamist
groupuscules
in the Horn of Africa and northern Nigeria, in which direction the UK had gestured its support.

Any minister was welcome to dip a finger in the blood of the Foreign Secretary’s position, or else to demur. But the Defence Secretary Susan Rivers, who had entered politics from management consultancy, had no military expertise to offer. Blaylock had long ceased to imagine his own ex-services opinion carried any special weight: nobody in Westminster valued any sort of life anyone had before politics. In any case, his view here was as everyone’s. Penetrating the arid centre of Somalia was a risky errand. Drone strikes, remote-controlled death from above, were perturbing, but met the need to injure and disrupt the enemy. The likelihood that they worsened the purported grievances of said enemy was not a matter one could afford to countenance, any more than one could really afford to address those purported grievances.

Cabinet was clicking along with customary briskness, a handful of agenda headings despatched per the Captain’s wish to be done in forty-five minutes. Vaughan retook charge of proceedings.

‘So, the headline figures on net migration will be known today
and, Home Secretary, we hope the good work will continue and the target for reductions kept on course, just in time for party conference?’

‘I am hopeful also,’ Blaylock nodded.

‘The Business Secretary, Prime Minister?’

Jason Malahide, by dint of his black beard, always seemed somehow piratical when he bared his teeth. ‘I feel, again, I must point out that any reduction in immigration to this country shouldn’t be cheered from the rafters if the figures show we continue to deter the best business people from overseas, and foreign students, damn, sorry—’

Malahide had been interrupted by the ringtone of a phone – his own, the bleeping notes of ‘Why Was He Born So Beautiful?’ The table made noises off and Vaughan his patented ‘Give me strength’ face, until Malahide had fumbled into his jacket and silenced the offender.

‘Sorry – yes, overseas students are the wealth creators of the future but our policy is driving them elsewhere and, frankly, hurting our economy. We are
seriously
inconveniencing the Chinese by forever taking their fingerprints, and wasting the time of our top banks on endless visa applications for overseas hires. I mean, old colleagues of mine in Zurich and Frankfurt are
laughing
at us.’

Malahide, Blaylock knew, was not so much of a European, having made his money with a company that mined iron ore in Brazil and copper in Chile, was headquartered in Zurich and registered in Jersey. What did seem noteworthy to him was Caroline Tennant’s firm approving nod to the bit about ‘hurting our economy’.

‘Home Secretary?’ Ruthven tossed Blaylock the ball.

‘Obviously I share the Business Secretary’s desire that this country be a mecca for entrepreneurial talent—’

Obviously we prefer wealthier foreigners, we’ve plenty homegrown poor
.

‘However, he knows as well as I do what are the parameters
within which we are obliged to make our decisions—’

We swore we’d keep immigration low, so since we can’t do a hand’s turn about movement within Europe we have to hit the rest of the globe instead
.

Ruthven, to Blaylock’s annoyance, was busy as a racetrack bookie taking note of ministers now wishing to speak. Whenever Caroline Tennant or Dom Moorhouse addressed the table it was to give mere briefings on decisions already made – courtesy calls, letting colleagues know roughly what they were up to. Blaylock’s share of government business, though, seemed forever an invitation for all-comers to jump in with boots on.

Valerie Laing, petite and flame-haired Communities Minister, tapped her folder vexedly with a biro. ‘Whatever happened to that idea of reserving job vacancies for our people? That we only let in an EU candidate where a UK national had first dibs?’

Ruthven made a show of turning pages before him. ‘Those discussions were had, but never without the caveat that any such policy would require us to prepare for legal challenge, at some cost.’

Malahide scoffed. ‘Our voters will say, “We’ve got a Tory government, so what’s it for?” Why don’t we just do what we think is right and let Europe sue us?’

‘Whatever any of us may think,’ Vaughan sighed theatrically, ‘we are bound by law.’

Blaylock checked his watch – thirty-three minutes gone – and fell to gazing through the window at the rose garden. They had had this argument, fruitlessly, so many times. What he knew, what they all knew as grown-ups, was that it was folly to lump together all who migrated to Britain – from within Europe or without, for whatever reason – and, worse, to then subtract the numbers who left and consider the difference a target to be assailed and reduced.
Never give an order that can’t be obeyed
.

He was called back to proceedings by the irascible Malahide.
‘David, come on, how hard is it to ensure proper immigration checks get done on people before they can rent a flat, or use the health service, or get a driver’s licence?’

‘The legal advice my department received’, said Blaylock, bridging his fingers in a style he thought judicial, ‘was that if identity checks were made compulsory in that way then they would have to be applied to everybody. Including “our people”.’

‘So they’d have to lug their passports around while EU citizens get to pony up any of a hundred IDs they use on the Continent?’

‘Quite. That’s why we’re scrapping all that rubbish and just having one.’ Blaylock was cheered that the obvious rejoinder had fallen so easily into his lap. But not one nervous laugh was raised. He pushed on into the silence. ‘It’s why we want one biometric identity card, to get in and out of the country, to access state services, et cetera.’

Ruthven’s pen was poised, the clock on the mantle ticked.

Finally, Malahide chuckled. ‘Well, yes, over to you on that one, David.’

Blaylock rubbed his jaw-line, looking from face to solemn face of his colleagues, feeling a cramped wrathfulness in his chest. ID cards had been a manifesto pledge, and yet the very mention of them, he knew, remained venomous to a whole swathe of people – some of whom were supposedly working with him to legislate the idea into existence, others of whom were sitting quietly with him around this Cabinet table.