The Storytellers (17 page)

“Well I hope you have the money to pay my bill,” Donald drawled.

“Unless it is more than one hundred thousand, we do.”

“No. More like ten.”

“Jesus!” Andrew exclaimed. “I'm in the wrong bloody business.”

Donald just shrugged. He wasn't joking.

Before he left Brightman and Meadows he called his finance director to give him the news and then he called Harvey Mudd. As luck would have it, Harvey was in with George Gilder and they
agreed to meet for a drink, and in Andrew's case, for several. He half expected to see his flow of indiscretions about Britain's nonexistent industrial policy plastered across the next morning's edition of
The Sentinel
. That they were not owed as much to George Gilder not yet being ready to break with the government as it did to Harvey's scruples.

Looking back on that extraordinary day there was one thing he wished he could have reversed. The rumour that the bank had called in its loan had spread quicker and further than the later rumour that it had not. Such secrets were always hard to contain and the bad secrets inevitably had the most traction. Had a telephone conversation been overheard? Had a wife spoken to another wife and the bush telegraph been primed? He never knew. What he did know was that his company never fully recovered from the effect of that ‘clerical error'. Business has a nose for vulnerability. It has to have.

C
HAPTER

A
S HARVEY toured the country over the last five months of 1981, firing back stories that appeared under the by-line
From The Front
, Andrew Champion's experience became depressingly familiar, but with one key difference: few of the companies he encountered had access to Brightman and Meadows. But to judge by what he saw, his friend had only purchased a stay of execution. British manufacturing was grinding to a halt. Thousands of companies were failing. Only the corporate liquidators were thriving and even they, like good undertakers, displayed a sombre demeanour.

It was the most vicious of vicious circles. Every death was a debt not paid, a product no longer supplied, capacity permanently removed and money destroyed. The government's industrial strategy looked more like a ten ball sending every skittle flying than anything approaching a surgical strike. In an attempt to improve his understanding of economics, he read an essay by Joseph Schumpeter, a famous economist who had died in 1950. The professor had coined the phrase ‘creative destruction' to describe the way capitalist economies reinvigorate themselves.

His idea seemed to be this: businessmen invest in sets of ideas
for making money and then overinvest in those that work best. When it becomes clear to them that chasing the same rabbit generates diminishing returns, they stop investing and instead of growing, the economy contracts. During these contractions many companies go out of business. This creates space for new sets of ideas to be pursued. As people invest in them, the cycle turns up once more, and the economy is renewed and reinvigorated. Naturally, being an intelligent man who had started life in Austria and ended up a Harvard professor, his argument appeared quite logical. But Harvey was left with a question. He wondered what Schumpeter thought was created by the destruction that had engulfed his homeland immediately after he left it in 1939?

In other words, just because an economy, like nature, is often able to recover from disasters, surely it didn't mean that one should court disasters. And even if it could be demonstrated that the state of things after disasters was in some clear and consistent way always better than the state of things that precede them, relying on disasters to get from A to B did not strike him as a mark of great intelligence. But then what did he know? He was just a journalist.

Harvey had not seen Frances Graham since the election night party at
The Sentinel
, although he had read about her from time to time in the society pages of his own paper. ‘Best not dwell on the unobtainable' had become his mantra, as often repeated as undermined by his own hope and Sylvia's ‘That's not over yet, Harve; you mark my words.' His mother concerned him. She was slowing. He could see that. At her age it was to be expected. But it still came as a shock to realize that her seemingly indestructible nature might be fallible to the ravages of time.

And time was weighing on him too. He and Suzie, a publicist whose career was on the up, had reached an understanding. Their well-organized, weekly encounters were leaving him empty and hungry for something more, although he couldn't honestly say what
that something was. The publicist was excellent company; however her career, even more than his, was always the elephant under the blanket. Sylvia knew about her, but expressed no desire to meet and took his weekly absences from Buttesland Street in her stride.

‘I might ask Trevelyan round to watch some television,' she would say of her charming gay neighbour from two doors down whenever Harvey appeared to hesitate on her account.

His encounters with Peter Betsworth had almost stopped. During the last, it was clear the intelligence officer had started to wonder whether the cure was turning out to be worse than the original disease. In fact, this was a growing concern amongst many of the government's supporters. Britain's first female Prime Minister was turning out to be more single-minded than most had expected. Those in her own party keen to offset her tough love with full-blooded investment into those areas worst affected were branded ‘wets'. Even George Gilder wondered if being a woman inside a male preserve was causing ‘Saint Margaret' to adopt more extreme positions than was wise.

On one thing, though, Peter Betsworth remained adamant: the NUM, he believed, was still deeply infected with communist ideology and this had to be exorcised at all costs. On that, he and the Prime Minister were at one. What his agents were telling him was that the miners themselves were split, with a sizeable minority in the most profitable mines determined not to be dragged down by the rest. A confrontation would come, but not while the government was so unpopular. Even the new Liberal-SDP alliance was ahead of all other parties in the polls and at its annual gathering in September, the Liberal leader had roused his delegates with the ringing war cry that they should go home and prepare for government.

In October, the final six IRA hunger strikers gave up. By then ten were dead and the British public had lost interest.
The Sentinel
hailed the capitulation as a victory for the Prime Minster and a vindication
of her steadfastness. George Gilder penned that one. Like most journalists, Harvey hadn't bothered to go to the Maze Prison when the tenth man died, but suspected none felt comfortable about it. The ease with which people became inured to a cycle of death which didn't directly affect them seemed to be a characteristic of human nature.

Now and again he liked to have a drink with Desmond O'Connor of the
New Irish Times
, just to get a feel for the other side. In the Irish Republic, Desmond told him, perceptions were quite different.

“Did you know that over a hundred thousand attended the funeral of Bobby Sands?”

Harvey said he knew it had been quite a number.

“His election to parliament fair boosted Sinn Féin,” Desmond explained. “It'll be Armalite and ballot box from now on.”

Margaret Thatcher had become as big a hate figure as Republican England's self-styled Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, he said, reminding Harvey that Cromwell's Protestant forces had brutally subjugated Irish Catholicism in 1652–53. “Cromwell even paid his soldiers wid stolen Irish land,” the
Irish Times
reporter exclaimed in mock horror. “T' cheek of it!”

“Our publicity's on t' up t'ough,” he went on with his countrymen's customary black humour. “Back t'en you had to kill several t'ousand of us to be hated: now ten will do!”

C
HAPTER

S
ITTING IN FRONT of him, Stacy looked nervous. Peter Betsworth had been expecting this moment. She was an attractive, intelligent woman and he was loath to lose her.

“I expect you know what I am here to say,” she said.

“Yes, I think so. You've grown close to John Preston, right?”

“Have I been under surveillance, too?”

The intelligence officer allowed himself one of his dry laughs.

“We don't have unlimited resources, unfortunately.”

“I want to be relieved from this operation.”

“I understand,” he responded, pleased that she had not simply handed in her resignation. “Do you intend to go on seeing Mr Preston?”

“I think so,” she answered.

“And how is my Marx?” he asked. “Will he continue working for us?”

“He has not told me he wants to stop, but he does wonder sometimes if anything good is coming out of what he does.”

“I think we all wonder that from time to time,” her handler admitted, “and working in the field does put a particular strain on a
person.”

“Can I ask something more general?” she said.

“Of course, Stacy. What?”

“Who decides what is right or wrong, who to encourage and who to stop?”

“We work for the government, Stacy, as you were taught during your training.”

“But that wasn't the case before the last election, was it?”

“Sooner or later, every intelligence officer finds himself staring into the grey area,” Peter Betsworth started to explain. “If there were always rules to follow, we would be machines, and we are not. The general rule, of course, is that we are here to protect the state.”

“But when the state is the problem,” Stacy interrupted, “or at least when some people in it are, what then?”

“Well there you have the grey area. There was a famous German called Max Weber who helped draft the Weimar Constitution. It was hoped this fine document would lay the foundations of democracy in Germany after the First World War. Sadly he died in 1920 aged only fifty-six after contracting the so-called Spanish Flu that killed millions of people around the world.”

“Nothing the security services could do about that then,” remarked Stacy.

“Quite so,” conceded Peter Betsworth, mildly irritated by her interruption. “Now one of the things Weber argued – and by the way, he is considered a co-founder of sociology, along with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx – was that authority could be categorized into three broad types: charismatic – you submit to someone's authority because you are attracted by his persona; traditional – you submit to someone's authority because he embodies the familiar order of the past as in divinely-ordained kingship; or rational-legal – you submit to someone's authority because rational laws oblige you to.”

“I don't know about Mr Durkheim,” Stacy interrupted again,
“but I hope he was less wrong than Karl Marx proved to be!”

“I am coming to that,” pleaded her boss, unable to suppress a laugh. “Now Max Weber suggested that to run efficiently the state needed a bureaucracy which would operate purely on the basis of rational-legal authority: no cronyism, no corruption, no personal empire building.”

“I'd like to see an organization without any of that!” Stacy protested.

“Which is exactly the point I am trying to make. Take marriage for example: its authority is traditional, but the persona of the male and the female determines its particular character, even as each party abides by certain rational and legal rules which appear to make sense to both. But you tell me what marriage does not have grey areas!”

“Or what relationship,” conceded Stacy.

“OK. Now we are on the same page,” Peter Betsworth noted with evident relief. “The security service is bound by rational-legal rules and these you were taught during training. But contrary to what Weber hoped, it is absolutely impossible for any organ of the state to be politically neutral. In its purest Weberian form, a bureaucracy is simply an instrument of politics, as the bureaucratic path to the gas chambers in his then-blighted country proved to be.”

“But you can't have everyone acting for themselves,” asserted Stacy. “That would produce chaos.”

“Exactly,” Peter Betsworth agreed. “That is the other extreme. Now as a general rule, companies, armies, bureaucracies – any organization in fact – can only function if those individuals who populate it follow its rules. The ‘grey area' enters the picture because every organization is held together by a vision of its purpose which those both inside it and outside it hold in their heads. And unless it is purely mechanical, like a car, there exists no set of rules which can ensure, absolutely, that its ‘purpose' will be fulfilled.

“Our vision of hospitals, for example, is that they exist to cure
ills and save lives. That is what people inside and outside expect them to do. However, if they are put to some other political purpose, are poorly led and badly structured, or are populated by individuals without the requisite skills and equipment, they will start to lose internal cohesion and external credibility. In short, they will fail.”

“I think I might know a hospital like that,” said Stacy.

“Sadly, so might I,” agreed Peter Betsworth. “Now, Stacy, if you cast your mind back to the 1970s you will recall that the country was functioning very poorly. Large swathes of industry were nominally under government control. This meant that steel mills, mining operations and automobile plants were no longer in existence because someone wanted to purchase their products. They were part of government with a claim against the public purse which their unions and to some extent even their managers, were more than happy to exploit. This led to rampant inflation, because governments virtually printed money to pay the bills, and horrendous inefficiencies because the link between what these organizations did and their customers had been utterly corrupted.

“You might be surprised if I told you, Stacy, how many individuals in the then-Labour government, in the nationalized industries and even in the unions concluded, privately, that the structures they found themselves with had become wholly dysfunctional. We saw our job, in the security services, as trying to facilitate a major change, ideally through the democratic process, even though that same process got us into the mess in the first place.

“So how about that, for a grey area?” he laughed. “A rational-legal bureaucracy that had become irrational and possibly even illegal, but certainly conflicted, requiring a personality strong enough to put it right and traditional enough, in the democratic sense, to be accepted.”

“So we really were trying to protect the country?” Stacy said, with noticeable satisfaction.

“Yes we were, and still are.”

“But things seem to be in a terrible mess all over again,” she protested. “Just a different sort of mess.”

Peter Betsworth simply shrugged. He disliked what was going on as much as everyone.

“Are you going to tell your John?” he asked after a while.

“I think I must if we're going to get anywhere,” she answered.

He clasped his hands in front of his face. For close on a minute he sat there in deep concentration while Stacy turned over in her head everything he had said.

“I have been thinking of making him permanent, not just a paid informer. Do you imagine he would be interested?”

“Yes, he might. He knows he would be a marked man inside any union if his cover was ever blown.”

“Quite,” he acknowledged. And then after a further pause he said, “It's probably best that you tell him now that you've taken yourself off his case. At least that's natural. He should be flattered you've fallen for him.”

“Grey areas,” mused Stacy.

“Life is full of them,” he said, “which is why each of us needs that still, small voice of calm some call God.”

“Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,” she quoted. “It was one of my mother's favourites.”

As they parted company, Peter Betsworth felt a glow of satisfaction. Stacy was his recruit. He liked her.