I'm afraid I can only give you a rudimentary receipt. Perhaps you would prefer to deliver the money directly to the party treasurers.'
Jhabwala threw up his hands in horror. 'Sir, I do not require a receipt from you. You have my fullest trust. It was you as my local Member of Parliament I wished to see, not a party official. I have even taken the liberty of engraving your initials on the hide case, Mr Urquhart, a small gesture which I hope you will accept for all your dutiful work in Surrey.'
You crafty, ingratiating little sod, thought Urquhart, all the while smiling broadly at Jhabwala and wondering how long it would be before he got the first call about planning permission. Perhaps he should have thrown the Indian out, but an idea was already forming in his mind. He reached across the table and shook Jhabwala's hand warmly.
It has been a great pleasure meeting you at last, Mr Jhabwala.'
The night was hot and humid, even for late July. Mat tie had taken a long, cool shower and thrown the windows wide open, but she could get no relief from the still and heavy air. She lay in the darkness upon her bed, feeling her hair stick clammily to the nape of her neck. She could not sleep while the scenes of parliamentary turmoil she had witnessed earlier in the day kept tumbling through her thoughts. But there was something else, too, something not of the mind but in her body that was disturbing her, making her restless.
She lay back on her lonely, cold bed and felt the dampness trickling between her shoulder blades. She could not forget that it was the first time since Yorkshire she had sweated in bed, for any reason...
The following morning a young black woman walked into a scruffy newsagents just off Praed Street in Paddington and enquired after the cost of accommodation address facilities advertised on the card in the shop window. She explained that she was working in the area and needed a local address to which she could direct her mail. It was a brilliant summer's day in London, but behind the thick shutters and dirty windows the shop was dark and musty. At first the fleshy, balding assistant behind the counter scarcely lifted his eyes from his copy of Playboy. This was one of London's notorious red light areas, and young women or seedy men asking to open an accommodation address was one of the less surprising requests he had to deal with. This girl was particularly attractive, though, and he wondered where she did business. His wife was staying with her mother over the weekend, and a little distraction would be better than the long list of household jobs she was threatening to leave behind.
He brushed away the cigarette ash he had spilled over the counter and smiled encouragingly at her. He got no response, however. With scarcely another word, the young woman paid the fee for the minimum three months, carefully put away the receipt which would be needed for identification, and left.
The assistant had time only for one last look at the retreating and beautifully curved backside before he was engaged by the complaints of an old age pensioner who had not yet received her morning newspaper, and he did not see the young woman get into the taxi outside.
'All right, Pen?' asked the man waiting inside.
‘No problem, Roger’ his secretary answered. 'But why couldn't he do it himself?'
'Look, I told you that he has some delicate personal problems to sort out and needs some privacy for his mail. Dirty magazines for all I know. So no questions, and not a word to anyone. OK?'
Urquhart had sworn him to secrecy, and he suspected that the Chief Whip would be furious if he discovered that O'Neill had got Penny Guy to carry out his dirty work. But he knew he could trust Penny with such chores. After all, what were secretaries for?
As the taxi drew away, Penny once again remarked to herself how strangely O'Neill was beginning to act nowadays.
The day was growing ever hotter by the time the man in the sports jacket and trilby hat ventured into the North London branch of the Union Bank of Turkey on the Seven Sisters Road. The Cypriot counter clerk often swore that Englishmen only ever had one set of clothes which they wore throughout the winter or summer, irrespective of the temperature. And this one obviously had money since he wanted to open an account. In a slight but perceptible regional accent which the clerk could not quite place, he explained that he lived in Kenya but was visiting the United Kingdom for a few months to develop the holiday business which he ran. He was interested in investing in a hotel which was being built just outside the Turkish resort of Antalya, on the southern Mediterranean coast.
The clerk responded that he did not know Antalya personally, but had heard that it was a beautiful spot, and of course the bank would be delighted to help him in whatever way possible. He offered the prospective customer a simple registration form, requiring details of his name, address, previous banking reference and other details.
Five minutes later, the customer had returned to the clerk's window with the completed form. He apologised f6r being able to provide a banking reference only from Kenya, but this was his first trip to London in nearly twenty years. The clerk assured the older man that the bank was very accustomed to dealing with overseas enquiries, and the banking reference in Kenya would be no problem.
That's what you think, the other thought. He knew it would take at least four weeks for the reference to be checked, and probably another four before it could be clearly established that the reference was false. By that time the account would have been closed with all bank charges paid, so no one would care or question.
The clerk sought no further verification of any of the other items on the form. 'How would you like to open your account, sir?'
‘I would like to make an initial deposit of £50,000 - in cash’
The man pulled open a brown corduroy holdall and passed the bundles of notes across the counter. He was glad he did not have to count them. It had been years since he had last worn these glasses, and in the meantime he had changed his contact lens prescription twice. His eyes were not focusing properly and they ached, but Urquhart knew that his simple disguise would be more than enough to avoid recognition by any but his closest colleagues. There was after all some benefit in being the most faceless senior member of Her Majesty's Government, he told himself sarcastically. He delighted at long last in being able to take advantage of his enforced anonymity.
The clerk had finished counting the money, with a colleague double checking the total, and was already filling out a receipt. Banks are like plumbers, Urquhart thought, cash in hand and no questions asked.
'Rather than have the cash just sitting idle in a current account, I would like you to purchase some shares for me. Can you arrange that?' he requested.
It took only another five minutes for Urquhart to fill out two further forms placing an order for 20,000 ordinary shares in the Renox Chemical Company PLC, currently trading at just over 240p per share. He was assured that the order would be completed by 4 p.m. that afternoon, at a cost of £49,288 including stamp duties and brokers' fees, leaving him exactly £712 in his new account Urquhart signed the forms with a flourish and a signature that was illegible.
The clerk smiled as he pushed the receipt across the counter. 'A great pleasure doing business with you, Mr Collingridge’
Seventy-two hours later MPs gathered in the House to begin the final week of bickering before the summer recess. There were relatively few Members present, as many of their colleagues had tried to take their leave of London early. There had been little attempt to dissuade them, since there was already enough tetchiness around Westminster without piling on needless aggravation. There was very much an end-of-term mood amongst the parliamentarians and little business was done. However, the Hansard record of parliamentary proceedings for that day would be thick, fleshed out with a remarkable number of Written Answers to MPs' questions which the Government were anxious to deal with while attention was diverted elsewhere and before Ministers and their civil servants left for their own recuperation. Ministers from the Department of Health were particularly careful not to be seen around the corridors of Westminster that day, because one of the many Written Answers they had issued concerned the long-awaited postponement of the hospital expansion programme. They did not expect to get much comfort from MPs of any party on that subject.
It was not surprising, therefore, that few noted another announcement from the Department concerning a list of three drugs which the Government, on the advice of their Chief Medical Officer and the Committee on the Safety of Medicines, were now licensing for general use. One of the drugs was Cybernox, a new medication developed by the Renox Chemical Company PLC which had proved startlingly effective in controlling the craving for nicotine when fed in small doses to addicted rats and beagles. The same excellent results had been obtained during extensive test programmes with humans, and now the drug had been approved for general use under doctor's prescription.
The announcement caused a flurry of activity at Renox Chemicals. A press conference for the medical and scientific press was called for the following day, the Marketing Director pressed the button on a pre-planned mail shot to every single general practitioner throughout the country, and the company's broker informed the Stock Exchange of the new licence.
The response was immediate. Shares in the Renox Chemical Company PLC jumped from 244p to 295p. The 20,000 ordinary shares purchased two days before by the Union Bank of Turkey's brokers were now worth exactly £59,000.
Shortly before noon the next day, a telephone call instructed the bank to sell the shares and credit the amount to the appropriate account. The caller also explained that regrettably the hotel venture in Antalya was not proceeding, and the account holder was returning to Kenya. Would the bank be kind enough to close the account, and expect a visit from the account holder later that afternoon?
Just before the bank closed at 3 p.m. the same bespectacled man in the hat and sports jacket walked into the branch on Seven Sisters Road and collected £58,962 which he placed in bundles of £20 notes in the bottom of his brown corduroy bag. He bridled at the £750 in charges which the bank had levied on his short-lived and simple account but, as the deputy manager had suspected, he chose not to make a fuss. He asked for a closing statement to be sent to him at his address in Paddington, and thanked the clerk for his courtesy.
The following morning and less than one week after Firdaus Jhabwala had met with Urquhart, the Chief Whip delivered £50,000 in cash to the party treasurers. Substantial payments in cash were not unique, and the treasurers expressed delight at discovering a new source of funds. Urquhart suggested that the treasurers office make the usual arrangements to ensure that the donor and his wife were invited to a charity reception or two at Downing Street, and asked to lie informed when this happened so that he could make a specific arrangement with the Prime Minister's political secretary to ensure that Mr and Mrs Jhabwala had ten minutes alone with the Prime Minister beforehand. One of the party treasurers made a careful note of the donor's address, said that he would write an immediate cryptic letter of thanks, and locked the money in a safe.
Probably uniquely amongst Cabinet Ministers, Urquhart left for holiday that night feeling utterly relaxed.
The newspapers during August were dreadful. With politicians and the main political correspondents all away, second string lobby correspondents struggled to fill the vacuum and develop any story they could which would get their by-line on the front page. So they clutched at whispers and rumour. What was on Tuesday only a minor piece of speculation on page five of the Guardian had become by Friday a hard news story on the front page of the Daily Mail. This was the chance for the junior correspondents to make their mark, and the mark they chose to make was all too frequently on the reputation of Henry Collingridge. Minor backbenchers who were too self-promoting even to take a break during the holiday season were honoured with significant pieces quoting 'senior party spokesmen', putting forward their views as to where the Government was going wrong and how a new sense of direction had to be imposed. Rumours about the Prime Minister's dissatisfaction with and distrust of his Cabinet colleagues abounded, and since there was no one around authoritatively to deny the rumours, the silence was taken as authoritative consent. So the speculation fed on itself and ran riot. The early August rumours about an 'official inquisition' into Cabinet leaks had, by later in the month, grown into predictions that there would after all be a reshuffle in the autumn. The word around Westminster had it that Henry Collingridge's temper was getting increasingly erratic, even though he was in fact enjoying a secluded holiday on a private estate many hundreds of miles away near Cannes.
The Prime Minister's brother also became the subject of a spate of press stories, mostly in the gossip columns, and the Downing Street press office was repeatedly called upon to comment on suggestions that the Prime Minister was bailing out 'dear old Charlie' from the increasingly close attentions of his creditors, including the Inland Revenue. But Downing Street would not comment - it was personal, not official - so the formal 'no comment' which was given to the most fanciful of accusations was recorded in the news coverage, usually in the most damaging light.
As August drew on, with only the lightest of nudges down the telephone from Urquhart, the press tied the Prime Minister ever more closely to his impecunious brother. Not that Charlie was saying anything stupid. He had the common sense to keep well out of the way, but an anonymous telephone call to one of the sensationalist Sunday newspapers enabled them to track him down to a cheap hotel in rural Bordeaux. A reporter was despatched to pour enough wine down him to encourage a few vintage 'Charlie-isms', but instead succeeded only in making Charlie violently sick over the reporter and his notebook, before passing out. The reporter promptly paid £50 to a big-busted girl with a low-cut dress to lean over the slumbering form, while a photographer captured the tender moment for posterity and the newspaper's 11 million readers.
"I'm broke and busted" says Charlie' screamed the headline, while the copy reported for the umpteenth time the fact that the Prime Minister's brother was nearly destitute and cracking under the pressure of a failed marriage and a famous brother. Downing Street's 'absolutely no comment' seemed in the circumstances even more uncaring than usual.
The next weekend the same photograph was run alongside one of the Prime Minister holidaying in considerable comfort in the South of France - to English eyes a mere stone's throw from his ailing brother - and seemingly unwilling to leave his poolside to help. The fact that the same newspaper a week earlier had been reporting how deeply Henry was involved in sorting out Charlie's financial affairs seemed to have been forgotten - until the Downing Street press office called the editor to complain.
'What do you want?' came the reply. ‘We give both sides of the story. We backed him warts and all throughout the election campaign. Now it's time to restore the balance a bit.'
Yes, the newspapers during August were dreadful.
September was even worse. As the new month opened, the Leader of the Opposition announced that he was resigning to make way for 'a stronger arm with which to hold our banner aloft'. He had always been a little too verbose for his own good.
Like most political leaders he was pushed by the younger men around him who had more energy and more ambition, who made their move quietly and secretly almost without his knowing until it was too late and he had announced his intention to resign in an emotional late night interview. For a moment he seemed to have changed his mind under pressure from his still intensely ambitious wife, until he discovered that he could no longer rely on a single vote in his Shadow Cabinet. Yet they were warm in their praise of their fallen leader. As so often happens, the faithful were far more effusively united by his death than by anything he had achieved in office.
The news electrified the media, and Mattie was summoned back from her beach in Zakynthos, much to her silent relief. Eight days of lying in the sun watching couples grow increasingly tender and uninhibited in the Ionian sun had made her feel utterly miserable. She was lonely, very lonely, and the loving couples around her only served to rub the point home. When the telephone call came instructing her to return to cover the breaking story, she packed her bags without complaint and found a seat on the next flight home.
She returned to discover an Opposition Party which had been galvanised. Their seemingly endless internal divisions were now being played down as they stepped up the attack on a lacklustre Government, most of whose members were still away on holiday. The real prospect of power at the next election, even one which was still perhaps four years away, was helping to focus Opposition minds and encourage fraternal thoughts. Better as one of twenty senior Cabinet Ministers in Government than the sole Party Leader in endless Opposition, one explained.