Henry Collingridge was in a good mood and enjoying his eggs. He had finished his conference speech in the early hours of the morning, and had left his staff to tidy it up and have it typed while he went to bed. He had slept soundly if briefly for the first time during conference week.
The end-of-conference speech always hung over his head like a dark cloud. He disliked conferences and the small talk, the week away from home, the over-indulgence around the dinner tables - and the speech. Most of all the speech. Long hours of anguished discussion in a smoke-filled hotel room, breaking off just when progress seemed in sight in order to attend some ball-breaking function or reception, resuming a considerable time later and trying to pick up where they had left off, only more tired and less inspired. If the speech was good, it was only what they expected and required. If it was poor, they still applauded but said the strain of office was beginning to show. Sod's Law.
But it was now almost over, bar the delivery. The Prime Minister was enjoying breakfast with his wife, watched carefully from surrounding tables by his personal Special
Branch detectives. He was discussing the merits of a winter holiday in Antigua or Sri Lanka.
‘I would recommend Sri Lanka this year’ he said. ‘You can stay on the beach if you want, Sarah, but I would rather like to take a couple of trips into the mountains. They have some ancient Buddhist monasteries and some nearby wildlife reserves which are supposed to be quite spectacular. The Sri Lankan President was describing them to me last year, and they sounded really... Darling, you're not listening!'
'Sorry, Henry. I was... just looking at that gentleman's newspaper.'
'More interesting than me, is it? What's it got to say, then?'
He began to feel ill at ease, remembering that no one had yet given him his daily press cuttings. Someone would surely have told him had there been anything that important.
Come to think of it, he had never felt comfortable since his staff had persuaded him that he didn't need to spend his time reading the daily newspapers, that an edited summary of press clippings prepared by them would be more efficient. But were they? Civil servants had their own narrow views on what was important for a Prime Minister's day, and he found increasingly that their briefing on party political matters was scant. Particularly when there was bad news, the controversy and the in-fighting, he often had to find out from others, sometimes days or weeks after the event. He began to wonder if eventually he would never find out at all, and some great political crisis would burst upon the Party about which he was kept blissfully unaware. They were trying to protect him, of course, but the cocoon they spun around him would, he feared, eventually stifle him.
He remembered the first time he had stepped inside 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister. He had left the crowds and the television crews outside and, as the great black door closed behind him, he had discovered an extraordinary sight.
On one side of the great hallway leading away from the door had gathered some 200 civil servants, his civil servants now, who were applauding him loudly - just as they had done Thatcher, Callaghan, Wilson and Heath, and just as they would his successor. On the other side of the hallway facing the host of civil servants stood his political staff, the team of loyal supporters he had hurriedly assembled around him as his campaign to succeed Margaret Thatcher had begun to take off, and whom he had invited to Downing Street to enjoy this historic moment. There were just seven of them, four assistants and three secretaries, dwarfed in their new surroundings.
He told his wife afterwards that it was rather like the Eton Wall Game, with two hugely unequal sides lined up to do battle, with no clear rules and with him cast as both the ball and the prize. He had felt almost relieved when three senior civil servants called an end to the proceedings by physically surrounding him and guiding him off to the Cabinet Room for his first Prime Ministerial briefing. One of the party officials present had described it more as an Assumption, with the Prime Minister disappearing into a different world surrounded by a band of guardian angels -Civil Service, Grade 1, Prime Ministers, for the Protection and Guidance Thereof: Exclusive. His party officials had scarcely seen him for the next six months as they were effectively squeezed out by the official machine, and none of the original band was still left.
Collingridge's attention returned to the newspaper being read at the far-off breakfast table. At such a distance he had great difficulty in bringing it fully into focus, and he fumbled for his glasses, perching them on the end of his nose and trying not to stare too hard. He found his air of studied indifference difficult to maintain as the large headline print came into focus.
‘Poll crisis hits Government', it screamed. PM's future in doubt as personal slump hits party'. 'By-election disaster feared'. And this in what was supposed to be the most loyal of newspapers.
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 not 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 ever be considered to qualify as hard' 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.
‘Just 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.