First Among Equals Read online

  “Your daughter died forty minutes ago when her heart stopped beating. Believe me, we tried everything.”

  Andrew collapsed on the bench in the corridor and didn’t speak for several moments. “How’s Louise?” was all he could eventually manage.

  “She hasn’t been told yet. She’s still under sedation. Be thankful she never saw the baby.”

  Andrew thumped his leg until it was numb. He stopped suddenly. “I’ll tell her myself,” he said quietly and remained on the bench, tears coursing down his cheeks. Elizabeth sat down beside him but didn’t speak. When she left it was only to check that Mrs. Fraser was ready to see her husband.

  Louise knew the moment Andrew walked in. It was over an hour before she managed to speak.

  “I bet Alison McKenzie would have given you a dozen sons,” she said, trying to make him smile.

  “No doubt about that,” said Andrew, “but they would have all been ugly and stupid.”

  “I agree with you,” said Louise. “But that wouldn’t have been her fault.”

  They both tried to laugh.

  Andrew returned to Cheyne Walk a little after four o’clock, but he didn’t sleep again that night.

  The great orator lain Macleod once remarked that it was the first two minutes of a speech that decided one’s fate. One either grasps the House and commands it or dithers, and loses it, and once the House is lost it can rarely be brought to heel. When Charles Seymour was invited to present the winding-up speech for the Opposition during the Economic debate, he felt he had prepared himself well, and although he knew he could not expect to convert Government back-benchers to his argument he hoped the press would acknowledge the following day that he had won the argument and embarrassed the Government. The Administration was already rocking over daily rumors of devaluation and economic trouble, and Charles was confident that this was the chance to make his name.

  Full parliamentary debates usually start at three-thirty, after question time, but can be delayed if there are ministerial statements to be made. The senior minister in the department concerned makes the opening speech for approximately thirty minutes and then the Opposition spokesman addresses the House for the same period of time. Between four-thirty and nine the debate is thrown open to the floor and the Speaker tries to be scrupulously fair in calling a cross-section of back-benchers who have demonstrated an interest in the subject, as well as preserving a party and regional balance. These back-bencher speeches are frowned on if they last for more than fifteen minutes. Some of the most memorable speeches delivered in the House have lasted eight or nine minutes, some of the worst over thirty.

  At nine o’clock the Opposition spokesman makes his final comments, and at nine-thirty a Government minister winds up.

  When Charles rose and stood at the dispatch box he intended to press home the Tory case on the Government’s economic record, the fatal consequences of devaluation, the record inflation, coupled with record borrowing and a lack of confidence in Britain unknown in any member’s lifetime.

  He stood his full height and stared down belligerently at the Government benches.

  “Mr. Speaker,” he began, “I can’t think

  “Then don’t bother to speak,” someone shouted from the Labour benches. Laughter broke out as Charles tried to compose himself, cursing his initial over-confidence. He began again.

  “I can’t imagine …”

  “No imagination either,” came another voice. “Typical Tory.”

  “ … why this motion was ever put before the House.”

  “Certainly not for you to give us a lesson in public speaking.”

  “Order,” growled the Speaker, but it was too late.

  The House was lost and Charles stumbled through thirty minutes of embarrassment until no one but the Speaker was listening to a word he said. Several members of his own front bench had their feet up on the table and their eyes closed. Back-benchers on either side sat chattering amongst themselves waiting for the ten o’clock division: the ultimate humiliation the House affords to its worst debaters. The Speaker had to call for order several times during Charles’s speech, once rising to rebuke noisy members, “The House does its reputation no service by behaving in this way.” But his plea fell on deaf ears as the conversations continued. At nine-thirty Charles sat down in a cold sweat. A few of his own back-benchers managed to raise an unconvincing “Hear, hear.”

  When the Government minister opened his speech by describing Charles’s offering as among the most pathetic he had heard in a long political career he may well have been exaggerating, but from the expressions on the Tory front benches not many Opposition members were going to disagree with him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE DECISION WAS finally made by the inner Cabinet of twelve on Thursday, 16 November 1967. By Friday every bank clerk in Tokyo was privy to the inner Cabinet’s closest secret, and by the time the Prime Minister made the announcement official on Saturday afternoon the Bank of England had lost 600 million dollars of reserves on the foreign exchange market.

  At the time of the Prime Minister’s statement Raymond was in Leeds conducting one of his fortnightly constituency “surgeries.” He was in the process of explaining the new housing bill to a young married couple when Fred Padgett, his agent, burst into the room.

  “Raymond, sorry to interrupt you, but I thought you’d want to know immediately. No. 10 have just announced that the pound has been devalued from two dollars eighty to two dollars forty.” The sitting member was momentarily stunned, the local housing problem driven from his mind. He stared blankly across the table at the two constituents who had come to seek his advice.

  “Will you please excuse me for a moment, Mr. Higginbottom,” Raymond asked courteously, “but I must make a phone call.” The moment turned out to be fifteen minutes, in which time Raymond had made contact with a senior civil servant from the Treasury and had all the details confirmed. He called Joyce and told her not to answer the phone until he arrived back home. It was several minutes before he felt composed enough to put his head round the office door.

  “How many people are still waiting to see me, Fred?” he asked.

  “After the Higginbottoms there’s only the mad major, still convinced that Martians are about to land on the roof of Leeds town hall.”

  “Why would they want to come to Leeds first?” asked Raymond, trying to hide his anxiety with false humor.

  “Once they’ve captured Yorkshire, the rest would be easy.”

  “Hard to find fault with that argument. Nevertheless, tell the major I’m deeply concerned but I need to study his claim in more detail and to seek further advice from the Ministry of Defense. Make an appointment for him to see me at the next surgery and by then I should have a strategic plan ready for him.”

  Fred Padgett grinned. “That will give him something to tell his friends about for at least two weeks.”

  Raymond returned to Mr. and Mrs. Higginbottom and assured them he would have their housing problem sorted out within a few days. He made a note on his file to ring the Leeds Council Housing Officer.

  “What an afternoon,” exclaimed Raymond after the door had closed behind them. “One wife-beating, one electricity turned off by the YEB with four children under ten in the house, one pollution of the Aire river, and one appalling housing problem—never forgetting the mad major and his itinerant Martians. And on top of all of that the devaluation news.”

  “How can you remain so calm?” asked Fred Padgett.

  “Because I can’t afford to let anyone know how I really feel.”

  After his surgery Raymond would normally have gone round to the local pub for a pint and an obligatory natter with the locals. This always gave him the chance to catch up on what had been happening in Leeds during the past fortnight. But on this occasion he bypassed the pub and returned quickly to his parents’ home.

  Joyce told him that the phone had rung so often that she had finally taken it off the hook, without letting his mother kno