Mightier Than the Sword Read online

  Alf swept through an unmarked entrance onto runway three at Heathrow and came to a halt at the bottom of the boarding stairs that led up to the aircraft. If Giles didn’t retain his seat in the cabinet after the election, he was going to miss all this. Back to joining baggage queues, check-in counters, passport control, security checks, long walks to the gate, and then an endless wait before you were finally told you could board the plane.

  Alf opened the backdoor and Giles climbed the steps to the waiting aircraft. Don’t get used to it, Harold Wilson had once warned him. Only the Queen can afford to do that.

  Giles was the last passenger to board and the door was pulled closed as he took his seat in the front row, next to his permanent secretary.

  “Good morning, minister,” he said. Not a man who wasted time on small talk. “Although on the face of it, minister,” he continued, “this conference doesn’t look at all promising, there could be several opportunities for us to take advantage of.”

  “Such as?”

  “The PM needs to know if Ulbricht is about to be replaced as general secretary. If he is, they’ll be sending out smoke signals and we need to find out who’s been chosen to replace him.”

  “Will it make any difference?” asked Giles. “Whoever gets the job will still be phoning reverse charges to Moscow before he can take any decisions.”

  “While the foreign secretary,” the civil servant continued, ignoring the remark, “is keen for you to discover if this would be a good time for the UK to make another application to join the EEC.”

  “Has De Gaulle died when I wasn’t looking?”

  “No, but his influence has waned since his retirement last year, and Pompidou might feel the time has come to flex his muscles.”

  The two men spent the rest of the flight going over the official agenda, and what HMG hoped to get out of the conference: a nudge here, a wink there, whenever an understanding had been reached.

  When the plane taxied to a halt at Berlin’s Tegel airport, the British ambassador was waiting for them at the bottom of the steps. With the help of a police escort, the Rolls-Royce whisked them across West Berlin, but came to an abrupt halt when it reached Checkpoint Charlie, as the Western Allies had dubbed the wall’s best-known crossing point.

  Giles looked up at the ugly, graffiti-covered wall, crowned with barbed wire. The Berlin Wall had been raised in 1961, virtually overnight, to stop the flood of people who were emigrating from East to West. East Berlin was now one giant prison, which wasn’t much of an advertisement for Communism. If it had really been the utopia the Communists claimed, thought Giles, it would have been the West Germans who would have had to build a wall to prevent their unhappy citizens from escaping to the East.

  “If I had a pickax…” he said.

  “I would have to stop you,” said the ambassador. “Unless of course you wanted to cause a diplomatic incident.”

  “It would take more than a diplomatic incident to stop my brother-in-law fighting for what he believes in,” said Giles.

  Once their passports had been checked, they were able to leave the Western sector, which allowed the driver to advance another couple of hundred yards before coming to a halt in no-man’s-land. Giles looked up at the armed guards in their turrets, staring down grim-faced at their British guests.

  They remained parked between the two borders, while the Rolls-Royce was checked from the front bumper to the boot, as if it were a Sherman tank, before they were eventually permitted to enter East Berlin. But without the assistance of a police escort, it took them another hour before they reached their hotel on the other side of the city.

  Once they had checked in and been handed their keys, the golden rule was for the minister to swap rooms with his permanent secretary so he wouldn’t be troubled by call girls, or have to watch every word he said because his room would certainly be bugged. But the Stasi had caught on to that ruse and now simply bugged both rooms.

  “If you want to have a private conversation,” said the ambassador, “the bathroom, with the taps running, is the only safe place.”

  Giles unpacked, showered, and came back downstairs to join some Dutch and Swedish colleagues for a late lunch. Although they were old friends, it didn’t stop them pumping each other for information.

  “So tell me, Giles, is Labour going to win the election?” asked Stellen Christerson, the Swedish foreign minister.

  “Officially, we can’t lose. Unofficially, it’s too close to call.”

  “And if you do win, will Mr. Wilson make you foreign secretary?”

  “Unofficially, I have to be in with a chance.”

  “And officially?” asked Jan Hilbert, the Dutch minister.

  “I shall serve Her Majesty’s Government in whatever capacity the prime minister thinks fit.”

  “And I’m going to win the next Monte Carlo Rally,” said Hilbert.

  “And I’m going back to my suite to check over my papers,” said Giles, aware that only debutants sat around drinking just to end up spending the next day yawning. You had to be wide awake if you hoped to catch the one unguarded revelation that often made hours of negotiating worthwhile.

  * * *

  The conference opened the following morning with a speech by the East German general secretary, Walter Ulbricht, who welcomed the delegates. It was clear that the contents had been written in Moscow, while the words were delivered by the Soviets’ puppet in East Berlin.

  Giles leaned back, closed his eyes, and pretended to listen to the translation of a speech he’d heard several times before, but his mind soon began to wander. Suddenly he heard an anxious voice ask, “I hope there’s nothing wrong with my translation, Sir Giles?”

  Giles glanced around. The Foreign Office had made it clear that, although every minister would have their own interpreter, they came with a health warning. Most of them worked for the Stasi, and any unfortunate remark or lapse in behavior would undoubtedly be reported back to their masters in the East German Politburo.

  What had taken Giles by surprise was not so much the concerned inquiry made by the young woman, as the fact that he could have sworn he detected a slight West Country accent.

  “Your translation is just fine,” he said, taking a closer look at her. “It’s just that I’ve heard this speech, or a slight variation of it, several times before.”

  She was wearing a gray shapeless dress that nearly reached her ankles, and that could only have been purchased off the peg from a comrades’ cooperative store. But she possessed something you couldn’t buy at Harrods, luxuriant auburn hair that had been plaited and wound into a severe bun, to hide any suggestion of femininity. It was as if she didn’t want anyone to notice her. But her big brown eyes and captivating smile would have caused most men to take a second look, including Giles. She was like one of those ugly ducklings in a film that you know will turn out in the last scene to be a swan.

  It stank of a setup. Giles immediately assumed she worked for the Stasi, and wondered if he could catch her out.

  “You have a slight West Country burr if I’m not mistaken,” he whispered.

  She nodded and displayed the same disarming smile. “My father was born in Truro.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I was born in East Berlin. My father met my mother when he was stationed here with the British Army in 1947.”

  “That can’t have been met with universal approval,” suggested Giles.

  “He had to resign his commission, and he then took a job in Germany so he could be with her.”

  “A true romantic.”

  “But the story doesn’t have a romantic ending, I’m afraid. More John Galsworthy than Charlotte Brontë, because when the wall went up in 1961, my father was in Cornwall visiting his parents and we’ve never seen him since.”

  Giles remained cautious. “That doesn’t make any sense, because if your father is a UK national you and your mother could make an application to visit Britain at any time.”

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