A Very British Coup Page 4

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, Minister,” said Sir Richard Fry, the Permanent Secretary, “I think you have made a big mistake.”

  “Time will tell,” Perkins had replied.

  Time did tell. Several years later at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania an overheated uranium core in a water-cooled reactor led to a radiation leak and the evacuation of a large number of people from their homes. Shortly after the incident Perkins, who had long since returned to the backbenches, received a hand-written note in an envelope bearing the seal of the Public Sector Department. The note, in elegant italic script, said simply: “You were right. We were wrong.” It was signed Richard Fry.

  Perkins had the letter framed and hung it on the wall of his room in the House of Commons.

  It was during the reactor negotiations that Perkins first met Molly Spence. The managing director of British Insulated had come to see Perkins at the Department. He had brought with him his head of research and development, two scientists to advise on safety aspects and a striking blonde girl who took notes. She was aged twenty-seven, her nose was lightly freckled and her expensive accent had a trace of Yorkshire.

  Mid-morning they broke for coffee. Someone from the private office produced a packet of digestive biscuits and the girl took hers and walked over to the window. Perkins followed.

  “I like your view,” she said, indicating the River Thames. She was standing sideways on to the window, half looking at Perkins, half at the river. The light on her face made her eyes gleam.

  “I don’t get much chance to look at it,” said Perkins, drawing alongside. A convoy of red buses passed over Lambeth Bridge and below, on the river, a barge passed on its way to Hammersmith.

  “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “That sort of castle on the other side of the bridge.”

  “Lambeth Palace, where the Archbishop of Canterbury lives.”

  “He’s done all right for himself.” She smiled lightly.

  “Aye,” said Perkins, “the Church of England’s worth a bob or two.”

  They were interrupted by a private secretary who came with letters to be signed. Perkins took a fountain pen from his inside pocket and signed, scarcely glancing at the letters. The girl waited in silence, staring out at the river. It was Perkins who broke the silence. “Sounds like you’re a Yorkshire lass.”

  “Sheffield,” she said.

  “That’s where I’m from.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Before he could speak again the private secretary was back. “Minister, I think we ought to make a start. You have the Select Committee at noon.” There was a clinking of crockery as a lady with a trolley collected the cups. They turned and walked back to the conference table and she said, almost in a whisper, “I think you knew my dad.”

  “Did I?”

  “Jack Spence, works manager at Firth Brown.”

  “Good heavens,” said Perkins, “is he your father?”

  She nodded. They did not get a chance to talk again, but when British Insulated came back to the Department two weeks later, Perkins slipped her an envelope. He tried to do it discreetly so that the private office would not gossip, but he had been seen. David Booth, a young high-flyer on secondment from the Treasury to the nuclear division of the Public Sector Department saw the girl put the envelope in her handbag. At the time he thought nothing of it. The girl was beautiful and the Secretary of State was unmarried. He might have done the same himself had Perkins not beaten him to it.

  Molly was dying to open the envelope. On the way out she excused herself and disappeared into the ladies. She cut along the top of the envelope with a nail file. Inside was a single sheet of notepaper which at the top bore the legend “From the Secretary of State”. The message inside written in red ink simply said: “Lunch Sunday? Ring me at midnight.” And then a telephone number.

  There was nothing else. The envelope did not even bear her name. Afterwards it occurred to Molly that this was because Perkins did not know her name. Trembling slightly she stuffed the letter into her handbag and went to catch up with her boss who was waiting in the main reception. That evening, at midnight precisely, she telephoned to say “Yes.”

  Where women were concerned, Harry Perkins was a late developer. He passed through Parkside Secondary School without ever giving the girls in his class a second glance. It was not that he didn’t have friends. There was Nobby Jones whose father was a signalman on the railway. Bill Spriggs, who lived in Jubilee Street, which backed on to the same alley as the Perkins house. And Danny Parker, whose father also worked at Firth Brown. They were all in the same class and went around together. At weekends and during school holidays Nobby’s father would sometimes smuggle them into his signal box, where they would sit for hours, with notepads and pencils, jotting down engine numbers. Sometimes when it rained they would go back to Perkins’ house and play cards, gin rummy usually. They used to sit round the dining-room table, each with a heap of used threepenny stamps as the stake. Harry never had much luck with cards and very often his supply of used stamps was cleaned out by the end of an afternoon. “Never mind, Harry,” Mrs Perkins used to say, “unlucky in cards, lucky in love.”

  As it turned out Perkins didn’t have much luck with love either. By the time they reached the fourth form the other lads had lost interest in train-spotting and gin rummy. Instead they took up girls and pop music.

  It was in a rather downmarket coffee bar called Brady’s that romance first blossomed. Bill Spriggs and Nobby Jones both did paper rounds and so they could afford to spend the after-school hours sitting round Brady’s formica-topped tables tapping their toes to music from the juke box and making a single cup of Brady’s awful coffee stretch out over two hours. Occasionally Perkins went with them, but his shilling-a-week pocket money did not run to many cups of coffee, let alone allow for feeding the juke box. Besides, he was not much interested. By the time he was fourteen he preferred to spend an hour browsing through the newspapers in the reading room of the city library. It was the time of the Korean war. Day by day in the Daily Worker young Perkins would follow the progress of MacArthur’s army as it inched its way up the Korean peninsula towards the border with China. One evening in Brady’s he tried to interest Danny Parker in Korea, but all Danny could talk about was a third-form girl called Lucy Marston whom he had just taken up with. “Last night she let me feel her tits,” exulted Danny.

  Perkins was disgusted. “Here we are with the world about to blow up and all you’re interested in is Lucy Marston’s tits.” That was the last time he went to Brady’s. Most weekends he stayed at home reading. Now and then he would go with his schoolmates to see United play; sometimes a crowd of them would go to the cinema. Danny and Nobby would bring their girl-friends along, but Perkins always played gooseberry. Once they passed themselves off as sixteen year olds and got into an X film called Flood of Tears. It was set in America, about a dam that burst and in the floods that followed prisoners escaped from the local jail. Two of the convicts, a murderer and a rapist, end up trapped by the rising waters and seeking refuge in a house with a beautiful girl. What followed was Perkins’ introduction to sex. It was pretty tame stuff by today’s standards, but for the next few years it was all he had to go on.

  Gradually he saw less and less of his schoolfriends. After classes they would go their own ways. Perkins to the library, the others to Brady’s. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons, they would meet up at a football match, but that was all they had in common.

  Four weeks after Perkins’ fifteenth birthday his father was killed in an accident at work. Two steel ingots being loaded by crane on to a lorry fell on him when a cable snapped. But for the accident he would have stayed on at school. His teachers tipped him as Parkside’s first candidate for university. Instead he left to take his father’s place at Firth Brown.

  Perkins’ first real girl-friend was Anne Scully. A small, neat girl who was receptionist at the district office of the engineering unio
n. He had been four years at Firth’s and met her when he went to pay in the subscriptions from his branch. Anne was quite unlike Perkins. She liked dancing and Buddy Holly and had never read a book – at least not through to the end. That summer they went for long walks in the Pennines and Perkins tried explaining about imperialism (it was the year of Suez) and the goings-on in his union branch. Anne tried hard to understand, but was happier gossiping about who was marrying whom and who was having babies. “You’re so bloody serious, Harry Perkins,” she scolded him, “always got your head stuck in a newspaper. Why can’t you just relax and enjoy life for a change?”

  Those days with Anne were the nearest he ever came to relaxing. The high spot of their relationship was a camping holiday in the Lake District. That was in the summer of 1956. For ten days the sun shone brightly. The days they would spend ambling hand in hand along the shore of Lake Windermere, the evenings singing songs with the locals in a pub called The Water’s Edge, and the nights snuggled up in the warmth of a single sleeping bag, borrowed from Anne’s brother-in-law who ran a camping shop.

  They went steady for the best part of three years, until Perkins went to Ruskin. “That’ll be the end of us,” said Anne sadly. “You’ll meet all kinds of fancy people in Oxford and forget about me.”

  “Don’t be daft,” he tried to reassure her, but he knew she was right. It was not so much the fancy people, as the distance. At first he hitch-hiked home nearly every weekend. Once Anne came to stay in his digs at Oxford, but the landlady soon put a stop to that. After a while the visits got fewer. The gaps between letters grew longer. In the end they just drifted apart.

  By the time he left Ruskin, Anne was married. Perkins got no sympathy from his mother. “That girl was the best thing that ever happened to you,” she told him. “If you had any sense, you would have married her while you had the chance.” As he passed the years alone he began to think that his mother had been right. Until he met Molly Spence.

  “My Dad used to think you were a bit of a bastard,” said Molly as she helped herself to salad dressing.

  “Between you and I,” said Perkins, winking at her, “I was a bit of a bastard.”

  Molly had never been to lunch with a Cabinet minister before. For the occasion she wore a cotton skirt patterned with red tulips which descended to mid-calf and swirled when she turned suddenly, and a white blouse which did justice to her breasts. Perkins had opened the door to her in his shirt sleeves and a pair of worn brown corduroys.

  She was surprised at where he lived. It was a street of late Victorian houses five minutes from the Oval tube station. Perkins’ flat was on the third floor. The living room was tastefully, but not extravagantly furnished. Shelves lined with books of Labour Party history and political memoirs. The fireplace had been bricked off, but the mantelpiece remained. Upon it stood a framed photograph of Perkins surrounded by a cluster of small oriental gentlemen.

  “Taken in Hanoi,” said Perkins when he saw Molly examining the photograph, “two years ago with a delegation.”

  “And this?” Molly fingered the white bust which sat on the mantelpiece beside the photograph.

  “That,” said Perkins in a slightly patronising tone, “is J. Keir Hardie.”

  “Oh,” said Molly, none the wiser.

  “I don’t suppose they taught you anything about him at school.”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Keir Hardie was the first Labour MP,” he said, pulling the cork from a bottle of Côte du Rhône.

  He poured two glasses and passed one to Molly. “Your health,” he said, raising his glass.

  “Yours,” said Molly, her blue eyes looking straight at him.

  They sat at the oak dining table eating the steak that Perkins had just grilled. A Handel organ concerto played on the stereo. They talked about Sheffield. About Firth Brown. About Molly’s Dad and Mum who lived in Hallam, on Sheffield’s posh side. Perkins told her about the life of a Cabinet minister. Up at six. In the office by eight. Home at midnight. About the red despatch boxes full of letters to sign, memoranda to digest and reports to read. About the time he sat next to the Queen at a lunch for some Arab potentate.

  After the steak they had Marks and Spencer’s cheesecake and then Perkins suggested a stroll in Kennington Park.

  That was how the affair began.

  Before she went to bed with Harry Perkins, Molly first looked him up in Who’s Who to see if he was married. Not that she would have been especially upset if there had been a Mrs Perkins. She just thought she ought to know. Molly was one of those girls who only seem to attract married men. She did not go out of her way to find them. It was just that in the circles in which she moved she had lost the habit of talking to people of her own age.

  Affairs with married men had schooled Molly in the art of discretion. At the time the newspapers were engaged in one of their periodic anti-extremist campaigns and Perkins was a prime target. Had Molly been seen with him she would certainly have found her picture on the front page of the popular dailies. The idea appealed to her, but she knew it wouldn’t appeal to Perkins.

  Molly came once a week, usually on a Sunday. Perkins spent Friday nights and most Saturdays in Sheffield and when he returned he brought with him a pile of constituency mail to be dealt with. More than once Molly arrived expecting to make love and instead found herself sitting up into the small hours typing out what Perkins insisted were urgent letters urging the Home Office not to deport one of his constituents.

  From the start Perkins knew there was no future in it. He sensed that she knew too. He was a lonely man, but he had long since reconciled himself to loneliness. Marriage required concessions which he was not prepared to make. He would have had to sacrifice time to small talk and to take an interest in things that bored him stiff. Marriage meant children. Children meant disruption of a life that was already spoken for. There was a time when he might have married. Maybe when he was at Firth Brown. Even perhaps in the early years in Parliament, but not now. Although Perkins would have argued that his life was dedicated to the service of others, it was also a selfish existence in which there was no room for full-time residents, only the occasional guest. That was where Molly came in.

  She made no demands on him. Usually she arrived after dark to avoid the prying eyes. In the lighter summer evenings she would ring first from the Oval tube station and he would go downstairs and open the front door to minimise the risk of alerting the neighbours. The routine rarely varied. There would be a record, usually Brahms or Handel, on the stereo. The table would be set for two. The Sunday newspapers, half read, would be scattered near a floor cushion by the window. Red despatch boxes were stacked in the hallway awaiting collection by a Ministry chauffeur. Another stood open on the writing desk in the corner with half its contents still awaiting attention in a neat pile.

  If Perkins was cooking, the meal would be simple. Pâté, a Marks and Spencer pie, vegetables, and a bottle of not very expensive wine. If, as was more often the case, Molly was cooking, the meal might run to a joint of lamb. Since Perkins didn’t have time to shop, she would bring the food with her in a wicker basket. He would always insist on repaying her, usually by cheque since he never seemed to have the time to go to a bank.

  Conversation centred around what Perkins had been up to in the previous week. Sometimes they gossiped. Molly liked discussing the private lives of public figures. Inside information, however trite, gave her a small thrill. Occasionally Perkins would regale her with an account of a little coup he had scored at a Cabinet sub-committee. Now and then they would discuss politics. Usually it was fairly basic stuff. He would talk of kicking out the American nuclear bases and she would say, “What about the Russians?” They would argue for perhaps five minutes before Perkins gave up, feigning disgust. “You sound like the bloody Daily Mail,” he would say half seriously. She would kiss him and they would go to bed, leaving the washing up in the sink.

  It wasn’t much of a love affair and by Molly’s standards th
e Secretary of State was not much of a lover. Her other lovers wooed her with flowers, dinners in West End restaurants and expensive presents. The only present she ever received from Perkins was a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. In the front he had written with a red felt pen, “To a slightly Tory lady in the hope that she will see the light.” It was signed, “Love, Harry” and followed by three kisses. She struggled through the first fifty pages and then gave up. Molly had never had much time for books.

  After about a year Molly stopped coming. Her disappearance was announced in a note which was only a little longer than the one with which Perkins had first brought her into his life. It read: “Dear Harry, on Saturday I’m getting married so we’ll have to call it a day. Please understand. Good luck. Molly.” For about an hour Perkins was devastated. He made himself a cup of tea and paced his modest living room composing a reply which in the end he did not send. He toyed with the idea of telephoning, but rejected it on the grounds that the telephone might be answered by Molly’s prospective husband. Instead he placed the note in his in-tray along with a pile of other unanswered correspondence. A few days later he filed it away in a green folder together with a postcard she had once sent him while on a skiing holiday in Austria and several notes, none more than half a page long, which mainly concerned arrangements for their Sunday night rendezvous and who should get the shopping. He labelled the folder ‘Molly’ and placed it between similar files labelled ‘Micro-chips’ and ‘Multinationals’ in a steel filing cabinet in the spare bedroom. His only other souvenirs were a yellow plastic bathing cap and a Wisdom toothbrush which she left behind in the bathroom.