Mightier Than the Sword (The Clifton Chronicles 5)

“But the press are still predicting May. Where are you getting your information?”

“Clarence, the PM’s driver, told me, didn’t he?”

“Then I’ll need to brief Griff immediately. Anything else?”

“The foreign secretary will announce this morning that he’ll be standing down from the cabinet after the election, whatever the result.”

Giles didn’t respond while he considered Alf’s casually dropped bombshell. If he could hold on to Bristol Docklands, and if Labour were to win the general election, he must be in with a chance of being offered the Foreign Office. Only problem: two ifs. He allowed himself a wry smile.

“Not bad, Alf, not bad at all,” he added as he opened his red box and began to look through his papers.

He always enjoyed catching up with his opposite numbers across Europe, exchanging views in corridors, lifts, and bars where the realpolitik took place, rather than in the endless formal gatherings for which civil servants had already drafted the minutes long before the meeting was called to order.

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.”