House of Cards by Michael Dobbs

Author:Michael Dobbs
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Thrillers, Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9781471128523
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2013-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

All members of a Cabinet are referred to as Right Honourable Gentlemen. There are only three things wrong with such a title . . .

Urquhart sat at the end of the Cabinet table transfixed. As the murmuring and gasps of surprise broke out around him he would not, could not, join in. He gazed for a long time at the Prime Minister’s empty chair.

He had done this. Alone. Had destroyed the most powerful man in the country. While the others around the table erupted in a babble of confusion, his mind turned to a memory forty years old, when as a raw military recruit he had prepared to make his first parachute jump 2,500 feet above the fields of Lincolnshire. Sitting in the open hatchway of a twin-engine Islander, his feet dangling in the slipstream, gazing down at the landscape a million miles below. Jumping was an act of faith, of trust in one’s destiny, showing contempt for acts that terrified others. But the view from up there had been worth the danger. As he and the others had jumped the wind had picked up, knocking them aside; one had broken a leg, another a shoulder, but Urquhart had wanted to go straight back up and do it all over again.

Now, as he gazed at the empty chair, he felt just the same. He gave an inner cry of joy while contriving outwardly to look as shocked as those around him.

While others lingered, milling around in confusion, Urquhart walked the few yards back to the Chief Whip’s office in 12 Downing Street. He locked himself in his private room and by 10.20 a.m. he had made two phone calls.

Ten minutes later Roger O’Neill called a meeting of the entire Press Office at Party Headquarters. ‘You guys are going to have to cancel all your lunch arrangements today. I’ve had word that shortly after one o’clock this afternoon we can expect a very important statement from Downing Street. It’s absolutely confidential, I can’t tell you what it’s about but we have to be ready to handle it. Push everything else aside.’

Within the hour five lobby correspondents had been contacted with apologies to cancel lunch. Two of them were sworn to secrecy and told that ‘something big was going on in Downing Street’. It didn’t take a Brain of Britain winner to conclude that it was likely to have something to do with ‘the Collingridge Affair’.

One of those facing the prospect of a cancelled lunch was the PA’s Manny Goodchild. Instead of twiddling his thumbs, he used the formidable range of contacts and favours he had built up over the years to ascertain that every single member of the Cabinet had cancelled engagements in order to be at Downing Street that morning, although the Number Ten Press Office refused to confirm it. He was a wise and experienced old hound and he smelled blood, so on a hunch he phoned the Buckingham Palace Press Office. That, too, like Downing Street, had nothing to say – at least officially.

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