To Play the King by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online

the anchor chains were being cut.
    Fiona sat motionless across a table littered with toast and fragments of eggshell and bone china, the household clutter and crumbs which represented the total sum of their life together. The telephone still demanded him. Without a further word he rose to answer it.
    'Come in, Tim, and close the door.'
    Urquhart was sitting in the Cabinet Room, alone except for the new arrival, occupying the only chair around the coffin-shaped table which had arms. Before him was a simple leather folder and a telephone. The rest of the table stood bare.
    'Not exactly luxurious, is it? But I'm beginning to like it.' Urquhart chuckled.
    Tim Stamper looked around, surprised to discover no one else present. He was - or had been until half an hour ago when Urquhart had exchanged the commission of Chief Whip for that of Prime Minister - the other man's loyal deputy. The role of Chief Whip is mysterious, that of his deputy invisible, but together they had combined into a force of incalculable influence, since the Whips Office is the base from where discipline within the parliamentary party is maintained through a judicious mixture of team spirit, arm twisting and outright thuggery. Stamper had ideal qualities for the job — a lean, pinched face with protruding nose and dark eyes of exceptional brightness which served to give him the appearance of a ferret, and a capacity for rummaging about in the dark corners of his colleagues' private lives to uncover their personal and political weaknesses. It was a job of vulnerabilities, guarding one's own while exploiting others'. He had long been Urquhart's protégé; fiftee n years younger, a former estate agent from Essex, it was an attraction of opposites. Urquhart was sophisticated, elegant, academic, highly polished; Stamper was none of these and wore off-the-peg suits from British Home Stores. Yet what they shared was perhaps more important - ambition, an arrogance that for one was intellectual and for the other instinctive, and an understanding of power. The combination had proved stunningly effective in plotting Urquhart's path to the premiership. Stamper's turn would come, that had been the implicit promise to the younger man. Now he was here to collect.
    'Prime Minister.' He offered a theatrical bow of respect. 'Prime Minister,' Stamper repeated, practising a different intonation as if trying to sell him the freehold. He had a familiar, almost camp manner which hid the steel beneath, and the two colleagues began to laugh in a fashion which managed to be both mocking and conspiratorial, like two burglars after a successful night out. Stamper was careful to ensure he stopped laughing first; it wouldn't do to outmock a Prime Minister. They had shared so much over recent months but he was aware that Prime Ministers have a tendency to hold back from their colleagues, even their fellow conspirators, and Urquhart didn't continue laughing for long.
    'Tim, I wanted to see you entirely à deux.'
    'Probably means I'm due to get a bollocking. What've I done, anyway?' His tone was light, yet Urquhart noticed the anxious downward cast at the corner of Stamper's mouth and discovered he was enjoying the feeling of mastery implied by his colleague's discomfort.
    'Sit down, Tim. Opposite me.'
    Stamper took the chair and looked across at his old friend. The sight confirmed just how much their relationship had changed. Urquhart sat before a large oil portrait of Robert Walpole, the first modern and arguably greatest Prime Minister who had watched for two centuries over the deliberations in this room of the mighty and mendacious, the woeful and miserably weak. Urquhart was his successor, elevated by his peers, anointed by his Monarch and now installed. The telephone beside him could summon statesmen to their fate or command the country to war. It was a power shared with no other man in the realm; indeed, he was no longer just a man but, for better or worse, was now the stuff of history.