A Delicate Truth A Novel

stringing up half tomorrow’s Cabinet.’ And finding Toby’s eyes still on her: ‘Man made a horse’s arse of himself and got his wrist smacked. Case totally closed.’ And as a final afterthought: ‘The only surprising thing is that for once in its life Defence managed to hush up a force-twelve scandal.’
    And with that, the loud rumours are officially declared dead and buried – until, in a concluding speech over coffee, Diana elects to exhume them and bury them all over again.
    ‘And just in case anyone should tell you different, both Defence and Treasury held a grand-slam internal inquiry with the gloves off, and concluded unanimously that Fergus had absolutely no case to answer. At worst, ill advised by his hopeless officials.Which is good enough for me, and I trust for you. Why are you looking at me like that?’
    He isn’t looking at her in any way he is aware of, but he is certainly thinking that the lady is protesting too much.
     
    *
     
    Toby Bell, newly anointed Private Secretary to Her Majesty’s newly anointed Minister takes up his seals of office. Fergus Quinn, MP, marooned Blairite of the new Gordon Brown era, may not on the face of it be the sort of minister he would have chosen for his master. Born the only child of an old Glaswegian engineering family fallen on hard times, Fergus made an early name for himself in left-wing student politics, leading protest marches, confronting the police and generally getting his photograph in the newspapers. Having graduated in Economics from Edinburgh University, he disappears into the mists of Scottish Labour Party politics. Three years on, somewhat inexplicably, he resurfaces at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he meets and marries his present wife, a wealthy but troubled Canadian woman. He returns to Scotland, where a safe seat awaits him. The Party spin doctors quickly rate his wife unfit for presentation. An alcohol addiction is rumoured.
    Soundings that Toby has taken round the Whitehall bazaar are mixed at best: ‘Sucks up a brief quick enough, but watch your arse when he decides to act on it,’ advises a bruised Defence Ministry veteran strictly off the record. And from a former assistant called Lucy: ‘Very sweet, very charming when he needs to be.’ And when he doesn’t? Toby asks. ‘He’s just not with us,’ she insists, frowning and avoiding his eye. ‘He’s out there fighting his demons somehow.’ But what demons and fighting them how is more than Lucy is willing or able to say.
    At first sight, nonetheless, all augurs well.
    True, Fergus Quinn is no easy ride, but Toby never expected different. He can be clever, obtuse, petulant, foul-mouthed and dazzlingly considerate in the space of half a day, one minute all over you, the next a brooder who locks himself up with his despatch boxes behind his heavy mahogany door. He is a natural bully and, as advertised, makes no secret of his contempt for civil servants; even those closest to him are not spared his tongue-lashings. But his greatest scorn is reserved for Whitehall’s sprawling intelligence octopus, which he holds to be bloated, elitist, self-regarding and in thrall to its own mystique. And this is all the more unfortunate since part of Team Quinn’s remit requires it to ‘evaluate incoming intelligence materials from all sources and submit recommendations for exploitation by the appropriate services’.
    As to the scandal-at-Defence-that-never-was, whenever Toby is tempted to edge alongside it, he bumps up against what feels increasingly like a wall of silence deliberately constructed for his personal benefit: case closed, mate  …  sorry, old boy, lips sealed  … And once, if only from a boastful clerk in Finance Section over a Friday-evening pint in the Sherlock Holmes – got away with daylight robbery, didn’t he? It takes the unlovable Gregory, seated by chance next to Toby at a tedious Monday focus session of the Staffing and Management Committee, to set his alarm bells ringing at full blast.
    Gregory, a large and ponderous man older than his years, is Toby’s exact contemporary and supposed rival. But it is a fact known to all that, whenever the two of them are in line for an appointment, it’s always Toby who pips Gregory at the post. And so it might have been in the recent race for Private Secretary to the new Junior Minister, except that this time round the rumour mill decreed that there was no proper contest. Gregory had served