Too Cold For Snow

me released soon.’
    The Governor looked at Tony and Tony looked back.
    ‘My problem is twofold. I can’t be seen to be letting in to the demands of the kidnappers and I need to keep my authority whatever happens.’
    Tony, who had a lot of ‘O’ levels, even though catering skills wasn’t one of them, had two suggestions. In a conspiratorial tone he asked if anyone else knew about the tape, suggesting that this was a secret the inmates could collectively keep. He then had his brainwave. Why didn’t they get Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef involved?
    That night Tony smoked his way through a carton of fags and the governor stared at the bulb on the ceiling as he thought things through: how authority could be sanctioned by the prisoners as well as the guards and how Tony’s crazy scheme was worth a punt. The governor liked life on board ship, it was the nearest he’d ever get to being a naval captain and ever since he was a nipper, growing up in a terraced house in Rochdale, he’d harboured a dream of gold braid and white uniform and a litany of sea names and far off gulfs: Cortez, Mediterranean, Bering, Baltic, Mexico, South China. He tried to imagine how he would live with himself if he conspired with a ship full of Category A prisoners to keep a secret. He was convinced that they could keep a secret because of the watchwords ‘what happens inside stays inside’. There were hard men, with hard histories, who took wives in jail but no-one would ever know. There were brotherhoods that didn’t follow divisions of race or creed, but of desire. The Governor only understood the half of it but he knew that if he made a pact it would be not with one devil but with two hundred and fifty eight of them.
    The civil servant who took the call thought at first that he had a loco caller who’d somehow minnowed through the net, because all he heard was the word ‘Madagascar’ and Terence Minns could only think of lemurs. But when the Governor of the prison ship Madagascar started to explain his plan, Terry knew enough to ring his mate Phil who was a political special adviser and knew exactly how to make political capital out of pretty much anything. This governor, he explained, had phoned him up with an idea about asking Jamie Oliver to visit the ship to start a campaign to improve prison food. He’d cited a study in Texas that suggested prisoners who were given good food became better prisoners overall with even prisons such as the notorious Angola jail in Louisiana benefitting from regular gumbo and decent veg. Phil said he thought he was definitely onto something, what with the latest cock-up in the Middle East where British peacekeepers had bopped off a Hamas leader needing some good news story to knock it off the news agenda and so Phil phoned another New Labour apparatchik higher up the chain and by noon he was through to Number Ten who were taking the Madagascar proposal very seriously indeed.
    Jamie Oliver’s agent put down the phone with a look of extraordinary triumph. He’d never talked turkey with a politician before but he’d just talked to the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary who’d agreed with him when he suggested that Jamie’d probably need a bit of a boost in his campaign to improve school dinners before moving on to prisons.
    The press conference was one of the best attended in the recent history of the Prison Service and the news that Jamie Oliver had assembled a team of notorious murderers, robbers, rapists and one satanist who had boiled his own child in a chip pan had filled two helicopter shuttles to the island, not to mention the TV technicians who had been ferrying back and forth with satellite stuff for three days or so.
    It had been a major headache for the security services, especially with Al-Qaeda’s fondness for marine targets such as the U.S. ship they had ramrodded off the coast, and the fact that all of the people they were dealing with were dangerous as vipers, not even mentioning that Oliver had said he wasn’t interested in teaching people how to cook with plastic instruments, so these guys would be appearing live on TV armed with cleavers, knives, weapons’ grade soup ladles and ferocious whisks.
    Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
    The whole thing was staged-managed for the Six O’Clock News in Britain, even though there were TV broadcasts going out in every time zone. There was something about this story that appealed to even the most life weary night editor and time