It was Cavendish who had fired Hatry’s imagination, if that was what Ben Hatry possessed, Cavendish who had struck the deal with Luxmore, encouraged him, bolstered his budget and his ego, Cavendish who on Hatry’s nod had given the first little lunches and informal briefings in expensive restaurants handy for the House, lobbied the right Members, though never in Hatry’s name, unrolled the map, showed them where the damn place was and where the Canal went, because half of them were hazy, Cavendish who had sounded discreet alarm bells in the City and the oil companies, cuddled up to the imbecile Conservative right, which was no work of art for him, wooed its Empire-dreamers, Euro-haters, nigger-haters, pan-xenophobes and lost, uneducated children.
It was Cavendish who had conjured visions of an eleventh-hour crusade before the election, a phoenix risen from the Tory ashes and turned war god, of a leader clad in the suit of shining armour that till now had always seemed too big for him, Cavendish who made the same pitch in different language to the Opposition – don’t worry, boys and girls, you don’t have to oppose anything or take a position, just keep your heads down and say this is no time to rock the Loyal British Boat even if it’s sailing slap in the wrong direction, piloted by lunatics and leaking like a colander.
It was Cavendish yet again who got the multis suitably worried, who stirred up murmurings about the devastating effect on British industry, commerce and the pound, Cavendish who made us aware, as he called it: which is to say turned rumour into received certainty by the ingenious use of arm’s length columnists operating outside the Hatry empire and therefore notionally untainted by its frightful reputation; Cavendish who planted follow-up articles in learned shoestring journals with promises to keep, such articles in turn being puffed out of all proportion by bigger journals, and so up the ladder or down it to the inside pages of the tabloids, to editorials in the degraded so-called qualities and late-night public debate on television, not only on the Hatry-owned channels but on rival channels too – since nothing is more predictable than the media’s parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by the others, whether or not the story is true because quite frankly, dears, in the news game these days, we don’t have the staff, time, interest, energy, literacy or minimal sense of responsibility to check our facts by any means except calling up whatever has been written by other hacks on the same subject and repeating it as gospel.
And it was Cavendish, this hulking, tweedy outdoor English chap with the voice of an upper-class cricket commentator on a sunny summer’s afternoon, who had so convincingly propagated, always through well-dined intermediaries, Ben Hatty’s treasured If Not Now When? doctrine that lay at the root of his trans-Atlantic arm-twisting and wire-pulling and intriguing, the thrust of which theory being that the United States cannot conceivably remain the world’s one and only superpower for more than another decade at most, after which it was curtains, so if there was any heavy surgery that needed doing anywhere in the world, said the doctrine, however brutal and self-serving it might look from the outside or for that matter from the inside, then for our survival and our kids’ survival and the survival of the Hatry empire and its evergrowing stranglehold on the hearts and minds of the Third and Fourth worlds: do it now while we have the clout, for fuck’s sake! Stop pussyfooting around! Take what you want, smash what you don’t! But whatever you do or don’t do, stop mollycoddling and conceding and apologising and wimping out.
And if that put Ben Hatry into bed with the North American Loony Right, as well as their blood brothers on this side of the pond, and made him the darling of the arms industry to boot – well, fuck it, he would say in his sweet mother tongue, he wasn’t a politico, he hated the bastards, he was a realist, he didn’t give a tinker’s who he was allied to as long as they talked sense and didn’t tiptoe around the international corridors saying to every Jap, nigger and dago: ‘Pardon me for being a white middle-class liberal American, sir, and excuse us for being so big and strong and powerful and rich, but we believe in the dignity and equality of all God’s people, and would you be so kind as to allow me to get down on my hands and knees and kiss your arse?’