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The end-of-conference speech always hung over his head like a dark cloud. He disliked conferences and the small talk, the week away from home, the over-indulgence around the dinner tables - and the speech. Most of all the speech. Long hours of anguished discussion in a smoke-filled hotel room, breaking off just when progress seemed in sight in order to attend some ball-breaking function or reception, resuming a considerable time later and trying to pick up where they had left off, only more tired and less inspired. If the speech was good, it was only what they expected and required. If it was poor, they still applauded but said the strain of office was beginning to show. Sod's Law.
But it was now almost over, bar the delivery. The Prime Minister was enjoying breakfast with his wife, watched carefully from surrounding tables by his personal Special
Branch detectives. He was discussing the merits of a winter holiday in Antigua or Sri Lanka.
'I would recommend Sri Lanka this year' he said. 'You can stay on the beach if you want, Sarah, but I would rather like to take a couple of trips into the mountains. They have some ancient Buddhist monasteries and some nearby wildlife reserves which are supposed to be quite spectacular. The Sri Lankan President was describing them to me last year, and they sounded really... Darling, you're not listening!'
'Sorry, Henry. I was... just looking at that gentleman's newspaper.'
'More interesting than me, is it? What's it got to say, then?'
He began to feel ill at ease, remembering that no one had yet given him his daily press cuttings. Someone would surely have told him had there been anything that important.
Come to think of it, he had never felt comfortable since his staff had persuaded him that he didn't need to spend his time reading the daily newspapers, that an edited summary of press clippings prepared by them would be more efficient. But were they? Civil servants had their own narrow views on what was important for a Prime Minister's day, and he found increasingly that their briefing on party political matters was scant. Particularly when there was bad news, the controversy and the in-fighting, he often had to find out from others, sometimes days or weeks after the event. He began to wonder if eventually he would never find out at all, and some great political crisis would burst upon the Party about which he was kept blissfully unaware. They were trying to protect him, of course, but the cocoon they spun around him would, he feared, eventually stifle him.
He remembered the first time he had stepped inside 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister. He had left the crowds and the television crews outside and, as the great black door closed behind him, he had discovered an extraordinary sight.
On one side of the great hallway leading away from the door had gathered some 200 civil servants, his civil servants now, who were applauding him loudly - just as they had done Thatcher, Callaghan, Wilson and Heath, and just as they would his successor. On the other side of the hallway facing the host of civil servants stood his political staff, the team of loyal supporters he had hurriedly assembled around him as his campaign to succeed Margaret Thatcher had begun to take off, and whom he had invited to Downing Street to enjoy this historic moment. There were just seven of them, four assistants and three secretaries, dwarfed in their new surroundings.
He told his wife afterwards that it was rather like the Eton Wall Game, with two hugely unequal sides lined up to do battle, with no clear rules and with him cast as both the ball and the prize. He had felt almost relieved when three senior civil servants called an end to the proceedings by physically surrounding him and guiding him off to the Cabinet Room for his first Prime Ministerial briefing. One of the party officials present had described it more as an Assumption, with the Prime Minister disappearing into a different world surrounded by a band of guardian angels -Civil Service, Grade 1, Prime Ministers, for the Protection and Guidance Thereof: Exclusive. His party officials had scarcely seen him for the next six months as they were effectively squeezed out by the official machine, and none of the original band was still left.
Collingridge's attention returned to the newspaper being read at the far-off breakfast table. At such a distance he had great difficulty in bringing it fully into focus, and he fumbled for his glasses, perching them on the end of his nose and trying not to stare too hard. He found his air of studied indifference difficult to maintain as the large headline print came into focus.
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