The Storytellers by Robert Mercer-Nairne Page B

instead.
    â€œIn what woy?”
    â€œFollowing the Ford settlement our sense is the unions want to let rip and blow the government’s pay policy to kingdom come. We’d like you to push this in any way you can.”
    â€œYou mean you want mower strikes, not less?”
    â€œExactly.”
    He knew that after a champion good year, the Ford Motor Corporation had settled with its unions on an inflation-busting pay rise which other workers were now drooling for. This had skewered the government, whose public sector wage bill was already daft. And now here was one branch of government actively siding with the workers against the official government policy of pay restraint.
    â€œWhat bleeden side am we on then?” Marx asked.
    â€œRight now, the union’s,” Peter Betsworth answered, without a hint of irony.
    â€œWell that’s ’un rowad I’ll not be guin down. I thought it was the unions that ’ad got us into this codge and it was the unions we were tryen ter break.”
    â€œAnd how do you propose the unions be made more accountable?” the MI5 man asked.
    â€œChange the bloody law,” Marx snapped back, “so that these shop-floor crazoys can’t bottle production whenever they fancy an’ spread their scabby notions ter every other industry in the country whenever they ployz.”
    For the first time since Marx had known him, his handler just laughed. Not a mocking laugh, but an indulgent one.
    â€œSo?” Marx pressed, feeling embarrassed, certain that he must be missing something obvious.
    Peter Betsworth felt hugely encouraged. If a young man from a working-class background could see the problem and its solution soclearly, then surely a majority of the electorate could too.
    â€œEvery time this government has sidled up to a change in the law,” he explained, “it has been forced back on account of the Labour Party’s deep roots within the labour movement. Even Heath’s ill-fated conservative government of ’70 to ’74 wasn’t willing to go for the jugular, at least without a mandate, which it didn’t get.”
    Marx paused to organize his thoughts. “You’re sayen we need a government that ’as a mandate an’ wull goo fer the jugular, roight?”
    â€œExactly.”
    Suddenly the laughter was gone and Peter Betsworth’s crisp answer seemed cold and calculating.
    For what seemed like a long time the two didn’t speak, but just sat there, surrounded by the noisy comings and goings inside the café. A young mother struggled to get her pushchair and baby between the chairs and was helped by an elderly Jamaican man who rose from his seat to assist her. A boy, in too much of a hurry, dropped his ice cream, just missing a lady’s handbag. He stared at the white mess on the floor in disbelief. Outside the glass walls, a row of ducks huddled in the cold, overlooking the water, waiting for any scraps that might come their way. Inside was not for them. Inside was for humans, upwards of fifty, happy to be warm, to be together, to be unaware – for a time at least – of the forces shaping their lives.
    â€œSo we’re aimen ter topple this government an’ put another in its place, that it?”
    Peter Betsworth simply shrugged. Such treasonable thoughts were never to be expressed. He knew the history of Tyburn, even if his agent did not.
    â€œDemocracy only works,” he said eventually, “if people know what is really going on. And as importantly, or perhaps even more so, understand the consequences of what is going on. Strikes they can see. The consequences of strikes they can feel.”
    â€œIf there is a change,” Marx asked, “what makes you fink a noolot would do anny be’ah?”
    â€œThat depends on how steely they are, how angry the electorate has become and how big a majority they get.”
    â€œThree ‘depends’!”
    â€œLife is a