foreigners. Even over breakfast he’d had to listen patiently to the exhortations of the Ambassador when all he truly wanted to think about was shagging the man’s wife. Baader was easily distracted like that. He was Tom Goodfellowe’s successor as Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and in the early days he’d found the job had attractions in abundance. It was, after all, one of the most glittering waiting rooms at the fringes of the Cabinet. Sadly for Baader, however, he’d been waiting too long. Nearly four years. Stuck. Too new in his job to be moved before the last election, yet afterwards too long in the job to be a fresh face. Baader was marooned, stuck on the shelf. Not his fault. Nothing wrong with his talent, only his timing. By day he was adroit enough to be philosophical about his fate, but sometimes by night he prayed that they might all rot in hell.
The combination of power and disappointment had made him incautious. Generally he bore his disappointment with good grace yet increasingly he had come to realize that, no matter how lustrous his job at the Foreign Office might seem to others, this was all he was going to get. At the tender age of fifty-four he was left under full brake in the great parking lot of Westminster, waiting for the time when the Prime Minister required his space for another, more recent model. But that was the game. No point in getting bitter. Others in his position might begin to plot and connive, to play Cassius to the great Caesar in the hope of a better ending than that crafted by Shakespeare, but Baader didn’t overestimate his talents as either scriptwriter or assassin.
His talents lay in other areas. Sharp-witted, a former university lecturer – economics and an established red brick, not one of these new concrete academic abattoirs – he was well suited to the role of talking up his country and selling it to foreign investors. The hair may have lost its original colour but it had settled to a fine silver sheen, there was humour in his smile and just a hint of the razor up his sleeve. Men respected that. Yet there was more. Within Baader the pageantry of the diplomatic world was interwoven with the lustre of late nights and just a hint of licence in his pale eyes. Many women found that irresistible. There was never any suggestion of deceit, no idle talk of a misunderstanding wife and certainly no insinuation of loneliness, just the discreet offer of a meander beneath Aphrodite’s arch with no threat of complications and without the husband ever knowing. For many Westminster wives it proved a potent and irresistible combination.
But he wasn’t in Westminster. His private secretary had prevailed and he was in Berlin. ‘You’ve turned down the invitation for the last three years, Minister; it’s really time to put in an appearance.’ So for the last two days Baader had been an official UK representative at a European seminar of parliamentarians and assorted advisers, researchers and assistants, shackled within a conference room where he was forced to listen to overstuffed Germans lecturing him, an Englishman, about the mechanics of democracy in Europe. Typical bloody Germans, always thinking they had the solution to ‘the problem in the East’ and the inherited right to implement it. He’d felt obliged to mention Winston Churchill three times during his own remarks simply to keep himself awake.
The official dinners had been gruesome. Bavarian wine as thin as their sauces were thick. A collective sense of humour as subtle as a trench shovel. And this evening an impromptu lecture from his neighbour at the dining table about the technical standards proposed by the European Commission to curb the explosion of telephonic sex chat services. What was particularly exhausting was that the bloody man was so patently sincere. Wearied, Baader called for an Armagnac and quietly resolved to find himself a new private secretary.
The telephonies expert had
The combination of power and disappointment had made him incautious. Generally he bore his disappointment with good grace yet increasingly he had come to realize that, no matter how lustrous his job at the Foreign Office might seem to others, this was all he was going to get. At the tender age of fifty-four he was left under full brake in the great parking lot of Westminster, waiting for the time when the Prime Minister required his space for another, more recent model. But that was the game. No point in getting bitter. Others in his position might begin to plot and connive, to play Cassius to the great Caesar in the hope of a better ending than that crafted by Shakespeare, but Baader didn’t overestimate his talents as either scriptwriter or assassin.
His talents lay in other areas. Sharp-witted, a former university lecturer – economics and an established red brick, not one of these new concrete academic abattoirs – he was well suited to the role of talking up his country and selling it to foreign investors. The hair may have lost its original colour but it had settled to a fine silver sheen, there was humour in his smile and just a hint of the razor up his sleeve. Men respected that. Yet there was more. Within Baader the pageantry of the diplomatic world was interwoven with the lustre of late nights and just a hint of licence in his pale eyes. Many women found that irresistible. There was never any suggestion of deceit, no idle talk of a misunderstanding wife and certainly no insinuation of loneliness, just the discreet offer of a meander beneath Aphrodite’s arch with no threat of complications and without the husband ever knowing. For many Westminster wives it proved a potent and irresistible combination.
But he wasn’t in Westminster. His private secretary had prevailed and he was in Berlin. ‘You’ve turned down the invitation for the last three years, Minister; it’s really time to put in an appearance.’ So for the last two days Baader had been an official UK representative at a European seminar of parliamentarians and assorted advisers, researchers and assistants, shackled within a conference room where he was forced to listen to overstuffed Germans lecturing him, an Englishman, about the mechanics of democracy in Europe. Typical bloody Germans, always thinking they had the solution to ‘the problem in the East’ and the inherited right to implement it. He’d felt obliged to mention Winston Churchill three times during his own remarks simply to keep himself awake.
The official dinners had been gruesome. Bavarian wine as thin as their sauces were thick. A collective sense of humour as subtle as a trench shovel. And this evening an impromptu lecture from his neighbour at the dining table about the technical standards proposed by the European Commission to curb the explosion of telephonic sex chat services. What was particularly exhausting was that the bloody man was so patently sincere. Wearied, Baader called for an Armagnac and quietly resolved to find himself a new private secretary.
The telephonies expert had
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