Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Brother Essad,

Abu Abdullah doesn’t want to hear your thoughts concerning Sheikh Muhammad. You forget our brother Abu Abdullah himself has family in the Yemen and is very well informed about who is, and who is not, a follower in the true path of God. He considers it very necessary for the sheikh to be liquidated, and at once.

Operational budget: flights $1000 (one way), car hire $500, food $25, disguise $200. Reward is $30,000 payable to the family of the operative assuming he is himself caught or liquidated by the security service. We will provide a clean mobile. We will provide papers. Total: $31,725, which is an increase of many dollars on what was first proposed. There is no more.

The needful operational sums will be made available at the Finchley post office in an account in the name of Hasan Yasin Abdullah. They only watch the banking system, not the post office. The reward will be paid when the deed is done.

Please confirm. Abu Adbullah wants to know your answer.

In the name of God,

Tariq Anwar

Email

From:

Essad

Date:

21 August

To:

Tariq Anwar

Folder:

Incoming mail from Yemen

Brother Anwar,

Peace be upon you.

We have found a brother here in the Hadramawt who speaks some English. His thirty goats have all just died from the foot and mouth. Now he has no food, no money and no goats. He will do it. Please send the money and then we will commence the operation.

In the name of God

Essad

9

Interview with Peter Maxwell, director of communications, prime minister’s office

Interrogator:

Please describe the initial reasons for your involving the prime minister in the Yemen salmon project.

Peter Maxwell:

Do you know who I am?

Interrogator:

You are Mr Peter Maxwell. Please describe the initial reasons for your involving the prime Minister in the Yemen salmon project. Please bear in mind it is in your own best interests to cooperate fully with this enquiry.

Peter Maxwell:

Okay. I see. Of course I will cooperate. Why shouldn’t I? It’s in everyone’s interests to get the fullest possible picture of what happened. I am writing a book about it. Or at least I was, until one of your lot took the manuscript away.

Interrogator:

Your manuscript is considered to contain material which might constitute a breach of confidentiality and its status will have to be reviewed by this enquiry before a decision can be taken as to whether it can be returned to you.

Peter Maxwell:

I’m deeply, deeply hurt by what happened. I’m traumatised. I want that put on the record. I’m traumatised.

The witness here broke down in tears and required mild sedation. The interview recommenced the following day and is transcribed here verbatim, as far as possible. Operational security details have been withheld from the public record.

Peter Maxwell:

My name is Peter Maxwell and I am-I was-the director of communications, prime minister’s office. I had held that post for two years. I am an old, old friend of the prime minister. That’s not why I got the job; I got the job because, false modesty aside, I am absolutely the best guy they’ve got at this sort of thing. I could have held Cabinet office. If I’d been elected as an MP, that is. But that whole ego trip of front-line politics was not for me. I wanted to serve my party from the sidelines, from the shadows. That’s where I operate. In the shadows. Let other people take the credit. Don’t be the story, shape the story: that’s my motto.

Jay [Prime Minister the Right Honourable James Vent MP] was a godsend for our party. He’s the best prime minister this country has had since Churchill. Since Gladstone. Since Pitt. He lifted this country up out of the Second Division and put it back in the Premier League, world affairs-wise. Right at the top. In the Champions’ League. He had total mastery of the House of Commons. Members bowled seamers, spinners, yorkers-it didn’t matter what-Jay put his bat to them all and carted them out of the ground. Every shot was in the bullseye.

Interrogator:

You appear to be quoting from the first chapter of your book. Please can you direct your reply to the question that was asked. How and when did you decide to recommend to the prime minister that he should become involved in the Yemen salmon project?

Peter Maxwell:

If you’d just let me answer in my own time, thank you very much, I was coming to that. You see, everyone has an off day. Everyone can get blindsided, sideswiped, no matter how good they are. That’s when I can add some value. That’s what I do. If the news is bad, I present it in the best possible light. If the news is very bad, I come up with a different story. The attention span of most of the media is about twenty minutes, and a new story, a new angle, normally tempts them to drop the bone you want them to drop, and look at the new bone you’re offering them. That’s off the record.

Interrogator:

I am afraid everything you say here is on the record. Please, can we proceed to discuss how you first became involved with the Yemen salmon project.

Peter Maxwell:

It was one of those bad news days you sometimes get. That was when the Yemen business first came up. I can’t remember what it was that had happened. I think someone had held a map upside down and bombed a hospital in Iran instead of a militants’ training camp in the Iraq desert. Not ideal from a presentational point of view, so I did what I usually do. I have a little email group of friends and right-minded people around the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and one or two other departments, so I sent out the usual ‘Anyone got a good news story for me?’ emails.

Usually what I get is stuff I have to work very hard at to turn into something I can use. You know, we have opened a new sewage treatment plant in south Basra, picture of a general standing by a ditch. The British Council has sent a group of morris dancers on tour in the Sunni Triangle. Hard work to sell that sort of story at a press conference-some of my colleagues in the trade are a touch cynical these days. But this story sold itself. Herbert Berkshire from the FCO rang me and asked, ‘What do you think of the idea of salmon fishing? In the Yemen?’

‘How’s that again?’ I said. I remember reaching for the Bartholomew’s School Atlas, which is never very far from my desk in these days of ethical foreign policy. We have got ethical in so many places I begin to wish I had not given up geography at school. I flip the pages, and the atlas more or less opens itself at the Middle East. Sure enough, there’s the Yemen, and sure enough it’s mostly coloured yellow and brown. ‘It’s desert,’ I said. ‘You won’t find many salmon there.’

I don’t know anything about salmon fishing. I like cricket, darts, football, salsa dancing, physical fitness stuff like that. Salmon fishing: isn’t that what old men in tweed caps and rubber trousers do in the rain in Scotland?

‘That’s the story,’ said Herbert. And he told me about Sheikh Muhammad from the Yemen. Herbert said that the sheikh had always been pro-British. He owned an estate in Scotland and had a power base in the Yemen that included a share of oil revenues. Money is a key driver in these situations. If there’s a pot of money somewhere in any project, you’ve cracked it almost before you start. Herbert told me that the sheikh had an obsession about fishing, in particular salmon fishing. He had a strange theory that fishing is a sport which has a calming and beneficial effect on people, and he wanted his own people in the Yemen to have the benefit of that. He actually believed that, said Herbert. I must say, it sounded like total crap to me but, who cared, it would make a good story. He wanted to spend a lot of money with UK fisheries scientists to work on a project to seed Yemeni watercourses with Scottish salmon. With live salmon, that is. He believed that if he spent enough money, he could create conditions in which salmon could be caught during the rainy season in the Yemen.

Herbert said that the sheikh had both the will and the money to make something happen. The sheikh wanted to spend the money funding a development project by some outfit within DEFRA called the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence. I didn’t realise it still existed; I thought we had reallocated all its grant funding to a programme of building swimming pools in deprived ethnic-minority-type inner-city areas. I remember making a mental note to check that later. My view was, fish don’t vote. When would people get that simple point?

‘Herbert, this is going to fail. It has D for disaster written all over it.’

‘Think about it for a moment,’ said Herbert. He started to number his points and I could see him in my mind’s eye spreading the fingers of his left hand and then bending them over double with the forefinger of his right hand. It’s an irritating, schoolmaster-type thing which he does in meetings. ‘One: all the news coming out of the region has got worse again just now and it doesn’t make the