Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

over-lengthy discussions about pricing which were perhaps not best handled by our then minister for energy despite the advice I gave him, the supplies were turned off for most of December and January. Regrettably, a few old age pensioners died when the gas was shut off, so there was a lot of difficult press to deal with, and it is no secret that the fate of the government was very much in my hands. Unless we could clearly explain why we had managed to both cancel the power station building programme and fall out with our main supplier of natural gas, there would be some difficult days ahead in the House of Commons.

There was a lot of pressure on me from the boss, as I used to call my friend Jay. I was working fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for most of that autumn and winter. And a lot of it was like pushing water uphill. Whenever we managed to get a positive story into the press or launch a new policy or rush some new piece of legislation through Parliament, a wheel came off somewhere else. That picture on the front page of the Independent during the energy crisis of the old lady’s corpse with her hand frozen to a cold radiator and icicles on the end of her nose was not good press for us. The public thought Jay was a nice guy, and the public was right. Jay Vent was a wonderful prime minister, and his greatest skill was picking the right people to support and guide him through difficult times like these. But, under pressure, Jay became very demanding of his closest lieutenants. In particular he looked to me, ‘Mr Good News’, as he sometimes liked to call me. And the record shows that Jay could be very tough on people who didn’t deliver.

My job was to ensure that the news was as good as possible as much of the time as possible. I was paid to do it, and paid well. I have no right to complain. The result was, I was a little stressed that winter. There were one or two issues in my personal life as well. When you are working as hard as I was, it can take a toll. My health suffered, and some of my colleagues felt I was overdoing it. Some quite senior Cabinet members urged me to take a long holiday, in woeful ignorance of how much they needed me to watch their backs.

Mostly, I react well to stress. A lot of my best ideas come bubbling to the surface when the pressure is on. Readers will remember the prime minister playing in a cricket match at the St Helen’s Orphanage for Partially Sighted Children. That was after a particularly difficult patch during which legislation to enable a newly trained corps of health and safety inspectors to provide logistical support for operations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East was struggling to get through the House of Lords. The Opposition and, I am afraid, some of the less well informed public had no conception of the overstretch of our armed forces at that time, otherwise we would never have faced such time-wasting arguments. We needed a distraction and that cricket match at the orphanage was it. That was one of my ideas: thought up in five minutes and put into action ten minutes later. I can still feel a prickling of excitement when I think how good that was.

So now I started to think about ways in which we could take the pressure off the government agenda. I thought about initiatives in the National Health Service, in education, in crime, but when I looked into it the last three governments had all taken so many initiatives in those areas, there simply wasn’t room for another one. So I turned my attention to policy initiatives abroad. It’s always easier to do things abroad; you don’t need planning permission or public enquiries or White Papers. You just go abroad-either on a fact-finding tour, a goodwill tour (which means taking a chequebook) or you invade. Those are generally the choices available. Unfortunately, we were already using all three methods in a number of different regions.

But Jay Vent had not employed me to tell him that something was impossible. My job was to find the solution. No matter how radical, there was always a way forward, and Jay recognised that. He called me his pathfinder, although I prefer, as I have said, the image of the helmsman. I started to look for other choices. I asked myself the question: what if there are other options in the Middle East? To be absolutely candid, the Middle East has been something of a graveyard for the reputation of a number of governments, and Opposition parties too. I found myself wondering if there was anything that we could do about that.

I decided to do what I often do when I’m in this situation; it’s one of the reasons I was so good at the job. I have a great ability to put myself in the place of the average voter, sitting watching television, just as I did, every day. What images would he see? Which of them would he select as representative of what was happening in the world? Which would remain in his mind and form the basis of his opinions?

One of the consequences of some of the things going on in the Middle East was that there was an increasing divide developing between those who wanted to keep theocratic government, sharia legal systems, and women in the home and not behind the steering wheel of a car or in a restaurant; and those who wanted democratic government, votes for women, a judiciary separate from church and state and so on. These, of course, are fundamental arguments which have been going on for decades. It could be said that the Middle East has polarised around these choices. I saw a shot of Damascus on the television the other day: a city of endless tower blocks, each apartment with a satellite TV dish on the balcony, and, among the tenements, the spires and domes of a thousand mosques. It seemed to me to sum up the conflict, the choices, at the heart of modern Islam. As I said in an earlier chapter, I watched a lot of TV in my job. I had a big flatscreen TV on all the time in my office tuned to CNN, another one tuned to BBC 24, and another with Sky News.

Mostly I watched the TV with the sound turned off-when it looked like there was breaking news, I hit the remote for sound. Most of the time I was just watching images. They washed over the surface of my mind and then they were gone, but every now and then an image would stick. I would remember it. It would shape my thought.

I would watch the images on the screen and think about what they meant. I saw young Kazakhs and Ossetians in baseball caps and tracksuits throwing stones at riot police trying to keep them off the streets at night, trying to stop them using mobile phones and wearing Western clothes. I saw those who had failed to dodge the bullets lying in dark pools in the street. I saw other images, of men young and old, in the traditional dress of their people, rioting against Westerners. And I saw that this was a society at a tipping point. Fourteen hundred years ago Islam began in the Arabian desert and within a century controlled an area which extended from Spain to central Asia. The same thing might be about to happen now. Or it could go the other way.

Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas-the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation.

I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV.

They watch TV and see how we live here in the West.

They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash.

I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.

And so I had my inspiration.

All of a sudden I knew there was a better way to spend the taxpayer’s money. I didn’t know the latest Treasury estimates of our various military operations but they were enormous and growing all the time. At the time of writing we were operating in fifteen different countries, five of them officially. Because the reasons for our overseas interventions are sometimes complex and politically quite sophisticated, the sad fact is that sometimes the general public does not always appreciate the value of these operations. Who can blame them? Some of our involvements overseas have been going on an awfully long time.

But, I reflected, there are other institutions which we also traditionally spend money on without making much effort to understand the value of the investment. For example, there is the BBC World Service. What’s that for? It’s protected by charter and much as I would like to have taken an axe to it during the earlier years of our government, I knew I could not touch it. I also had to admit that a lot of people listened to it and, I speculated, does that not demonstrate an enormous thirst for information about the European and in particular the British way of life? I have never listened to the World Service myself. I imagined from looking at some of the programme lists that it was mostly repeats of Farming Today or recent speeches in the European Parliament or magazine programmes about tribal rituals in the Congo, and this made me realise that there were audiences in the Arab world and beyond who really must be desperate for a glimpse of a world beyond their own. So, what would they do if they had access to a really zippy British-owned and-controlled TV channel? The idea I developed that winter was to set up a TV station called, let’s say for argument’s sake, Voice of Britain. From the outset I was enthralled by the possibilities and I determined to produce a pilot of a show, in order to take it to the boss. We scripted the show with Noel Edmonds in mind as presenter, but his agent wasn’t keen on the idea. In the end we used a lookalike presenter from al-Jazeera for the pilot. The other problem was that the contestants spoke either Farsi, Pashto, Arabic or Urdu and we needed to put the show out in English, so simultaneous translators were needed. But on the whole I think it worked extremely well.

26

Script of TV pilot for Prizes for the People

Episode One (Duration 30 minutes), Prizes for the People

[Title sequence]

[00.30]

[Theme music]

[Presenter welcome and introduction]

[00.30]

[Presenter is standing in the ruins of a village.]

Muhammad Jaballah (in vision):

‘Good evening. I’m Muhammad Jaballah, and I’m standing here in the middle of the village of Dugan in the Northern Frontier District of Pakistan. The villagers of Dugan have been going through a tough time recently, as their government battles for the control of the area with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But now things are about to change for them. They are going to join me in my new show, a show that will test the wits of contestants from all over the Middle East and Asia. And, if they get the right answers, their lives will undergo the most incredible transformation. They will win prizes beyond their wildest dreams. Welcome to our great new show, [Theme music] Prizes for the People.’

’

[Still photograph of a Pakistani male in his early twenties.]

Male voice?over:

‘Farrukh from Dugan will be our first contestant. But for now let’s learn more about Dugan, the wonderful village which Farrukh comes from.’