This is the second part of my re-work of the original Journey posts.  A third will follow.

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The entrance to that part of the secret state
concerned with countering domestic threat.

The text on Jon Dunstan’s mobile read, “1.00 pm same place”.  It was initialled “B”.  He understood that this was not a request.  But the short notice rankled.  Obviously, they knew very well that he could have client commitments but they didn’t care.  They knew he would obey the call.  He would attend what was, in fact, a final briefing, given that Driscoll’s personal secretary had booked one of the first-floor private rooms at Rules - hardly the most chic of eateries - for dinner that very evening.  Still, the game was commencing and that was what he had signed up for.

He found “B”, a middle-aged woman of unremarkable appearance and cool demeanour whom he knew only by the pseudonym Beatrix, sitting primly in the sun on one of the benches by the tennis courts in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  There were no niceties exchanged.  “Do you want to sit or walk?” he asked her.  She rose and the two of them began to stroll slowly around the perimeter of the Fields.

“We were disappointed to learn,” she stated, “that you will only be meeting with Driscoll.  How did that happen?”

Dunstan didn’t know.  “I sent you Driscoll’s text.  The Prof couldn’t make it, that’s all.”

“I doubt if that’s all,” she responded, “If Upton is distancing himself or not taking you seriously we want to know why.  We want to keep on top of things.”

Dunstan nodded dutifully although, in truth, he was not at all the dutiful sort.  “I’ll ask,” he said, “but I really need to stick to law as much as possible.  I’m not sure what else I can safely say to Driscoll if, as you say, he’s just the money-man.  It might be wiser to postpone altogether.”

“Postponing now would only make you look suspect,” she retorted, “We started with him, remember.  So it follows that you must want to see him.  About what, precisely, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think.  You’re on the same side.  You haven’t got to explain everything.  It’s more subtle than that.  Watch his face.  Sense his working assumptions about you.  Where they are positive let him run with them.  Where they’re not, throw in a redirection or put him off by cross-examining him.  Never allow him to cross-examine you.  Always be aware of the underlying power-dynamics.  It’s trade-craft.  Surely it must be second nature to any half-decent advocate?”  Something close to a smile yet not a smile, a schemer’s relish, played on her lips.  But it was gone without trace in an instant.

“Yeah yeah, OK,” said Dunstan, sighing wearily.  She had this way of beating him down which felt intentional.  Was that because she was “aware of the underlying power-dynamics”?  He was a junior of thirty-one, for Christ’s sake, and he knew perfectly well how to handle himself.  He was not charmed to be told otherwise, even by MI5.  He didn’t hide it well, either.

“Am I boring you, Mr Dunstan?” Beatrix inquired with quiet malice.  “This is a formal operation, in case you have forgotten.  It has a clear objective, a plan of action, a codename, and a budget.  What it does not have is room for cavalier attitudes from you.”

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, knuckling down again,“of course I will do as you ask.”

“You will have to,” his handler stated flatly, “You’re in now and there’s no getting out.”

It could not escape Dunstan’s notice that a relationship which began with an intriguing and flattering invitation to help his country had transmogrified with alarming speed into a master-servant relationship, and he was not the master.  He was, instead, a cog in a machine - codename Operation Culvert - designed to interdict and fragment a lawful action by British citizens in an international court of justice.  He had no moral or intellectual problem with the action or the interdiction.  If people wanted to challenge government policy on race and immigration good luck to them, and good luck to anybody who wanted to stop them.  From the lawyer’s perspective it was all good business.

Dunstan was a realist, not an idealist; and had specialised in human rights, equalities and employment law rather than, say, company and tax law because the field was less competitive, the case law was simplicity itself, and, client-wise, it offered a steady stream of entertaining zoo creatures.  The fees were, well, not greatly above average; but then there was also the non-material consideration, perfectly admissible for a single man, of the heavy preponderance of female fellow-advocates to be encountered in his daily round.  True, some of them were insanely political and feminist to the soles of their designer pumps, or somewhere lower.  But, to be mercenary about it, the narrower the ideologue the more persuaded she was likely to be that the male delectation for meaningless sex on the first (and probably only) encounter was something to which she, too, must aspire.  Dunstan saw absolutely nothing wrong with feminist aspirations.

In similar realist vein, when Beatrix tapped him, asking what he felt about his country, he could not find anything to wax lyrical about.  On reflection, he wasn’t sure what he really knew of the England that existed outside central London.  He supposed that there were grey and faded things to which some residual truth still attached ... greasy fish and chips in Morecambe, rainy Sundays, litter in the hedgerows, windy motorway service stations.  But nothing of that England gripped him in any way.  No, as with much else in his busy life ... snowboarding black runs, the sky-diving and paragliding ... he fancied playing the spook not out of some blazing patriotism but for himself and for the sheer hell of it.

Right now, though, espionage seemed to be a disappointingly pedestrian pastime.  “You know the routine if and when you do get onto the legals,” Beatrix had said when their circuit brought them back to the tennis courts, “Ask them how confident they are that their case is really justiciable under the terms of the 1948 Convention.  Plant the seed of doubt.  On strength, obviously you have to review all of their evidence.  Tell him that if there really is an application to the ICJ in it you can pick up the phone at any time to any of the London HR silks.  Yes, you understand why, with such a novel case, Professor Upton concluded that the usual solicitorial channels would be inadequate.  There is nothing wrong with that per se.  But the DIY approach isn’t working, and you can’t have him blowing up barristers’ egos all over town.

“So that’s the first stage.  Secure for us everything they have ... all their supporting documentation ... and secure control of them.  That’s your brief.

“Final point.  We’ll be there tonight.  When you walk through the main restaurant you will pass me seated at one of the tables.  There will be someone with me.  Ignore us both.  When you have finished your meal spring an excuse on Driscoll and leave.  Don’t come out with him.  Don’t hang around outside waiting for a cab.  Walk away.”

Dunstan looked quizically at her.

“You don’t need to know why,” she said.

Beatrix arrived back at her office to be summoned by her section head Tom Kelloway.  He was an old MI5 hand, like her.  They had both cut their teeth in Northern Ireland during the eighties.  Since 7/7 both had been heavily focussed on the threat of Islamist terrorism.  But that was judged now to be receding, and political consideration - the bane of every MI5 manager’s life - was inevitably filling the void.  Kellaway was being put out to grass in three weeks, to be replaced, inevitably, by not only the first female head of Technical Ops but the first Muslim.  They had to look to GCHQ management to find her though, overlooking Beatrix and every senior field operative in the process.

Kelloway brought two cups of coffee from the machine in the boardroom next door and set the black and sweet one down on the desk in front of Beatrix.

“Everything set for tonight?” he asked, taking his seat behind the desk.

She took a sip of the liquid and nodded slowly.

“How’s our barrister boy?” Kelloway asked.

“Fully briefed,” she replied, “I like him.  He’ll do well when he gets into it.”

“And who’s the honey trap?”

“New girl for us.  Belongs to the Americans.  But the right age, very pretty,” she replied.

“Well, I hope she likes roast beef,” he said, then after a brief pause, “Anne, I want you to expand Culvert.  I want to return to the Haynes business.” 

He pushed a thin folder across the desk towards her.  She opened it.  “I thought Veronica Haynes was out of bounds,” she observed.

“Obviously not anymore,” he replied,  “The DG has it from the Cabinet Secretary.  There is unease among ministers about the way that Haynes’ FOI campaign has been arrowing in on anything remotely sensitive.  They suspect that she has a source.  They’re very suspicious about the Home Office.  They are also asking if classified material could be reaching her and guiding her search.  They want to be reassured that we haven’t been asleep, and leaving the sainted Veronica alone these last years hasn’t been a mistake on our part.”

Beatrix mulled that one over.  “But that was uniform,” she said, correctly.

“Yes, and these are politicians,” Kelloway observed, “Their nervousness is existential.  And their transparency.  No doubt they’re hoping that we can be persuaded to sting Haynes with something marked Secret which will then conveniently turn up behind a cushion on Upton’s sofa.”

“That attitude, Tom,” Beatrix told him, “is precisely why they are moving you out!  But a fourth man?  Now that is a possibility.”

“Or woman, of course,” came Kelloway’s mandatory correction.  “There’s something personal about this whole affair.  Either way, someone who knows how to circumvent the Home Office archive security protocols, and remain hidden.  As of this morning their digital security team has initiated a review, and we are dovetailing that with a meta-analysis of Haynes’s information requests for confirmation of the ministers’ suspicions.  I have a video-conference with Cheltenham this evening to set up the usual domestic intercepts on Haynes.  But we have to assume that these people are good and aren’t going to help us by making mistakes.  So I want you to blindside them by replicating your Dunstan strategy inside Marsham Street: a fifth man to see if we can net a fourth.”

“Do you mind if I get Dunstan settled in first?” she asked.

“Heavens, yes do; but find the talent as soon as you can, please.  I’ll ask the data team to copy you in on their trawl.  That should help.  Everything else is in the file.  And, Anne, eyes are on us.  I rely on your impeccable tact, as always.  If A2 does have a source there would be embarrassment if it went to ground now.”

The Haynes affair had been national news three years earlier.  Veronica Haynes was 46 at the time, and a long-serving researcher and senior manager in the Population Section of the ONS Newport.  Back in 2007/8 the organisation had been made independent of government, its director reporting instead to parliamentary committee.  But government oversight continued to be exercised through the UK Statistics Authority in London, which was itself under ministerial authority via the Cabinet Office.  By that opportune means politics slipped back in the door at Newport with the Tory cost-cutting programme Beyond 2011 and then, from 2015, the Census Transformation Programme.

But it was only in the wake of the EU Referendum of June 2016 that Veronica saw the speed and character of the “transformation” hit home in her own areas of census policy, development, and consultations.  She thought it had been made worse by leakage from the struggle then developing fast in parliament and the media to ameliorate and, if at all possible, reverse the Referendum decision.  Despite the then PM referring to it on the record as “an instruction from the voters”, any notion that the majority had voted for immigration controls was quietly excised from the official post-campaign narrative and bundled into the canon of unexamined beliefs, cherished and maintained no less by the political right than the left, about the racism of the native masses.

Veronica, who had joined the Labour Party of John Smith while at UCL, belonged to another, more socialised political age when Labour politicians faced towards the people and not their own networks, and Tories towards their shires and not the dateline corporations.  She understood perfectly well that the real issue at Newport was the moving governmental spirit of the day; in short, Tory neoliberalism.  She detected its presence in a pattern of management decisions which always worked against any accounting of the past, present, and future influx of low-cost immigrated labour.  Even the pursuit of cold, non-ameliorable statistics had to be bent to the presentational requirement for immigration as an unchallengeable economic benefit.  Professional rigour, therefore, became politically inconvenient.  Best practise in data gathering and analysis was mysteriously forgotten.  Staffing levels were run down, with able researchers and statisticians transferred out of the department or let go altogether, every one of whom had, like her, dutifully relocated to South Wales as the old Pimlico headquarters was wound down.  To Veronica’s outraged eyes the entire department was being cynically neutered and re-purposed as a tame creature of government policy.  Departmental independence was still officially celebrated by senior managers.  But it was a collective, bare-faced lie that became ever more sovietesque with each repetition.

Nothing if not pugnacious by character, she made her views known, first to her union and, when that produced only excuses, within her department.  She found no support.  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your head down and get on with your job,” seemed to be the consensus of opinion.  Pleased to see that his staff-members were nothing if not realists, Veronica’s director summoned her to be lectured on departmental loyalty while at the same time threatened with the next round of redundancy.  She thought on this for several minutes before determining that if she could not ask the political question of why the ONS was not doing meaningful work, she must surely be able to advocate efficiency.

She duly wrote and circularised in hard-copy a paper to her departmental colleagues, pulling together a panoply of technical concerns she knew to be widespread among them.  In the process she tore apart ONS base assumptions in several key areas, notably on Principal Projections, variant ranges and specifications.  These criticism might have passed without too much blow-back.  But in the second half of the paper she ventured upon the negative implications of self-identification for Census Form users and, then, upon the open secret of the low rate of form returns from ethnic minority households.  She then examined what it would actually take in terms of policy, investment and manpower to deliver to government a service of acceptable certitude.  She had crossed a line.  Self-identification was a sacred political cow as well as an economic necessity.  But anything critical of non-white groups was completely unacceptable, especially when it was true and absolutely everybody was studiously ignoring it.  Her director personally toured the building collecting every copy of the paper.  Then, in magisterial tones, he delivered a final warning to her.

So it was that Veronica, calculating that she had nothing to lose, took the fateful decision to go public.  She contacted The Guardian and, together with a young staff reporter named Ricky Kellogg, produced in diary-format a series of anonymously-authored but, of course, ghost-written eye-witness accounts of ideological vandalism, duplicity and back-stabbing in an unnamed and hitherto trusted arm of government.  There was, however, enough there for an educated guess as to which arm it might be.  The director immediately accused her of involvement in these scurrilous articles but, out of revenge, she treated him to a bare-faced lie of her own.

Ricky’s artful ghost-writing, meanwhile, had struck a chord in other departments of government.  Many employees had trade union and Labour Party links.  Among some there was a sense that a new front in the party political war could be opened.  Miles Waldron, the veteran editor of the Guardian and sentimentally a liberal in the grand Manchester tradition, wrote an editorial revealing that a half-dozen other whistle-blowers in government departments had come forward with similarly hair-raising tales of Machiavellian Tory abuses of the public service ethos.  “There are endemic operational problems across the machinery of government,” Waldron wrote, “every one of which is the responsibility of an administration which does not believe in the mission to govern well, only cheaply and for its own ideological gain.”

The then junior minister with oversight of the civil service, a sleek and thoroughly clubbable operator named Gus Trigg, divined an unwelcome threat to the smooth progress of his career.  More in hope than expectation, he made luridly alarming appeals to fellow careerists about left-wing activism inside the civil service.  They all understood the party political sub-text, and the hue and cry went up.  The Home Secretary duly listened to their fears, then over-reacted.  To Trigg’s total delight, SO15 was sent in to hunt down the socialist evil-doers.

As the principal suspect Veronica was first in line for the treatment.  Her home was raided, she and her husband were arrested and questioned, and their mobiles and home computers were seized for analysis.  But nothing was found, a result taken to indicate not her innocence but her cunning.  Some senior officer in SO15, with nothing better to do, re-designated her as a Subject of Interest, which was a category normally reserved for terrorist suspects.  A physical surveillance operation was mounted on her under the codename Antrobus, after the Cheshire village of her birth.

At the same time, a Bronze Commander, no less, was dispatched to Waldron’s office to slap a hard-copy DSMA-Notice in his hand.  Bronze Man wanted to have a cosy chat about things.  Waldron reminded him that as no classified material was involved, and there were no national security issues, the law on source protection applied.  But he duly confirmed that, obviously, work on the whistle-blower project ceases immediately and his journalists will be re-assigned.  Bronze Man closed the door behind him on the way out.  He could at least be confident, though, that the impending disaster for one minister’s advancement had been averted.

But then something completely unexpected happened.  Veronica was hit by a van reversing - re-positioning, actually - in the lane outside her Caerlion home.  It was an electronic eavesdropping vehicle operated by a team of three SO15 officers.  She went under the rear wheels, suffering catastrophic internal injuries along with multiple leg fractures and broken vertebrae.  But she did not die, neither then nor in the days after.  She was though, with execrable timing, sacked forthwith and in absentia from her job.

This whole event could not now be hushed up.  The PM herself, ever mindful of the political inconvenience, ordered that the maximum medical care and expertise was to be invested in her survival.  No matter the cost or the length of her treatment, Veronica was to be made whole again.  The national print and broadcast media covered it all, according her the status of a heroine of the libertarian left.  Regular reports appeared under Ricky’s by-line of her moves between specialist medical facilities as she was stabilised and, as far as possible, rehabilitated (the possible would be confinement to a wheelchair for the rest of her life).

Ministers, however, still took refuge in national security, and steadfastly refused to meet demands from the opposition benches for information on the accident itself.  There were off-the-record briefings to the Tory press, repeated with less circumlocution by loyal Tory backbenchers, that Veronica had marched straight out of a blind-spot in the path of the reversing vehicle, with the obvious intention of berating its occupants.  Legal responsibility, therefore, could not safely and automatically be laid at the door of officers, much less ministers.  That line seemed to be cutting through.

Then it all changed again.  Seven months after the event, and with the financial support of Veronica’s trade union, her husband Eric sued the Home Secretary in the High Court.  Veronica gave her testimony by video link from her hospital bed, after which counsel for the minister, no doubt under close political instruction, declined to cross-examine and offered no defence.  Political discretion - embarrassment really - had prevailed, and a dreadfully changed woman was spared being called a liar for the greater good of government.  The judge praised Veronica for her courage, criticised the Home Office for its obstructiveness and avoidance of responsibility, and awarded an undisclosed settlement there and then.

Eric and his two daughters were photographed by the media scrum as they emerged onto the steps of the courthouse.  A headmaster by profession, he delivered a hastily prepared but suitably dignified and restrained statement calling on the Home Secretary to resign and for greater public accountability of the state security apparatus.  In fact, the politicos clung on, as they do, and nothing changed at Newport or anywhere else in government.  But careers were damaged by the press reaction, and the whole affair quickly gained notoriety in government and security circles.

Eric used part of the award to buy and convert a large and airy Edwardian house on the South Coast near Pevensey, where the land is flat.  But, inevitably, if Veronica’s physical surroundings were wistfully peaceful, haunted only by the calls of great, grey gulls climbing and wheeling in the lighted sky, her mental world was haunted by the pains and dark resentments of her ordeal, which never went away.

A childless woman, she had always had her marriage and her work.  She still had her marriage, but a life of simple interests ... music, TV, books ... could not suffice for her.  In the long waking hours of her paralysis, her mind, a good researcher’s mind still, craved variety and stimulation, purpose, something to go at, something that led back out there in the wide world.  The giddy excitement of those last weeks creating the articles with Ricky, battling with the hierarchy in Newport, confounding the secret state, still gripped her.  She longed to re-enter that old life, to discover it anew, to consume it whole like a ripe fruit.

It was as if she had fallen out of some grand historical swing.  No, not fallen; she had been pushed.  She wanted revenge not so much on the hand which pushed her but on the whole rotten edifice of what passed for government and politics in this country, and on all the elitism and greed for money, greed for power that hid away inside it; and then she saw.  The means to take it had been staring her in the face all along.  It was the one vast, arrogant, screamingly obvious betrayal that must never be exposed, never examined, never even spoken of; for which no one must be held accountable, and around which everyone, literally everyone, must be forced forever to walk as if on eggshells.  It was the one thing that would skewer them and bring them down, all of them.