2007 - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (24 page)

The Secretary of State:

If the honourable gentleman will look at the website of the MoD on the page ‘Operation Telic 2’ tomorrow, he will find, regrettably, that Captain Matthews is now posted, or will be posted, as ‘Missing in Action’.

Correspondence between Ms Chetwode-Talbot and herself

Captain Robert Matthews

c⁄o BFPO Basra Palace

Basra

Iraq

21 November

Darling Robert,

This is the last letter I will write to you, until you come home, when there will be no more need for letters. I shall not post it because there is no way I can post it from here that I know of and because of course you would never get it anyway. But I had to put these words on paper, to try and understand the feelings I have. First, I will tell you about what we are doing here. If I write about the everyday things, perhaps I will get my balance back.

I am writing this in a place called al-Shisr, in the mountains of Heraz, in the western highlands of the Yemen. It is a wilderness of mountains and fortified hill villages, connected by tracks that even you might hesitate to drive along (I have to keep my eyes closed most of the time). Although they have a satphone and computers down at the construction site in the Wadi Aleyn, up here in this mountain village there are no computers and no phones. My mobile long ago ceased to find a signal. This is the sheikh’s ancestral home and he likes to keep everything just as it was in the ninth century, when it was built. Of course we have air conditioning and running hot water and a fantastic chef in the kitchen, but everything else about this place could be from any century except the present one.

Down in the Wadi Aleyn, there is a huge amount of activity: masses of trucks and earth-moving equipment, hundreds of Indian construction workers, more stuff being driven in every day. It is fascinating to see the concrete basins taking shape. They are doing a terrific job. The basins will be filled with water when they are ready and then, after we have done a few tests, we will be ready to fly the salmon out from Fort William down to London, and from there to the Yemen.

Fred and I have walked nearly every yard of the Wadi Aleyn, and he and the project engineer have prepared a profile of the wadi bed, showing where we need some additional engineering to help the salmon get over natural obstacles. It will just be a question of putting in some concrete steps or slipways here and there, to help the fish get past what will be waterfalls when the wadi is flowing. We have spent a fair amount of time with the engineers working these extras into the construction plans.

Fred says that, for the first time, he really believes we might achieve something. The topography of the wadi pleases him. The quality of the water coming from the aquifer pleases him. Even the size of the gravel pleases him. He thinks his fish—our fish—will survive here, even if only for a while. But something will happen; something will be achieved. The sheikh has infected us all with his own sense of belief. In this Old Testament land it is difficult not to believe in myths and magic and miracles.

I have another week here before I can go back, but Fred is going to stay longer, to wait for the construction of the holding basins to be completed and for the engineers to sign off on the job, so that he can satisfy himself that the basin doesn’t leak, the oxygen bubblers work and the sluice gates open, and so on. Then he is flying back to start planning the last phase of the project, the transport of the salmon.

My job is nearly over now. I still have to manage the administration and accounting of the project but the hard part—the design and engineering, the feasibility studies, the planning and construction—is nearly over. Now all we have to do is finish this stage and wait for next summer’s rains, which will fill up the holding basins. When the rainy season is close, then we will start the crucial job of transporting live salmon from Scotland to the mountains of the Yemen. For Fred, that next stage is the vital moment, the culmination of all of our work. I expect he will be in and out of the Yemen over the next few months and I will see a lot less of him. Sorry, I seem to be going on about Fred a bit. He has become a good friend.

Now I must write about myself. I have been worried absolutely sick; there has been no news of you, only rumours. Some of the rumours I heard, a few weeks ago, have made it worse. How is it possible that so much time can go by, so many questions be asked about where you are and what you are doing, and yet still there are no answers? How can people be so cruel as to keep me in ignorance? I dread writing these words, but even if the news about you was the worst possible, the news that I have feared I would receive almost hourly since you went away, would not that be better than this endless not knowing?

I’ve lost weight. No bad thing, you might say. But I look at myself in the mirror and some of me has gone. I have been evaporating with worry. Now I come to the thing I have to set down in writing, even if you never read it. Today, for the first time, I feel a profound sense of relief. Or is it a sense of release? Whatever the right word is, I have a strange certainty that you are out of danger now. I don’t know where you are, but I feel sure you have reached somewhere where no one can harm you. I hope it’s true. I believe it’s true. I feel sure now that when I return to the UK in a few days’ time there will be some news of you after these weeks and months of silence.

I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed you were staying with us here, in the sheikh’s villa, that somehow you had got leave from your regiment and found out where I was, and had flown down south to be with me. It was all mixed up as to how you got here. Dreams never make sense. But it was a wonderful dream, and we were together. We were as together as any two people could be, more together than I have ever been before with you, or with anyone. When I awoke I burst into tears. The dream was so wonderful, I wanted to be back in it; I wanted it to go on and on. I tried to smell you on me. I smelled my own skin to see if, somehow, magically, it had been real. It felt real. But they were burning frankincense and the smell of it was everywhere. It was a dream, of course, how could it have been otherwise? But its reality was so strong that for a while the waking world was quite unreal to me.

But what if it had not been a dream? How could you possibly have been with me?

Now a brilliant sunrise is climbing over the ridges high above us. I can smell spices, flowers and coffee when I stand at the window and inhale the mountain air. How strange it is that I am here, and yet, how calm and how natural everything feels now. The despair I have sometimes felt over the last few weeks has, for the moment, quite gone from me.

Down in the village, the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer.

I’ll stop now and put this letter away. I won’t read it again until you have come back to me, and then I’ll look at it once and throw it on the fire.

Love,

Harriet

Extract from Peter Maxwell’s unpublished autobiography,
A Helmsman at the Ship of State

The image of the ship of state was, my researcher tells me, first created by Tenniel or another of the Victorian illustrators in a cartoon for
Punch
magazine. It was a metaphor for government: the captain of the ship was, naturally, the prime minister of the day. His concern was to keep the passengers happy, and to keep control of the crew. The analogies are too obvious to labour, but it is the figure of the helmsman that so often commands our attention.

In my long association with Prime Minister Jay Vent—as employee, colleague but above all friend—I believe I was, for him, the helmsman. In the Victorian illustration we see the figure of a man, clad in oilskins, on the foredeck of the ship, lashed to the helm to prevent him from being swept overboard. Drenched by the spray from towering waves, pitched in every direction by the motion of the sea, he keeps his eye on the firmament. Above him through the wrack of cloud is the gleam of the North Star. Without thought for his own safety, he concentrates his whole being on keeping the ship on course, guided by the light from above. He is focused, selfless; for him, the only task is to bring his captain and all the complement of the ship safe to harbour.

Of course, I would never overstate my role in Jay Vent’s administration: I was one of many cogs in the machinery of government. But I was the cog that so often laid his hands upon the wheel and, by a touch this way, a tug the other way, helped shape our course.

§

That winter, at the invitation of the government of Iraq, we sent troops back to deal with local instabilities which were once again threatening the reconstruction of the oilfields. There were, unfortunately, other issues to deal with around that time. Apart from our renewed operations in Iraq, there was the unfortunate explosion in a dental floss factory in Iran which everyone seemed to assume was something much more sinister, the result of a covert operation by our forces. We were also also asked by the US government to make a contribution to the Saudi Aramco Defence Force, which had been deployed to prevent further terrorist attacks on oilfields in the kingdom.

On top of everything, we had a cold winter. Understandably, our own administration and previous governments have not been quick to restart the building of nuclear power stations in this country. I have often said it is the right direction to take, but not before we have had the opportunity for measured debate and a review of the relevant town and country planning acts. Meanwhile, the temporary deficit in our energy supplies has been kindly met by the government of the Ukraine, which has agreed to increase the supply of natural gas to the UK. Unfortunately, as a result of some 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.