2007 - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (16 page)

Boris Johnson:

But there’s a rumour, Peter, which must have reached your ears, that you yourself are writing a book…

Peter Maxwell:

Well, political biography is something I do read when I get the time. As for writing a book about myself and my own time in politics, I suppose at some point in the future when I’m less busy than I am now, it might be interesting to look back and reflect on things that happened during my watch. I’ve had a very interesting position for the last few years, in the eye of the storm, Boris, and I’ve seen and heard a lot. There’s certainly material there for a book if I ever I had the time to write one. But it wouldn’t be about me, Boris, because I’m a very private and quiet man. I would be more likely to write about some of the events I’ve witnessed.

Boris Johnson:

Well, let’s hope you do write that book one day, Peter. I, for one, would certainly queue up in a bookshop to buy a copy. But have you any other thoughts about things you would like to do in the future? If the pressure ever eased up for a bit, is there anything you’ve never done that you would like to try—sort of unfulfilled ambitions for your spare time?

Peter Maxwell:

Chance would be a fine thing, Boris. However, it’s funny you should ask me that because, yes, there is something I’ve never done before that I would like to do. It’s no secret that I have been acting in a kind of informal liaison role for the boss with respect to the Yemen salmon project, and while I’ve been doing that, I’ve come to feel I might like to try salmon fishing. You know, it’s a rather wonderful sport. I visited a place very recently where there were literally thousands of salmon leaping about, and they are the most wonderful creatures to watch. They can—I don’t know if you knew this, Boris—jump several feet out of the water into the air. It’s quite something to see, and if you’ve never seen a salmon leaping, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with this particular place.

Boris Johnson:

Thank you, that would be a very interesting experience. Have you any immediate plans to fish for salmon, then?

Peter Maxwell:

Well, we’ve arranged for a few to be put into an old gravel pit filled up with water near Chequers, so that the boss can practise his casting. He’s keen on the idea, too. And if we get the hang of salmon fishing, as I’m sure we both will, I’m hoping Sheikh Muhammad ibn Zaidi will ask us both to come and fish with him some time soon in the Yemen. Wouldn’t that be great? You ought to come, Boris!

Boris Johnson:

I can’t wait. I hope they ask me. Until then, Peter, thanks for talking to me.

Interview with Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot

Interrogator:

Describe your first meeting with Mr Peter Maxwell.

Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

Yes, I remember that visit to Glen Tulloch with Fred and Peter Maxwell. It was horrendous.

Peter Maxwell:

—is this being recorded? Well, I don’t care—is the most ghastly little man. How people like that get into such positions of power is quite beyond me. Did you read that appalling interview in the
Sunday Telegraph
he gave when he returned to London from Glen Tulloch?

Interrogator:

It will be included in the evidence. Please describe your first meeting with Peter Maxwell.

Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

He didn’t exactly make a favourable first impression. He can’t be five foot six. He wears suits that are years too young for him, nipped in the waist, shoulder padding, scarlet silk lining peeking out everywhere, which obviously cost a fortune in tailor’s bills. Candy-striped shirts with huge cufflinks. And the ties! And
what is
that stuff he puts on his hair! It reeks! Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. It was funny, though, to see him mincing across the wet lawns at Glen Tulloch in his Gucci loafers. The sheikh made him do it. He had to go outside in the rain and inspect the sheikh’s honour guard, or whatever they are.

Two dozen tall Yemeni tribesmen—skinny, hawk-nosed, fierce-eyed men who look as if they would kill you for the price of a goat. Or less. And Peter Maxwell had to walk past and pretend to inspect them while they stood to attention in their
thobes
, their long warm wraparound robes, with jackets over them, clutching their curved daggers in one hand and their fishing rods in the other. If only I had remembered to bring my digital camera. Couldn’t I have sold
that
photo to the
Sun\

His loafers were wet through. Ruined.

I remember wondering if the sheikh might not have rather a well-developed sense of fun. He never appeared to make jokes. But I wonder.

We had the stickiest evening imaginable. Fred was down in the dumps. The sheikh told me before we came up on the plane that Fred’s wife had left him. Or not left him, exactly, but decided to go and work in Geneva. It sounded like much the same thing. I don’t know how the sheikh knew. But he always seemed to know everything.

Poor Fred. Poor me, come to that. I hadn’t heard from Robert, my fiancé, for weeks. His letters stopped coming and then mine started being returned unopened, with the message that it had not been possible to forward them. So I was lonely and miserable and worrying to death about what might be happening to Robert. You can understand why.

Oh, God.

The witness became emotionally disturbed for a brief period. The interview resumed an hour later
.

Interrogator:

Please continue, Ms Chetwode-Talbot.

Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

I was very stressed out by the project. It had become too big. I was seconded full-time by my firm to support it. There was an immense amount to do. Fred did a good job, don’t get me wrong. The science and the engineering studies and proposals that he produced, or had produced for him, were brilliant. No one will ever know the amount of work that man put in. But at the end of the day Fred was a scientist, not an administrator. So I was spending twelve hours a day talking to contractors, talking to auditors, running a project team, talking to bankers, talking to Peter Maxwell’s office, talking to Fred’s boss to keep him off Fred’s back, writing reports, writing letters, writing spreadsheets for my partners, who were hypnotised by the fees rolling in. Then at seven o’clock at night I’d get off the phone and start dealing with the hundred or so emails that had come in.

Some of them were from other teams working on the project, but some were from fishing-rod manufacturers, and wader manufacturers, and fishing-wear manufacturers wanting us to use their products. Some were from people wanting work as consultants: retired oilmen from Saudi who knew a thing or two about wadis, indigent fisheries experts wanting to advise us on the science, an expert in ancient Arabian irrigation systems who believed that our project had been forecast and described in hieroglyphs on the interior walls of the Great Pyramid. I was emailed by people wanting to buy a week’s fishing on the Wadi Aleyn, people wanting to ask the sheikh to speak at their next flyfishing or angling association dinner, people wanting a timeshare in a villa in the Yemen. I received daily and hourly requests for donations from the Retired Drift Netsmen’s Association, the Retired Gillies Association, the North Atlantic Salmon Foundation, the Atlantic Salmon Trust, the Rivers Trusts—from just about everyone you could imagine except for Oxfam.

Come to think of it, I think Oxfam asked for money too. Why not? We were spending it like water, to coin a phrase.

The project had taken over every moment of my waking life. I was exhausted, and anxious about whether we would succeed. I was worried about what would happen to my job when it was all over; I had completely lost track of the rest of the business and someone else had been given all my other files. I had one client and one only: the sheikh. It was only his calm certainty that kept me sane.

It wasn’t surprising that Fred and I were such poor company that evening. Fred’s workload was as enormous as mine, and as far as I knew he wasn’t getting paid any extra for it. He was on secondment from NCFE, still drawing the same miserable salary. At least I would bank my partner’s share of the profits. And Fred was more exposed than I was. If the project failed, his reputation would die with it; there would always be plenty of people to point out where he had gone wrong. If it succeeded, I didn’t know what would happen. For all I knew he might be created a life peer. Or made a freeman of the city of Sana’a.

Interrogator:

Can you focus your remarks on what was actually said that evening?

Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

I’ve got off the point, haven’t I? Yes, that was a dreadful evening. Peter Maxwell was either pompous or provocative. I don’t know which I found the most awful. He dominated the conversation, such as it was, and kept trying to goad the sheikh into saying things about the Middle East. He wanted the sheikh to say something unmeasured, incautious. Then Peter would have something on him. He wouldn’t use it. He’d file it and keep it as ammunition for some other day.

Then he started making patronising remarks about how the prime minister wanted this photo opportunity and that photo opportunity. He actually turned to Fred at one point in the evening and told him to make sure the prime minister caught a fish, and to bear in mind he would only allow twenty minutes in his schedule to do so. I think he imagined that salmon could be driven to the fishermen, like grouse over guns.

Of course the sheikh took no notice of him. He was endlessly polite, and also managed to deflect Fred from saying something he might have regretted afterwards. I could almost see steam coming out of Fred’s nostrils at one point in the evening. The sheikh is a very subtle, intelligent man. He won’t be manipulated by people like Peter Maxwell. He just lets them make fools of themselves.

Eventually Peter took himself off—to go and play with his Blackberry, I expect. The sheikh then turned to Fred and told him, not quite in these words, to pull his finger out and get a grip of himself. And he said something else too, about faith, and love. I can’t remember the words he used then, either. It was a typical sheikhism. A mixture of down to earth and practical with a strong dash of the mystical.

At any rate, it had the most extraordinary effect on Fred. He jerked upright in his chair as if he had been poked with an electric cattle prod. After a moment his expression began to change. He stopped looking so Eeyorish and sorry for himself. His face took on a distant look, as if he was seeing something he thought he rather liked, but a long way off, too far away to be certain of what he was looking at.

When Fred wasn’t being gloomy, or pompous, I thought he looked rather nice. I walked upstairs with him and, on the landing, I kissed him goodnight, on the cheek. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done. Maybe that was less than professional, but I didn’t care. I felt a little sorry for him, and a little sorry for myself, so I kissed him on the cheek. He looked at me when I did that. He didn’t try to make anything of it, for which I was grateful. He just said, ‘Thanks,’ very quietly and as if he really meant it.

When I first met Fred and we were still at the stage of calling each other Dr Jones and Ms Harriet I’m-not-quite-sure-how-to-pronounce-your-surname-so-I’ll-just-mumble-it, I think I would rather have kissed a salmon than Fred. Now, I was not so sure. I went to bed wondering what would have happened if I had kissed him properly, on the lips.

The next morning we took a helicopter down to see the fish farm. Fred had told me about this and kept saying, ‘The sheikh will hate it. He’ll hate it.’

But there was nowhere else to get the fish, you see. We needed so many and it seemed as if trying to rear fish from wild stock would meet with so many objections and obstacles that it would take for ever, perhaps never. I couldn’t see the difference—then. Salmon farms breed salmon. We needed salmon, and lots of them. What was the problem?

So Fred gave me a long lecture about genetic integrity, and why wild salmon have it and farmed salmon don’t. I couldn’t see why it mattered. A fish is a fish, isn’t it? I had to pretend to be interested for half an hour. At the end of his speech I told him, ‘If this is the only way to get the salmon we need in the time we’ve got, let’s please just get on with it.’

The sheikh did hate it. I hated it, too. I hated seeing those poor fish crowded together like that in those cages, swimming in their own dirt. I hated the way they leaped into the air all the time as if they were trying to escape from a vast prison camp, which is of course what it was. I know they were only fish. But still.

Peter Maxwell took a few pictures; otherwise he said nothing until we were back in the helicopter. I think he thought that was how salmon always lived because he said how fascinating it was to see wild creatures so close, and what a marvellous tourist attraction they could be. Then he started to muse about whether one couldn’t sell tickets for people to row alongside the cages and hook fish out of them. He took out his Blackberry and wrote a note to himself to talk to the Scottish Executive about it. I saw Fred give him a look of such contempt and loathing it was lucky Peter did not see it.

When we got back to Glen Tulloch the helicopter dropped us off and took Peter Maxwell on to Inverness airport, so he could fly back to Downing Street and tell his boss all about it. He said, ‘The PM will be very impressed by what I have to tell him.’ There was more about being ‘deeply gratified by the progress made’ and ‘how delighted the prime minister will be to share the moment of the launch’. Then he turned to Fred and me and instructed us to keep him posted. He wanted weekly updates by email; he wanted us to keep at our work on the project night and day. I must say I felt like giving him a piece of my mind. Fred was a civil servant, so perhaps that gave Peter the right to give him instructions although I don’t really see why. But he had no right to tell me what to do. I was working as a partner in a private firm, and the sheikh was my client and the sheikh was the only person who could tell me what to do.

Then Peter Maxwell was gone. I saw later that he went straight back to London and gave that interview to the
Sunday Telegraph Magazine
about what a great salmon fisherman he was going to be.