Reid’s face showed nothing but polite curiosity.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
‘Ruin my street-cred.’
‘We wouldn’t want you to say anything different from what you’ve said already,’ Cochrane interjected.
‘That’s not the point,’ I said. ‘You could get all the independent scientists you want, even relatively sane environmentalists on board. All that anyone would have to do to discredit it is remind people where the money was coming from.’ I checked that we’d all abandoned our plates, and lit a cigarette. ‘Look at FOREST.’
The skin around Cochrane’s eyes creased and he nodded, as if to hold the place. He gestured to the waiter and ordered coffee and cigarillos. I tried to decline the cigarillo, but he insisted that I at least keep it for later. He stripped the cellophane from his own, lit up, and savoured his first few puffs with a lot more apparent appreciation than I did.
‘The Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco,’ he said, ‘has a good deal more media-credibility than the Tobacco Advisory Council. We’ve checked. They’re quite up-front about where they get a lot of their money from. They don’t dispute the health risks, just the use of them to justify all kinds of intrusive restrictions and invasive propaganda. That doesn’t strike me as a bad example.’
He stubbed out his cigarillo and fanned away the vile clouds with his hand. ‘Feelthy habit,’ he remarked, blinking furiously. ‘Matter of principle.’
I shrugged. ‘OK, if that’s how you see it go ahead. But you won’t do much to change public opinion, at least in the present climate.’
‘Mister Wilde,’ Cochrane said in a disappointed tone, ‘We aren’t talking about the present climate. We’re talking about changing the climate.’
‘You want to take the rap for global warming?’
Cochrane indulged a brief laugh. ‘Touché…but seriously, we stand to lose a great deal if the dire predictions turn out to be true, so no, we have no interest in minimising that. We’d like a clearer public perception of the issues, that’s all. As to the climate of opinion…North British Mutual Assurance has existed in one form or another since before the Revolution.’ (Before the what?) ‘If truth be told, its predecessor companies had not a little to do with the fact that the Revolution was Peaceful, and Glorious, and all those other fine words that history has applied to the distinctly businesslike takeover of 1688.’ (At this point my brain caught up with him.) ‘So let me put a proposition to you, on the basis that – should the lady at the nearest table happen to be, let’s say, a journalist for The Scotsman – this conversation will have undeniably happened, and otherwise…perhaps not.’
He chuckled darkly, and despite misgivings I felt drawn in, part of his plot.
‘As insurers,’ he went on, in a lower voice, ‘we have no interest whatsoever in backing polluters, because – as the asbestos companies have shown – they’re a bad risk. We most emphatically do have an interest in prosperity, and growth, and clients who pay in their premiums through long and healthy lives. So if someone were to set up an organisation such as we’ve discussed, our interest could be quite open, and quite defensible by both sides.’
‘If presented in the right way,’ Reid said. ‘I think it’s within your capabilities.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It could look no more sinister than giving money to the Tory Party. Probably less.’
Cochrane coughed. ‘As it happens, our political donations this year –’
He was interupted by the cynical cackles of Reid and myself. After a moment he joined in.
‘Yes, well, we are in the business of spreading the risk!’
‘It’s quite something,’ I said, ‘to see the smart money changing sides, almost before your very eyes.’
‘Indeed,’ Cochrane said. ‘And you could look on our proposal as something similar, if on a longer time-scale.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t see your point.’ I thought I did, but I hardly dared believe it.
Cochrane raised an eyebrow to Reid, who nodded slightly.
‘I’ve glanced over some of the literature that you’ve sent to Dave over the years,’ Cochrane said. ‘Among all the dross it contains rather stimulating ideas about a possible role for insurance companies in supplying security to their clients. Now, as a political ideal –’ An airy flick of the hand. ‘However, as a market strategy for dealing with, ah, a certain absconding of the state from what have hitherto been its responsibilities, it has definite attractions. To say nothing of…’
And he said nothing of it. His eyes had lost the blinking tic, and gazed steadily back at me.
‘Another little interruption in the smooth course of British history?’ I asked.
He nodded soberly. ‘Speculative, of course. But we may some day have to consider our position in relation to what the erudite Mr Ascherson delights in calling the Hanoverian regime. Think of it as…’
‘Insurance,’ Reid said gleefully.
I looked from one to the other and lit a cigarette, moving my hands very carefully to keep them steady.
Until that moment I’d thought myself immune to the glamour of power, in exactly the way that a eunuch might be to the glamour of women. I’d never stood up for an anthem or straightened for a flag, never fumblingly inserted anything in a ballot-box. The attitude that made my parents’ sect reclaim the taunting nickname of ‘impossibilists’ had, I fancied, been inherited in my own anti-political stance. Oh, I’d wanted to have influence, to change the way people thought, just as my parents did; but – again like them – I’d never seriously expected the opportunity to actually get my hands on power’s inviting flesh.
In short, I’d been a complete wanker, until that moment when I learned what I’d been missing. And you know, what I felt then was almost sexual; it’s something in the wiring of the male primate brain.
The big thrill wasn’t that they were offering me power – they were offering me a bit more influence, that was all. No, what made the hairs on my neck prickle was that they thought I might – any decade now – have power; that I might represent something that it was a smart move to get on the right side of well in advance; that somewhere down the line might be my Finland Station.
‘Just one question,’ I said. ‘There are plenty of better-known and better-connected people with views similar to mine, so why me?’
Reid looked as if he were about to say something, but Cochrane cut him off.
‘It’s because you don’t have connections with any part of the present establishment, and we wouldn’t wish you to cultivate any. Your views on the land question and the banking system are dismissed as thoroughly unsound by every free-market think-tank I’ve consulted. Your political connections are such that your MI5 and Special Branch files are, I understand, commendably thick. Your Internet articles on the recent Oklahoma outrage, on Chechnya, on Bosnia, have added the FBI and the CIA and FIS to your attentive readership. So, you see –’
‘I see, all right,’ I said. ‘You want to buy someone who looks like he’s not been bought.’
‘Christ, man –!’ Reid began, but again Cochrane interrupted.
‘Excuse me, chaps,’ he said, dusting grains of chilli from his fingers. ‘I’ve never had a radical conscience to wrestle with, and quite frankly I’d be a liability to my own case in the kind of discussion I can foresee developing.’ He smiled wryly, almost regretfully, at us. ‘So if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to it.’
He stood up, held out his hand, and I rose to shake it, mischievously returning his peculiar grip. ‘Good evening, Jon, and I hope I see you again.’