The Green papers (continued)

Dear Tony

By the time you read this, there will be no point in pursuing us. We will be long gone. You will have noticed during the third interview that I was not fitted with any ancillary devices. All you have to work on is what the cameras recorded. I am currently uploading the material as I write, so you may get to see it in a couple of days, once the technical people have finished with it and you can have your own copy. In any case, you will see the programme before this letter reaches you, because I am not going to send it for a couple of days.

You will of course have noted the change in approach. I began this One-On-One assignment with a quite specific brief to take this man apart. Our line was that he was a predator, bent on achieving a megalomaniac’s domination of the free world. Or words to that effect... Sorry if I sound cynical, or if the words are hackneyed. Perhaps we have all become mere hacks without realising it. I was to demonstrate how his methods violated personal privacy. I was to stress the possibility, nay probability that his claims about developing new theories and methods of operation were spurious. I was to establish in the public mind the belief that his trading success was as a result of either good fortune or conspiracy or both.

I was to create the belief that he was a mere front for other powerful individuals, whose mission was to change the world by imposing their foreign values on it, values that were neither ‘Western’ nor ‘democratic’. Basically, Tony, I was to destroy the man by ridiculing him, branding him a liar and exposing him as a puppet. This would legitimise the calls to control him, tax him, even bar him, rein him in, some way or other...

I have done this before, of course. This is no Damascus moment that changes my attitude to everything that went before. I have interviewed and thus pilloried heads of state, politicians, celebrities, upstarts and psychopaths. I have met ordinary people, business leaders, capitalists, communists, the twice-born, the once-burned and the twice-shy. Over the last forty years I have dealt with Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Bahais, Shintos, animists, theists, atheists, polytheists, monotheists, Catholics, protestants, Shiites, Sunis, Adventists, Scientologists, even seismologists! And in most of my work - no let’s say all of my work - I have followed my journalistic instincts and, as a result of a firm belief in my own consistency of judgment and sincerity of approach, I have rarely looked back on any assignment with anything other than satisfaction at having got some way towards something called truth, a concept I still hold dear, respect and obviously idealise. On those occasions when I have worked to a brief, I have always stuck to that brief and sought to achieve precisely what I was contracted to do and commissioned to deliver. Never have I experienced any conflict between my principles, my sense of right, and my experience with an assignment. Until now.

You must have known there were risks. You also had no choice. You have lived a lifetime of being ordered. Cartwright was a subject who would deal with no-one else. He was not interested in media contact, apparently uninterested in what the media could do for him. And he cared not two hoots for his own image. But your task was to nail him, and nail him to the shape you and your paymasters had drawn. My problem was that he did not resemble the ogre you wanted me to find, and no matter how much I tried to reshape what I found, he simply refused to be anything other than sincere, probably harmless and certainly not threatening. You wanted him demonised, but my programmes may even have sanctified him. But you had no choice. He was willing to talk to me and none other, and so you have the material I have sent and nothing else, other than what you had collected or invented before my contribution began.

But that willingness to talk to me and to me alone, you knew from the start was a danger. It may just have been the case that his game was simple, sincere and humble: politically motivated, perhaps; idealistic, certainly. If he were to prove as unthreatening and even benign as his own pronouncements - however few and sparing in content - had claimed, then you would be in double trouble, because not only would your mission have failed, but also your entire analysis and its underpinning assumptions would be revealed to be specious, even malicious. Then where would you go?

Now I have always been willing to toe the line. I have always worked to my brief, and always delivered. There have been occasions of doubt, grey areas, but never before have I been confronted with a subject who is nothing like the brief I had been delivered. I have interviewed threats to peace, brainless celebrities who think they think, hated politicians who court popularity, innovative entrepreneurs without an idea in their heads, but I have never, until now, found such a complete mismatch between independent assessment and personal reality. There has always been at least a partial fit.

In this assignment, I have now delivered on my brief, in that I have completed three interviews that address the agreed areas, press crucial points, examine practice and motive. I have dealt with origins and future in this present. I have completed the task, but I have certainly not delivered on the envisaged brief. The man simply does not fit the picture. He is no vile conspirator, no threat to our way of life, no avaricious hoarder of wealth. It is simply not true. In not complying with this aspect of my brief, I realise that I put you, Tony, in an invidious position. But I can’t avoid that, since the brief that is so patently wrong was delivered by you. I was commissioned to do this by you, to deliver what you wanted, what you needed to further your professional credibility. So now I can’t avoid landing you in the proverbial. It’s a pile of your own making, after all. You have put me in it many times over the years, so I might cite the idea of payback, but then citing examples to justify that would be worse than petty. The mess is now all yours. I wish I could say ‘good luck, Tony’, but that would be stretching politeness.

You gave me my chance. Without you, your influence and connections, my career would probably have never even started. I owe everything I have become and everything I have achieved to you. You made the contacts, you negotiated the special assignments from which all the other work stemmed. Thank you.

But you are also a selfish bastard. Everything I have done has been conceived for your own benefit. What I could do was unique, and you knew that. I was a disabled, vulnerable woman, who volunteered to be pitched into the deep ends of events, and somehow, despite my challenged-limb status, I always managed to swim to safety. And deliver, it has to be said, deliver precisely what you needed to enhance your own standing, and thus advance your career, your own rise to influence and power. But everything has its day, and perhaps ours jointly is passed. It’s a pity that things started to go wrong for you, but frankly you only have yourself to blame. The womanising alone would have made you enough enemies to ensure that one day retribution would hit you squarely in the back, but the drinking on top, especially doing it on duty, was bound to bring things to a head at some point.

Thank you for volunteering my services for this One-On-One special. I am sure your motives were sincere. You and your colleagues really were convinced that you had a mandate to save the world from tyranny. The fact that, by chance, you happened to be married to the only person in the world that the tyrant was willing to meet was pure coincidence, of course. Your exploitation of it, however, was calculated, opportunistic, selfish and cynical. Your beliefs may have been sincere, but the philosophy that generated them was corrupt. And the weapon only you could use has now backfired.

I was convinced by your sincerity, all those years ago. I was more than vulnerable when we met; I was conquered. I expected to die within the year. I had been told my chances were fifty-fifty at best. I never even expected to get to university, let alone finish it. Your support was effective and probably crucial. Thank you for that. You took me under your wing. You were obviously and sincerely attracted to me, and I am sure your motives were quite honest, even altruistic. You wanted to protect me. And there was always an element of dependency on my part, but I did not complain, at least for the first decade or so. By that time I was secure enough about my own future to believe in it. I was inextricably linked to you, personally and professionally, I was happy on both counts. It’s hard to imagine what my life might have been without you. I probably would still have become a journalist, but you set up those first few opportunities, the ones that made my name. I owe you everything, Tony, but it was all based on a lie, wasn’t it? A lie, because that night in my first term at Oxford, you lied about that man on the fence, that man who created a fracas, as you put it, that man who was calling out my name.

Tony, I can put up with the womanising. I can always lock the door and make you sleep in the spare room, so I can put up with the drinking as well. I can tolerate your selfishness and the manipulation of my abilities for your own ends, up to a point. But that lie changed our lives, for the better, you would argue, but then you always were a selfish bastard, always full of yourself, weren’t you? And ironically, if it were not for my disability, I would not have been such a marketable commodity, would I? My audience always was on my side, right from the start, and also on the right, since the left was missing! Sorry about the pun...

You knew how I could be marketed. You knew from the start how I might disarm (having been de-legged myself) those who trade in power. But I have lived a professional life like the bearded lady, or the smallest man in the world, revealed in a side-show at a funfair for the merest of glimpses when a curtain is momentarily pulled back to reveal the freak our eyes hate to view. Christine Gardiner is as much your creation as she is mine. Or should I say she is more the creation of those who run you, who deliver your orders? For you simply do as you are told, don’t you?

Tony, I don’t hold you responsible for everything that’s gone wrong. I have been a completely willing participant in the nonsense. But I was never big enough to bite the hand that fed me, even when your behaviour hit the pits. I owed you. Your callousness, your manipulation, your selfishness, your infidelity, your drunkenness... all of these I have tolerated in different measure over the years. And I tolerated them because I got the kudos. I got the assignments. I won the awards. You got the day job (and probably the bigger pay cheque!), but I got the spotlight. But One-On-One with Tom Cartwright was an assignment too far. I cannot deliver on the brief because the analysis is wrong. He is no threat. I suppose many might see him as a threat,, but Tom Cartwright is unique in that he is an idealist who can actually deliver on his promises. But if you don’t deliver on yours, Tony, you are finished. And on this job, I’m afraid you can’t deliver because I can’t deliver on your behalf. Not this time. And you have probably had too many failures in recent times. They will not be tolerant for much longer.

This time the real difference is that there is a way out. You knew I’d had enough of this game, that I wanted to give it all up five years ago, but it was you who persuaded me to take more jobs, to continue to deliver. Was it panic on your own behalf? Did you know that you were useless without me? But, of course, just like you I couldn’t resign. The option simply is not in our contract, is it?

But this time I have turned turtle. Sorry about the pun. An opportunity like this arises far less than once in a lifetime. It’s a privilege that’s afforded only by an accident of history, by happening to be alive when genius is near. He is nothing less than genius, Tony. And you now know that. I have been lucky to have had two opportunities to take up the offer. I missed out first time round, but I grasp it this time with enthusiasm. Tom and I are off to chase turtles. He wants his own life, and so do I. Together, we will stand on our own two feet and make a new life for ourselves.

I’ll leave it at that, Tony. Don’t try to reply. Goodbye. Chris.