i.m. M.I.
You weren’t there, but your typescript had arrived
an hour before the copy went to press:
one of us took a bus up the Cowley Road
to get the piece of paper to the printers,
a sheet where every other line was stiff
with Tippex, and over the patches your own hand,
elegant even there, even in biro.
The finished magazines would be wheeled down
in a shopping trolley all the way to Magdalen,
and where they went from there I never knew,
preoccupied with typos I might find,
too late to fix, in something on my watch.
I was the careless one, and still am careless,
for whom your nickname, which was maybe halfaffectionate,
of ‘Supermac’ was apt,
satirically two decades out of date
(I’d told you about how I sent the real
Harold Macmillan gently off to sleep
by spouting verse in the Sheldonian).
I missed things, often. It wasn’t until
one afternoon with you, deep in the Chequers,
at a sunny table, drinking like we meant it,
when we were joined by an ancient, fugitive
Glaswegian who talked rubbish for an hour,
and my accent softened, and your open smile
broadened and shone, accepting, that I knew
my stupid blunder in taking you for English.
We weren’t in Oxford, even though we sat
in High Street – not that Oxford, anyway,
where power hatches and speaks to itself:
we were at home in feeling far from home,
and listening to a voice that wasn’t ours,
while in the sunlight I could see you make
connections and corrections both at once.
The blunders of a quarter century
all felt like nothing once I stood apart,
a year ago today, watching them wheel
you out from Magdalen, when you weren’t there.
A typist has got it wrong, and so in pen
the Foreign Secretary corrects his memo,
adding the phrase she left out from his last
sentence of para. 1, in which ‘Our own
parliamentary history is one long story
of trouble’ is missing three vital words:
he dashes in with the Irish, and now it’s clear.
The rest is all right: he tells the PM
how they (the Northern Irish) ‘are not like
the Scots or Welsh’, he tells him how he doubts
they ever will be, how the British interest
is not served best by ‘tying them closer
to the United Kingdom’; he recommends
pushing them now towards a United Ireland.
He is himself a Scot: Eton and Oxford
(3rd Class in Modern History), a life
given largely to service, and being spent so now,
adding the weight of his practised signature
as he sends the paper on to Downing Street
like a coda to one long story of trouble
from Alec Douglas-Home (a Christ Church man).
Trip-switches tripping, rooms and rooms of them;
all the connections failing one by one;
power and poetry riddled with each other:
the information, accurate and mad,
of a spent lifetime, what does it come to?
One kind of answer is a bare report,
its commentary an open smile – yours;
then a thousand lightbulbs switching themselves off.