A COBRA meeting had been called for 7:30, the early start a traditional method of indicating the serious intentions of all concerned. We may not be getting anywhere, the subtext read, but at least we’ve had very little sleep. Pre-meeting meetings were thus taking place from 6:00 onwards, as various Head Desks herded their ducks into a row, and some of the faces round the tables were new: over the past months, significant changes had been rung in the personnel called forth by crisis. Life in Whitehall’s corridors was sometimes compared to a game of musical chairs, an image conjuring genteel notions of women in bonnets, men in stiff collars, and a well-rehearsed string quartet pausing mid-note. No pushing, no shoving, no tears before bedtime: a gentle ruffle of applause awaiting the victor. But the reality was more like a mosh pit, with thrash metal accompaniment. Most of those playing were too deafened by reverb to notice when the music stopped, and losers wore the imprints of winners’ boots on their faces. Still and all, it sometimes happened that the most skilful players of the game found themselves outmanouvred. Peter Judd, for example, erstwhile Home Secretary and Prime Minister manqué, had retired into what passed for him as private life, his business interests—the official story going—having become incompatible with a political career. Dame Ingrid Tearney, former Head of the Intelligence Service, had likewise surrendered the reins of office, in her case to take up a role at one of the heritage charities dedicated to preserving Britain’s traditional verities: not so different in aim, perhaps, from her former life, but involving, it was to be hoped, less carnage. And there’d been other retirements too, from Westminster; none of them—it can’t be repeated often enough—remotely connected with ongoing police investigations into the sexual abuse of children: on the contrary, all were dictated by loftier concerns—to allow fresh blood into the body politic; to make way for younger guns; to give elbow room to the distaff side, as one outgoing notable put it, his vocabulary indicating how firmly his finger was held to the pulse of contemporary life. So the music had stopped, the music had started again, and bruised and bloodied players were licking wounds and picking sides.
And as a result of all this change, of course, most things remained the same.
In a room some storeys below the breaking dawn, the lately-appointed First Desk of Regent’s Park was speaking.
“First, the big picture. This is new. Something we’ve never seen before. Crowds as targets, yes, that’s always been the fear, whether it’s football stadiums or market squares, but this takes terrorism onto a whole new level. These kids were invited.”
Claude Whelan was a short man with a high forehead and a pinched way of speaking: words issued from him as if in perforated sheets; his full stops almost audible. But his manner was generally pleasant, and informality the key to his character. While suit-and-tie remained de rigueur among the Park’s male aristocracy, Whelan turned up on his first day wearing a polo shirt under his jacket, “and it was like,” one of the Queens of the Database breathlessly uttered, “a fresh breeze had blown through the whole building.”
“We’ve always known we’re defenceless against the individual extremist. Groups, yes, because groups have to communicate, but the lone wolf, who puts something together in his garage and sets it off in his local supermarket—when they’re completely under the radar, we can’t stop them. We all know that, deep down—everybody knows. But the advantage we’ve always had is that lone-wolf types tend to stick out. They tend to be odd, to arouse suspicion, and they tend—Hollywood notwithstanding—to be functionally moronic, so more of them plaster themselves over those same garages than ever make it as far as the shops.”
He was fifties, childless, but with a wife whose photograph adorned his desk, and whose image he was prone to introduce to visitors: “Claire,” he’d say. “Lost without her.” And sometimes with the words would come a furrowing of the brow, as if the phrase weren’t a simple mechanical tribute but a glimpse into an alternative state of being, where the landscape was a wasteland across which he’d wander mapless, his footprints circling nowhere.
“This one appears to have been different. This one planned his attack carefully, down to the hijacking of the Twitter feed on which the event was first mentioned. That feed belongs to one Richard Wyatt, twenty-one, a student at the LSE, who has a large number of followers owing to his role on the college’s entertainments committee. The tweet appeared at eight forty-seven a.m. on Monday the first, the day before the event. It read, ‘Mob needed for dance duty,’ followed by three exclamation marks and a hashtag, ‘flashthemall.’ We are satisfied that Mr. Wyatt was not responsible for its appearance.”
