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So amidst much family bitterness he had sold the estates, which could no longer provide him with an adequate lifestyle and would never provide him with a secure majority, and at the age of thirty-nine had exchanged them for the safer political fields of Westminster and Surrey. His aged father, who had expected no more of his only surviving son than that he devote himself to the family duties as he and his own father had done, had never spoken to him again. To have sold his heritage for the whole of Scotland would have been unforgivable, but for Surrey?
Urquhart had never disciplined himself to enjoy the small talk of constituency circles, and his mood had begun to sour as the day drew on. This was the eighteenth committee room he had visited today, and the early morning smile had long since been transfixed into a rigid grimace. It was now only forty minutes before the close of the polling booms, and his shirt was wringing wet under the Savile Row suit. He knew he should have worn one of his older suits: no amount of pressing would get it back into shape again. He was tired, uncomfortable and losing patience.
He spent little time in his constituency nowadays, and the less time he spent the less congenial his demanding constituents seemed. The journey to the leafy suburbs, which had seemed so short and attractive when he had gone for his first adoption meeting, seemed to grow longer as he climbed the political ladder from backbencher through Junior Ministerial jobs and now attending Cabinet as Chief Whip, one of the two dozen most powerful posts in the Government, with its splendid offices at 12 Downing Street just yards from the Prime Minister's own.
Yet his power did not come directly from his public office. The role of Chief Whip does not carry with it full Cabinet rank. Urquhart had no great Department of State or massive civil service machine to command; his was a faceless task, toiling ceaselessly behind the scenes, making no public speeches and giving no television interviews. Less than 1 per cent of the Gallup Poll gave him instant name recognition.
His was a task which had to be pursued out of the limelight for, as Chief Whip, he was responsible for discipline within the Parliamentary Party, for delivering a full turnout on every vote. Which meant he was not only the Minister with the most acute political antennae, knowing all the secrets of Government before almost any of his colleagues, but in order to deliver the vote day after day, night after night, he also needed to know where every one of his Members of Parliament was likely to be found, with whom they were conspiring, with whom they might be sleeping, whether they would be sober enough to vote or had any personal crisis which could disrupt their work and the smooth management of parliamentary business.
And in Westminster, such information is power. More, than one of his senior colleagues and many more junior members of the Parliamentary Party owed their continuing position to the ability of the Whips Office to sort out and occasionally cover up their personal problems. And many disaffected backbenchers had found themselves suddenly supporting the Government when reminded of some earlier indiscretion which had been forgiven by the Party and Whips Office, but never forgotten. Scarcely any scandal in Government strikes without the Whips Office knowing about it first, and because they know about it first, many scandals simply never strike-unless the Chief Whip and his ten Junior Whips wish it to.
Urquhart was brought up sharply by one of his ladies whose coyness and discretion had been overcome by the heat and excitement of the day.
'Will you still stand at the next election, Mr Urquhart?' she enquired brashly.
'What do you mean?' he spluttered, taken aback.
'Are you thinking of retiring? You are sixty-one years old now, aren't you? Sixty-five or more at the next election,' she persisted.
He bent his tall and angular figure low in order to look her directly in the face. 'Mrs Bailey, I still have my wits about me and in many societies I would just be entering my political prime' he responded defensively. 'I still have a lot of work to do and things I want to achieve.'
But deep down he knew she was right. Instead of the strong red hues of his youth, he was now left with but a dirty smear of colour in his thinning hair, which he wore over-long and straggly as if to compensate. His spare frame no longer filled the traditionally cut suits as amply as in earlier years, and his blue eyes had grown colder with the passage of time. While his height and upright bearing presented a distinguished image in the crowded room, those closest to him got no warmth from his carefully rationed smile, which revealed only uneven teeth badly stained by nicotine from his forty-a-day habit. He was not ageing with the elegance or the authority for which he would have wished.
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