Breaking Cover

8

As the hands of the clock in the small tutorial room moved towards noon Jasminder said, ‘That’s it for today. I’d like you each to do an outline brief for the defence of this case, making the points we’ve been discussing as convincingly as you can. Put it in my pigeon hole by Friday evening, please.’

She watched as the students gathered their papers together, scraped their chairs back and filed out of the room. When they’d left she sighed. She knew that one of them would make most of the relevant points, a couple more would include some of them, and the remaining three would produce something that showed they had understood very little of what she’d been saying. But the most dispiriting part was that even the brightest didn’t seem to have been taught how to write; how to marshal an argument; how to make points effectively. She shouldn’t have to waste her time teaching undergraduates how to write English; the schools should have done that before they ever reached university.

She got up to collect her things. She had a couple of clients to see at the charity in an hour and a half and was intending to grab some lunch in the restaurant before she left the college. As she was putting on her coat, the phone rang.

A woman’s voice said, ‘Oh, hello. This is Rosamund Butler from Egerton Smith, the executive search company. We do a lot of our work for Government departments and agencies. May I take a moment of your time to explain one of the searches we have been commissioned to do? I wanted to ask your advice, and to ask particularly if you had any suggestions as to who might be interested in applying for the position.’

Jasminder sat down. She had had dealings with head-hunters before and she recognised the approach. This woman was going to try and persuade her to apply for the job.

‘Before you go any further,’ she said, ‘I am not interested in applying for anything in Government service. And if I were, I don’t think I’d be successful. I assume you know something about me, and if so you’ll know that my views are not the same as those of the Government on lots of things. I’m a civil liberties lawyer and I spend a lot of my time helping people work their way through Government regulations.’

‘The reason I am approaching you is that this post is directly about civil liberties,’ Rosamund broke in. ‘I saw a report of your lecture a few weeks ago and I’ve read the text online. It was the views you expressed on the balance between our rights to a private life and freedom of expression, and the Government’s need for information to protect us at a time of high security threat, that made me think you might be the ideal person for this job. It is a post in a Government agency directly concerned with the security of the country. They are looking to appoint a Director of Communications. They don’t want a cheerleader for their work. They need someone who understands the arguments of their critics, and who can, in a sense, represent one side to the other and so help bring the two sides nearer together. From what you said the other week it is clear that you do.’

Jasminder didn’t reply. Unusually for her, she didn’t know what to say. Surely this could only be one of the intelligence agencies and the thought that they might be trying to head-hunt her took her breath away. But it also intrigued her. While she was still thinking what to say, Rosamund broke the silence. ‘Look, why don’t you come over to my office when you have a moment? I can show you the detailed job description, and I’ll get someone who knows about the job from the inside to come and join us. The only thing I would say is there is a certain confidentiality attached to the search at this stage, so I would be grateful if you wouldn’t talk about it.’

By this time Jasminder was far too intrigued to say no, and a meeting was fixed up for the following week at which Rosamund and this mysterious ‘someone’ would explain more.

During the next few days Jasminder said nothing to anyone about the approach from the head-hunter, though she was very tempted to ring her friend Emma and ask her opinion. She thought about the job a lot. In fact she couldn’t get it out of her head. Twice she decided not to go to the meeting and twice she changed her mind, curiosity overcoming her doubts.

On the agreed day, at the agreed time, she rang the bell on the door of an anonymous Georgian house in a street off Berkeley Square. A smartly dressed young woman showed her into a small room, more like a drawing room than a waiting room, furnished with draped curtains, a couple of soft grey-upholstered armchairs, and a low table holding copies of Country Life and The World of Interiors plus a stack of glossy company reports.

Jasminder sat down on the edge of one of the chairs, putting her bulging bag, full of students’ essays, on the floor beside her, feeling very out of place. She wished she hadn’t come; she was sure she was not going to like Rosamund Butler, who had sounded so smooth on the phone.

She had just started to flick through one of the magazines when the door opened and a short, middle-aged woman, wearing a grey flannel skirt and a jumper, with her glasses dangling from a chain round her neck, came in. Jasminder stood up as the woman walked across the room and, shaking her warmly by the hand, introduced herself as Rosamund.

‘I am so pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘Let’s go into my office. I have someone there for you to meet. You can leave your bag here.’

Jasminder, who had been expecting a cool, elegant woman in a sharp suit and Louboutins, started to feel much better. The other person turned out to be a red-haired woman just a few years older than Jasminder herself, who was introduced as ‘Catherine’. From her, Jasminder learned that the post was Communications Director in one of the intelligence agencies. It was a new post and something of an experiment. The person appointed would be working closely with the senior management, and the Head of the Service himself was taking a keen interest. They were looking for someone who would be an intermediary with the media and other external contacts. It was important, Catherine said, that whoever was appointed should understand the current freedom of information and data access issues, not to bang the drum for the agencies but to listen and explain and act as a sort of conduit between the Service and its critics. The post was for a year in the first instance and if it were a success it would be made permanent. If Jasminder were appointed they could help her negotiate a sabbatical from King’s.

Three-quarters of an hour later, when she walked out into Berkeley Square carrying a folder containing a description of the post (which actually told her not much more than Catherine had said), and several long and daunting-looking forms, Jasminder was exhilarated. How very much more interesting this would be than reading her students’ confused and garbled scripts. It would be a risk to her reputation, of course, because a lot of people would think that she had sold out and gone over to the other side. But if what the two women had told her were true, she could have a big influence on a very important national issue. She would be in a better position than anyone else to see all sides of the freedom versus security debate. She hadn’t expected to be interested at all, and here she was getting excited about a job she hadn’t even been offered. She told herself she needed to slow down and think things over.