by James Philip
Chapter 13
Sunday 8th December 1963
Prime Minister’s Private Office, Government Compound, Cheltenham
Margaret Thatcher’s thoughts were preoccupied ordering her decidedly ambivalent impressions of the rather too secret meeting she had just left in the Foreign Secretary’s office. In one way she’d been grateful that she’d been able to leave that ‘conference’ early on the thoroughly authentic grounds that she had a prior engagement with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence, James Callaghan. She tried and failed to stifle a yawn as she bustled down the corridor in the direction of the Edward Heath’s rooms. She’d heard tall stories about Winston Churchill’s war room and the chaotic, impulsive way the great man had worked – and very nearly driven every single one of his friends and detractors alike quite literally, up the wall – in the darkest hours of the Second World War. She was only now realising how dissonant and exactly how disorientating the dreadful pressures of conflict and international crisis must have been, for every Government unfortunate to have suffered them down the ages. Those pressures bounced off her but the weariness was cumulative and she hadn’t yet found a way to counteract its insidious, mind-slowing effects.
“I hope I’m not too late, Prime Minister,” she apologised with a tired smile as she was ushered into Edward Heath’s private drawing room. The room was as spartanly furnished as practically every other room in the mansion, and no warmer. James Callaghan rose to his feet, nodding acknowledgment. The only other person in the room was Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Head of the Home Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet, with whom she exchanged a thoughtful look. The meeting in Tom Harding-Grayson’s office with the former US Naval Attaché, Captain Walter Brenckmann, bore the fingerprints of a pincer-movement engineered by Henry Tomlinson and his oldest and firmest friend in the Civil Service, the new Foreign Secretary. “I allowed myself to be traduced into accepting a meeting with Tom Harding-Grayson at short notice and I fear it over ran somewhat. I do apologise.”
The Prime Minister indicated for her to take a chair; his relaxed manner was that of a man who believed himself among friends with whom he had no need to stand on ceremony.
“Presumably, Tom Harding-Grayson gave you the good news about the Portuguese?” He checked, perfunctorily.
“Yes, they’ve offered our damaged ships safe harbour,” the Angry Widow confirmed, purring with the same relief she’d purred when the Foreign Secretary had shown her the telegram from the Embassy in Lisbon. “I’d expected demands for guarantees that we’d defend them against their neighbour?”
“Perhaps, Salazar isn’t the same kind of old fascist as Franco after all,” James Callaghan observed, lugubriously from the creaking depths of the arm chair into which he had gratefully re-arranged his large frame. A grey pall of approaching exhaustion lay across the three men and the woman in the room.
“I wanted to have this talk,” Edward Heath explained, seeking his words with infinite care, “because the process I initiated last week to confront the threats to the security of our Mediterranean protectorates and trade routes, and to respond to the provocations of our former American allies, cannot and should not deflect us from simultaneously addressing the other great issues facing us.”
“We could be a war with the USA in hours or days, Prime Minister,” James Callaghan observed. There was only the mildest taint of censure in the voice of the leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party. “As a Government, and as a people, we are stretched pretty thin at the moment.”
Edward Heath accepted this; electing to pose another question.
“Even in the middle of the Second World War Rab Butler was planning the reform of the post-war education system, and William Beverage was preparing the blueprint for an economy in which full employment was a given and in which all our citizens would be able to rely on the safety net of the welfare state if through ill health or personal misfortune they fell on hard times.”
“True,’ James Callaghan agreed. “But we’re in no position to contemplate either, Prime Minister.”
Margaret Thatcher hadn’t known what the meeting was to discuss, simply that the Prime Minister wished to sound her out about ‘certain matters’. She opened her mouth to speak, but then shut it. She waved for the two men to carry on while she thought her thoughts.
“You are right, Jim,” Edward Heath conceded. “But that’s not the point, is it?”
The other man snorted mildly.
“Crisis or not I had the First Sea Lord bending my ear this afternoon about the ‘1964 Naval Construction Program’. He wants to re-commence all existing projects and to re-commission practically every ship in the Reserve Fleet. He even wants to recover and refit the hulks of two or three old cruisers that were on the 1962 Disposal List!”
Now Margaret Thatcher found her voice.
“The Royal Air Force and the Army will have similar plans?”
“Oh, yes,” the Minister of Defence confirmed glumly.
“Can we afford such programs?”
“No,” Edward Heath interjected. “We are bankrupt as a nation.” He shrugged with a spasm of his broad shoulders. “But I don’t have to tell you that. Even if we had a functioning money economy, which we don’t, having had to operate on a command basis under virtual martial law for the last year would have destroyed it.”
They had been so busy just surviving; so busy keeping the worst ravages of starvation and disease at bay it was hardly surprising that virtually all other responsibilities of a modern government had been shamefully neglected. Practical governance in the last year had been delivered by ten Regional Commissioners who reported to the Home Secretary. The Commissioners were mainly Army officers who managed local teams drawn from former County and District Councils; they were responsible for the distribution of resources – food and fuel – within their fiefdoms, for the provision of medical services and for the repair and maintenance of public utilities. In many areas of the country barter had replaced the cash economy. Nobody trusted paper money and as the majority of the things vital to sustain life and to stave off the worst misery of everyday existence were provided free – if and when those staples were available – normal economic activity had been replaced with a Soviet-style command model. As an emergency exigency this system had, to a fashion, worked. People were getting fed just enough in enough areas of the country to stave off famine, the National Health Service was beginning to function again after its collapse in the aftermath of the October War, and transportation links, electricity, gas and telephone links were being gradually restored up to the limits of habitation adjacent to the zones of destruction. In the spring a program of rebuilding and driving new roads through those zones was scheduled, mainly to reconnect communities up and down the East Coast and establish a route across the downs to channel port of Dover. Greater London remained beyond the ambitions of such limited programs; there simply were not the means to tackle the wasteland of rubble. The priority had been to keep the Navy at sea, to preserve the much reduced fighting power of the Army and the Royal Air Force, and to support as best as possible, the technical and industrial infrastructure required to keep the advanced electronic systems and weapons of the armed forces. The UKIEA had, in fact, been operating on a war footing ever since the October War and sooner or later, the country would reach breaking point. It was anyone’s guess how much longer those who survived ‘could take it’.
Given what the country had been through it astonished the three men and the woman in the Prime Minister’s Room that night that there hadn’t been a major insurrection. However, if they’d been lucky thus far that was no guarantee that the road ahead would be anything other than extremely rocky. Bizarrely, the prospect of a stupid, futile, needless war with the United States of America was just one more insurmountable problem. Lately, they’d all become used to confronting the impossible and somehow fighting to live another day. That the UKIEA had served its people so well was largely the work of its leader, Edward Heath. T
he Prime Minister had earned the right to muse out aloud the state of the World and the United Kingdom’s future in it, even at such a time of dire crisis.
“We have very little idea of the true situation in the bombed areas of Central Europe,” Edward Heath reminded his colleagues. “We have only the White House’s damage assessment vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and its partners. Frankly, we are blind in the World beyond our Mediterranean bases. Goodness, we have found it practically impossible to talk to, let alone help or understand the plight of our putative French allies just across the Channel.” The Premier’s exasperation threatened to get the better of him, and sensing it, he hesitated. “We know that Italy survived the cataclysm more or less untouched and that before the US Fifth Fleet abandoned its base at Naples it off-loaded a number of aircraft and other supporting military ‘assets’. In retrospect we might now reasonably suspect that those ‘assets’ were not insignificant and that they have been used to prop up the fascistic regimes that carved up Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica in the aftermath of the October War.”
James Callaghan objected, albeit gently.
“We suspected as much, Prime Minister,” he mollified. “However, we’ve hardly been in any position to do anything about any of that.”
“True.” Edward Heath was not deflected. “We know that Greece is in the hands of some kind of military junta; and we know that the Greeks are stirring up trouble in Cyprus. We know that there have been clashes between Turkish naval forces and the Greeks in the Aegean. We know that sooner or later the Arabs will fall upon Israel like wolves upon the fold...”
“There is nothing we can do about that, Prime Minister,” the Minister of Defence said flatly. “Any of it.”
“I disagree,” the Angry Widow declared. “There is a great deal we can do about a great number of things, but,” she looked to each of the men in the room, “but only when we have ‘healed ourselves’ sufficiently. Sometimes, we worry too much about what we ‘can’t do’ and forget about the things we ‘can do’. For all we know the Americans might be planning to bomb us back to the Stone Age, as that self-important oaf Lemay proudly claims to have ‘bombed the Ruskies’ last year. Well, we shall see. Personally, I don’t think we have much control over that and our best defence, probably our only defence, is to show not one chink of moral weakness. Prime Minister,” she fixed Edward Heath with a steely blue-eyed stare that would have made a lesser man flinch, “I share one hundred percent your vision of a return to business as normal.” She sighed. “As soon as possible.”
The Prime Minister nodded ponderously.
“A few days ago I alienated much of my own Party, who now view me as a dictator of the ilk of Franco or Salazar,” he wryly reminded his newly appointed Home Secretary.
“Last week you placed the country on a proper war footing to deal with the provocations of the Americans, the fallout from the attack on Balmoral and the critical situation developing in the Mediterranean, Prime Minister,” the Angry Widow rejoined, every cobweb of weariness blown asunder. “If we survive the next few days and weeks there will be ample time to make the case to the British people that you did the right thing. The only thing that the British people will never forgive us for doing; is failing to stand up against former ‘friends’ who would see their children starve, and new enemies who would exploit our current, apparent weakness to destroy what remains of our power and influence in the World.”
“Nevertheless,” Edward Heath replied, “I believe that we must be talking about the future to our people now. It may be that there will never be a ‘right time’ to begin the national debate about reconstruction and restitution. It is our responsibility to ensure that the legacy we leave those who come after us is one of hope, not despair.”
Margaret Thatcher heard the fatalism underlying the Prime Minister’s statement of political faith; as if Ted Heath had already understood that he’d never see the better times of which he so clearly dreamed. In that moment it was as if he knew another fate awaited him and he was resigned to it. His calm was the calm of a man who was at peace with himself and because of it, he was fearless in ways he could never have been at any time in his previous life. Before the October War she’d regarded her present Party leader as a starchy, old-fashioned sort of man a little too hidebound by tradition and by a rigid sense of the right and wrong way of getting things done. He’d seemed such a perfect pillar of the old hierarchy, utterly at home in the rather fuddy-duddy Conservative Party she’d had to fight so hard to be accepted within, precisely because it was populated with men exactly like him. She’d been wrong about Ted Heath; he wasn’t a throwback to that halcyon, mythical English past for which most Conservative voters yearned, he was a man with a much deeper vision for his people. He might have been born for this moment in history. Perhaps, he sensed it and knew that like a moth drawn to the light his destiny was to emerge brilliantly from his chrysalis, open his wings and fly towards his destiny in the certain knowledge that it would consume him in the blink of an eye. Whatever fate awaited him he was reconciled to it and uncomplaining because he knew his duty, and he’d rather die than be seen to have failed to have done that duty.
She stared at Edward Heath. The last thirteen months had rushed by at a nightmare rush; every day she’d learned a hundred new lessons, discovered questions she’d never have asked in her old, suburban, insular political life. She had entered politics to change things, to get things done without ever really understanding either objective. It was as if her new life, her second life, had only begun on that dreadful morning after the last fireball had mushroomed over London. She had become a person she probably wouldn’t have recognised had she met new self in the old World. Yes, she’d retained many of her hard edges – that was a flaw she’d constantly fought to rectify with little success – but she’d mellowed in other ways, recognised the complexities of the real World in the same way she’d come to grips with the intricacies of industrial chemistry and the convoluted majesty of the law. The grocer’s daughter from Grantham in Lincolnshire would – had she noticed it at all – scoffed at the poignancy of Edward Heath’s quietly spoken statement of faith in a better future. However, the grocer’s daughter had become the Angry Widow in the last year; and now she’d accidentally glimpsed a vision to sustain her in the years to come.
The Prime Minister met her gaze briefly. She nodded, tight-lipped and they knew they’d understood each other perfectly in that moment even if in the future they might never again.
There was a knock at the door.
A youthful naval officer entered and handed the Prime Minister a folded note, before departing without uttering a word.
Edward Heath read for a moment.
“Portuguese warships and an ocean-going tug have rendezvoused with HMS Plymouth and HMS Talavera. The port authorities in Oporto have put all dockyard facilities at our disposal and have alerted every hospital in northern Portugal to be ready to receive casualties...”
The Prime Minister looked up.
“It seems that in the person of António de Oliveira Salazar,” he sighed, “the last of the old dictators, we have finally found a friend in Europe who is prepared to do more than talk about ‘friendship’.” The regimes in Scandinavia had mooted discussions about some kind of loose ‘mutual co-operation’ pact but this had come to nothing. The administrations running several of the Swiss cantons had radioed and sent emissaries across the dead zones of Germany offering ‘mutual defence pacts’ in exchange for food and weapons. All those contacts had hung in the air, and one by one, withered on the vine for want of succour. The UKIEA had too many problems of its own to be distracted with diplomacy. In retrospect that had been a mistake; one of many mistakes.
“Salazar isn’t Franco,” Margaret Thatcher announced.
“Next best thing!” James Callaghan muttered.
Edward Heath looked up.
“Franco murders and imprisons his enemies; António de Oliveira Salazar ostracises and ridicules them. Much as we�
��ve been obliged to do, Jim.”
The leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party raised his hands, not in surrender, rather to signify he hadn’t the energy to debate the point further. A friend in need was a friend indeed, they’d worry about their moral qualms another day.
Chapter 14
Monday 9th December 1963
The White House Situation Room, Washington DC
“The Brits have gun camera footage of the shooting down of all four 100th Bomb Group B-52s,” John McCone, the Director of the CIA reported tersely. Notwithstanding that each of the participants in the briefing had grabbed a few hours – albeit disturbed, restless – sleep the previous night, there was greyness in every man’s face that acknowledged the crisis was deepening with each passing minute. “They’ve also commenced a forensic examination of the crash site on Gozo. Thus far, they’ve recovered the bodies of four missing crew members from the sea. Third party agencies report that they have six, seven or eight B-52 crew men in custody on Malta. They’ve also got their hands on three Italians who ejected during the raid.”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy drained his coffee mug. No sooner had he placed it on the table, leaving a dark ring on the top copy of the heap of glossy monochrome U2 surveillance pictures strewn across the table, than an aide stepped forward and refilled it. The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America asked himself why he felt so calm when clearly most of his closest associates were on the verge of shitting their pants?
“You said the Brits intercepted our spy plane?” He asked calmly, not betraying how stunned he was to learn that one of his Cabinet members had been dumb enough to risk another flash point provocation in the current climate of panic.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle ‘Bus’ Wheeler gave his colleagues in the room the opportunity to answer before reluctantly, assuming responsibility.