by James Philip
Peter Christopher put those recollections aside as he tore open the slim Manila envelope waiting for him at the reception desk of the Armada de Tagus Hotel.
He was so astonished by the contents of his orders that he started reading them aloud.
“...seat booked on Flight GIB Zero-Nine...sixteenth instant.”
“Report Officer Commanding HMS Talavera on arrival at Gibraltar...”
“Assume duties of Executive Officer said ship with immediate effect...”
Chapter 3
Tuesday 14th January 1964
Wolverhampton Civic Hall, Wolverhampton, England
The tall, gaunt man with the horribly scarred face wearing a black patch over his left eye moved painfully to the lectern at the front of the stage. Whereas the English industrial West Midlands – the engine room of the manufacturing economy of the United Kingdom - had escaped the firestorm of late October 1964, the half-broken body of the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, was a testament to the greater cataclysm that had consumed as many as eight million of his fellow countrymen and women in the first hours, and between four and five millions in the subsequent fourteen months.
Cigarette and tobacco smoke clouded the air and as the angular, grim-visaged figure of the local MP settled, his good eye scanning the ranks of the faithful in the packed auditorium as a breathless hush awaited the prophet’s words of wisdom.
Airey Neave, the forty-seven year old war hero who had escaped from Colditz and had since December filled the post of Minister of Supply, glanced with apparent equanimity at his companion in the front row of the hall. He and Iain Macleod had declined an invitation to sit with the party of local luminaries and worthies at the back of the stage. When one voluntarily walked into a lion’s den one was best advised not to place oneself in the middle of the hostile pride.
Iain Norman Macleod, the Minister of Information and nominally, at least, still the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, returned a tight-lipped smile This was one of those rare occasions when he felt the need of the company of a man of exactly Airey Neave’s proven mettle. In addition to escaping from Colditz Castle, Airey Neave was the man who had read the indictments to the leading Nazis on trial at Nuremburg and was, by common consent that rarest of things, a gold-plated, universally acknowledged surviving national treasure.
Before the October War the annual meeting of the West Midlands Conservative Associations would have been a jamboree, a mostly social event. Tonight’s assembly had about it the feel of a bear pit, hence the presence of two of the Party’s ‘biggest hitters’. Neither Airey Neave nor Iain Macleod anticipated getting out of Wolverhampton Civic Hall unscathed. Tonight’s extravaganza was politics in its rawest, most brutal incarnation, red in tooth and claw. All that was missing was the certainty of pre-meditated violence against the opponents of the local champion. This evening, any violence would be entirely spontaneous. Such had always been the Tory way. Neither Airey Neave, Ian Macleod nor the new Prime Minister was prepared to surrender ground to the opponents of reason. The Government had no intention of allowing itself to be stabbed in the back by the very people who ought to be its staunchest supporters.
Iain Norman Macleod, the fifty year old Minister of Information in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom might, in other circumstances, have assumed the premiership on Edward Heath’s tragic death in Washington a little over a month ago. A less noble or a less politically astute operator would have seized the opportunity without a second thought. But he had known the time was wrong – at some time in the future it might be right – and more importantly, he had not known if his putative premiership commanded the Chiefs of Staff of the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, the Army, or Her Majesty, the Queen’s, unqualified support. Without the backing of the three Chiefs of Staff and the Monarch no man, or woman, could rule in this sorely fractured land. Pragmatically, his sponsorship, counsel and public approbation of the new Prime Minister had guaranteed him what he had been denied for much of the last year, a privileged seat within the inner circle of Government. He would settle for this for the time being and loyally fight battles like that ahead of him tonight, with every ounce of true blue gusto and zeal he could muster; no matter how much blood, sweat, tears and electoral collateral had to be spilled in the process. If tonight went badly wrong the Party in the country might split down sectional, ideological lines because if there was one man in England who had it in his hands to consign them all to political obscurity for a generation, it was the haunting figure peering one-eyed into the dark mass of his supporters.
In the next few minutes Airey Neave and Iain Macleod understood that they might glimpse the shape of things to come. The Minister of Information’s recent encounters with John Enoch Powell had been painful personally – to see his old friend so grievously injured and at one point at death’s door – and politically, because every inch of shared ground beneath their feet had evaporated since the October War. Partly, this had been because of the compromises every member of the initial United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration had had to make to one, form the UKIEA in the first place; and two, to stop it falling to pieces every time something went wrong. Enoch Powell and compromise had always been uneasy bedfellows; and likewise, he and Edward Heath had never been natural confederates.
“We stand at a crossroads in the history of these Isles,” the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West declared in that oddly captivating, fascinating nasal way that was his and his alone. “Through tragedy and trial we now emerge into what we all hope will be what our last great leader, Winston Churchill, might have described as the ‘sunlit uplands’ of a future redolent with possibilities for the betterment of our people.”
Iain Macleod’s expression was fixed, his sombre smile painted rictus-like across his face; next to him in the front row Airey Neave groaned audibly. The Minister of Information reached for his cigarettes – one of the first boons of the new Anglo-American rapprochement was a flood of Virginia tobacco and US manufactured filter-tipped cigarettes – and lit up, suspecting this was going to be an even longer evening than he feared. He had chain smoked most of his adult life and the enforced privations of the last year had turned him into a quarrelsome, agitated tartar at times. But then what was a man without his vices? It was a peculiarity of his career that he had first caught the eye of eye of the then Prime Minister, poor dear, departed Winston Churchill, in 1952 when he had given Aneurin Bevan – the darling of the Labour Party - a roasting in a debate on the National Health Service. Later, as Minister of Health, Iain Macleod had – in the face of vehement and angry protestations from the tobacco industry – announced the scientifically proven link between smoking and lung cancer. Nevertheless, he chain smoked because, and he knew it well, men were essentially contrary animals.
In post World War II British politics there had been few men as contrary as John Enoch Powell, and now that contrariness threatened to run amok at the worst possible time for the new Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
Airey Neave felt his blood pressure rising by the second. There was something about Enoch Powell that had always brought out the worst in him. The man’s observations on the elevation of his dear friend, Margaret Thatcher to the premiership, while outrageously beyond the pale were oddly in keeping with both the man, and the conduct of his life and career to date.
Fifty-one year old John Enoch Powell was the most brilliantly gifted prima donna, a man to whom everything came easily and as if by natural right. He came from a middle-class background, was educated at King’s Norton Grammar School and later, King Edward’s School in Birmingham. In 1930 he had gone up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he encountered and had fallen a little under the thrall of the poet A.E. Houseman – then Professor of Latin at Trinity – and the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche. Not content with attaining a double starred first in Latin and Greek, the young tyro learned Urdu at the School of Oriental Stu
dies in London; this latter because one day he intended to one day become Viceroy of India! At the time it was unclear whether this was youthful bravura or a genuine reflection of the man’s over-weaning ambition. Many of the stories about the young Enoch Powell were apocryphal of course and deserved to be taken with a large pinch of salt. The problem was that the man never did anything to disentangle fact from myth. Although Powell was fluent in Welsh, Portuguese, and later Russian; he never claimed he wanted to be Prince of Wales or to replace the dictator, Salazar, in Lisbon, less still to be the man to restore the Romanov’s to the throne.
“We live in strange and aberrant times, my friends,” the great man proclaimed. “We live in times in which the normal standards of political life and democratic accountability are held wilfully in abeyance by an unelected, unaccountable polity that nobody in this room was ever given the chance to vote for, or would, in my humble estimation, have voted for had they been given the opportunity.”
After winning a clutch of prestigious Classics prizes and graduating with a Double First, Powell had stayed on at Cambridge studying ancient manuscripts and churning out a plethora of academic papers. In 1937 at the age of twenty-five he had travelled to Australia to take up a professorship in Greek at the University of Sydney, publishing in 1938 his signature scholarly contribution to the Classical world, the Lexicon to Herodotus.
Like so many stars of post-Second World War British politics he had been appalled by the appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis in the later 1930s and the tardiness of British rearmament.
“Not only did the previous incumbent, Edward Heath, arbitrarily dismiss and for a short time imprison, good and true men who had served their country and this Party honourably all their lives,” the poison dripped from the twisted corners of the speaker’s mouth, “but he had the bare-faced gall to maintain that he did what he did for the national good!” The one, blazing eye settled on the two ministers, surrounded by their mixed cadre of Royal Marine and Special Branch bodyguards. “Earlier this evening we heard Missis Thatcher’s co-conspirators and apologists utter their weasel words in a pusillanimous defence of the indefensible!”
This prompted a low growling groundswell of anger. The objects of the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West’s ire – both thick-skinned and resilient old soldiers hardened by the experience of the last year - were comforted by the knowledge that not everybody in the hall was actually out for their blood. Just ninety percent of them.
Arriving home from Australia in September 1939, Enoch Powell had enlisted as a private soldier in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. In World War Two only two men in the British Army enlisted as a private soldier and were promoted to Brigadier General by its close. The other man was Fitzroy Maclean. Unlike Fitzroy Maclean, a veteran of daring commando raids in the Western Desert who had later fought with Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia, Enoch Powell had never seen action. He had spent the war filling mainly intelligence and senior staff posts in England, Egypt and the Far East. Reputedly, he once so infuriated Orde Wingate, the legendary leader of the Chindits in Burma that that Wingate asked a friend to stop him if he ever looked like he was going to ‘beat Powell’s brains in’. Both Airey Neave and Iain Macleod would have gladly testified under oath that Enoch Powell was exactly the sort of comrade in arms who often moved those closest to him to want to ‘beat in his brains’.
Iain Macleod visibly flinched. His own long, pre-October War, friendship with the Party’s most gifted and most dangerous loose cannon had taught him that the man was an utterly unpredictable mixture of good and bad; he could be the most perspicacious man in England one moment, dazzled by hubris the next, wedded to a profound universal moral truth one day, and blind to what was staring him in the face half-an-hour later. His career in Government was at once distinguished, brilliant – a word much overused in politics but entirely justified in describing many of Enoch Powell’s insights and initiatives – and yet horribly fallible. Just when his ascent to the highest echelons of Government seemed most inevitable he would stumble, unable to connect with, well, reality. He had been an able Financial Secretary to the Treasury under Peter Thorneycroft’s Chancellorship in the late 1950s, and the Health Minister in the years leading up to the October War. At the Treasury he had become a fervent believer in the new theories of ‘monetarism’, and an archetypal old school opponent of using public money to prop up ailing businesses or to boost consumer spending, resigning in protest with Peter Thorneycroft when Harold MacMillan had over-ruled the Treasury team.
Later, at the Ministry of Health, Powell had tried to address the inhumanity of the systemic neglect of Victorian psychiatric institutions – asylums – and made what became known as his ‘Water Tower’ speech: ‘There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside-–the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day.’ He had wanted to tear down the whole diabolical system and replace it with something that was genuinely humane. However, set against great moral crusades such as the battle to reform the insane houses of the nation’s past; there was an odd, pedantic callousness, a disregard for the personal, a lack of empathy for the problems of real people. For example, he was profoundly unsympathetic to the victims of the Thalidomide scandal – babies who had been born with deformities to mothers who had taken the drug in pregnancy – and refused point blank to meet any of the children who had been born with birth defects. ‘Anyone who took so much as an aspirin put himself at risk,’ he was reported to have said, as if the principle of caveat emptor should, or had ever applied to the products of the pharmaceutical industry. Burying his head in the sand he had refused to authorise a public inquiry, and – incredibly – decided not to issue a warning to prevent the consumption of any leftover Thalidomide pills remaining in people’s medicine cabinets, although such a warning had already been issued personally by the President of the United States to the American people.
Iain Macleod mourned the dreadful suffering his old friend had lived through since the night of the October War; he mourned also the stellar career and remarkable life that he feared was imploding before his eyes. Worse, in the next few minutes he was very much afraid that Enoch Powell was going to light the touch paper of a British insurrection of the kind that had just rocked Washington DC. The poor, deluded man honestly and truly, knew not what he was doing.
“I say to you all here in this hall that,” Enoch Powell’s voice quivered with rage, “that woman has usurped the constitution in a way no usurper has usurped the rightful governance of these Islands since Henry Tudor ousted Richard at Bosworth Field. Except,” he added with an excoriating flourish, “at least Henry Tudor had the courage to take his prize by battle. He had no skirts to hide behind!”
“I think I’ve heard enough of this balderdash,” Airey Neave said loudly in the moment before the demigod’s true believers began to bay for blood.
Iain Macleod nodded and as he staggered to his feet – his two decade old war wound, from which he had never fully recovered, had stiffened while he sat listening to the other speakers – the ministers’ bodyguards quickly stepped close.
“See!” The man on the stage cried in triumph. “See how they run now that their little game has been exposed! Like rats falling over each other in their haste to get off a sinking ship.”
Airey Neave did not look back.
Elsewhere in the hall other people were standing; some gesticulating, brandishing clenched fists, others simply trying to get out. Something flew through the air. The veteran of Colditz did not blink, did not attempt to duck. Somewhere behind him on the apron of the stage glass shattered.
At the very moment the Prime Minister was fighting to safeguard the life of the nation in Washington, men who had the bare-face gall to dare to call themselves Tory diehards were queuing up to stab her in the back as soon as she got back. If only for once, just once,
the Party could find the gumption to march in step with the rest of the country!
Was that really too much to ask?
Chapter 4
Tuesday 14th January 1964
Blair House, 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC
Sir Thomas ‘Tom’ Harding-Grayson and his wife, Patricia, were waiting in the first floor lobby with Lord Franks, the recently appointed United Kingdom Ambassador, and the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce, when Margaret Thatcher made her regal appearance.
Blair House still reeked of fresh paint and in places the recently repaired damage to the internal fabric of the building stood out like a sore thumb. However, despite its proximity to the White House and the fact that vicious fighting had washed around it during the Battle of Washington, the building itself – the original early nineteenth century town house and three adjoining properties – had survived more or less intact. Emergency restoration and repairs had been begun within days of the fighting ending while several rings of new defences were prepared. Blair House was now the temporary Washington residence of the President of the United States of America and no expense or effort had been spared in getting it ready to accommodate its new occupant and his guests.