by James Philip
Paul Boffa’s eyes were widening, his pupils dilating in astonishment.
“Moreover,” Julian Christopher went on, his tone low and severe, almost schoolmasterly, “it is the considered view of Her Majesty’s Government that the attacks on Royal Navy vessels and the bombing of Malta last month was part of a broader Red Dawn inspired conspiracy against British and American interests. Furthermore, the belligerence of Spain and the irrational behaviour of Italy and other Mediterranean powers towards British interests may also have been fomented by agents of Red Dawn. The recent actions against Pantelleria, Linosa and Lampedusa were therefore necessary ‘tidying up’ operations to deny safe havens to Red Dawn terrorists, and to secure sea communications with Gibraltar. It is my sincere hope that these actions will persuade the authorities on Sicily and in North Africa, that any attempt to shelter elements of Red Dawn or to interdict our lines of communication will henceforth have the most dire consequences for those responsible. ”
“So Red Dawn really exists?”
“Yes. That is our best analysis of the available intelligence.”
Paul Boffa was reeling and yet from somewhere, he knew not whence, he found the gumption to ask the one question that he had to ask.
“Is Malta in danger, Sir Julian?”
The older man nodded.
“Yes,” he said again, “if Malta falls to Krasnaya Zarya then the whole Mediterranean basin from the Levant to the Straits of Gibraltar will most likely be plunged into a new dark age.”
Chapter 29
Thursday 30th January 1964
Cheltenham Town Hall, Gloucestershire, England
“The Lady says to us,” the tall, gaunt, scarred man with a patch over his empty left eye socket called, his voice keening to the high vaulted beams fifty feet above his head, ‘that we should trust her; that she knows what she is doing and that she is, at heart, a democrat of the old school. Yet she is of that coterie of place men and women that only a few short weeks ago, very nearly carried this great nation to the brink of a new thermonuclear denouement with the United States of America! How could that war have ended other than with our total and utter immolation, our extinction as an island race, and the final obliteration of what remains of our ancient and proud heritage?”
Margaret Thatcher listened with apparent equanimity as she gazed seraphically into the body of the main hall. Although it looked and had the feel of a building fifty years older, Cheltenham Town Hall had been completed as recently as 1903. Back then it had been a part of the redevelopment and expansion of the spa town, built on one side of Imperial Square – in peaceful times a green garden area for the citizenry to enjoy when at leisure – at a princely cost of some forty-five thousand pounds. The main hall was the jewel in the architectural crown of the building, designed to hold a thousand people, its Corinthian columns and balustraded first floor gallery gave it a regal, old World authenticity. On alcoves either side of the stage there were plaster statues of King Edward VII and King George V dressed in their coronation robes. The Town Hall was a marvellous relic from the England that had been swept away by the October War.
“What price the sanctity of our Parliamentary tradition?” Demanded the one-eyed man. “When it can be so effortlessly suborned by the Machiavellian machinations of the Government’s propaganda machine? Josef Goebbels reincarnated could not wish for a better tool with which to sculpt the cult of personality surrounding the person of our new leader!”
Iain Macleod was spitting, almost but not quite, under his breath.
“Some of us actually fought the Nazis,” he hissed in Margaret Thatcher’s ear, “unlike others who hid behind the staff tabs on their shoulders for the whole bloody war!”
Enoch Powell must have caught at least a part of his old friend’s outburst. He hesitated, half-turned before picking up the threads of his thoughts.
“What profit is there going cap in hand to our American friends when clearly those friends have already reneged upon the terms of ‘the treaty’ so recently signed with such fanfare in Washington? And by what right did the Lady’s government sign that treaty in the first place?”
A small section of the crowd was braying: “Hear! Hear!” Each and every time their spokesman paused to draw breath. Other voices, male and female were responding: “Shame! Better peace than war!”
“And that, my friends,” the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West declared, beginning to wind up his ‘brief’ opening remarks, which had already dragged into a twenty-five minute long harangue, a monologue underwritten with bitterness and anger, a spear of righteous anger seeking but never actually finding a target in which to embed itself. “That is the real question. Through cruel mischance we have reached a point in which we no longer have a legitimate Government. The Unity Administration is a skimpy fig leaf for the Lady’s petty tyranny. The Unity Administration is a charade, a constitutional nonsense with which the coven of conspirators locked in smoke-filled rooms in that old house next to the new airport has shamelessly bamboozled the Queen, in her time of grief and trial, into rubber stamping to the eternal ignominy of what was once the mother of Parliaments!”
Margaret Thatcher hoped Enoch Powell would sit down before he fell down; her opponent looked dreadful and he had been dripping with perspiration for several minutes.
The man’s arguments were at once cogent and oddly, banal. It was as if he was not living in the same World that she had been for the last year.
She was only a little surprised by how few people stood to applaud Enoch Powell when eventually he stepped back from his lectern. As she had warned Iain Macleod she would, she got up and politely clapped her adversary back to his chair. Then she walked to her lectern, carefully placed her hand bag on the floor by one side and looked into the blinding lights. Taking a moment to shield her eyes she peered into the throng.
“Oh, dear,” she smiled, “I had no idea that I’d upset Mr Powell so,” she spread her arms, momentarily, “so much.”
The mood in the hall was instantly less tense, oppressive.
“I was reminded on the way to this meeting,” she continued, desperately trying not to laugh at her own jokes, “that Mr Norman Wisdom, during his time in the Signal Corps, once appeared on this stage. I believe it was in 1943 and Rex Harrison was also on the bill. It was after the show that Rex went backstage and tried to persuade Mr Wisdom to turn professional. So, what with one thing and another, Mr Powell and I are treading in illustrious footsteps!”
Enoch Powell and his on stage supporter, former Treasury Minister Nigel Birch scoffed loudly and tossed their heads back with an ill-considered contempt that ran exactly counter to the mood pervading the thoughts of nine out of ten people in the hall.
“This Lady,” the Angry Widow declaimed, “has no pretensions of dictatorship and none of my colleagues is Josef Goebbels’s analogue. I am disappointed that a man of honour would even consider voicing such a slur in such a public and reckless manner.”
Enoch Powell and his second made as if to rise to their feet.
“No!” Margaret Thatcher cried angrily. “We’ve had to listen to your bile and your recriminations, now you can jolly well hear me out!” She focused on the Hall. “People keep telling me about the good old days. I understand as much as anybody why people naturally yearn for a return to ‘normality’. Before the war I was blissfully happy in my marriage and my chosen career, my children had a loving and devoted father, our little family had so much to look forward to. All that was stolen from me. But, we cannot turn back the clock. I am sorry but we are never going back to the way we once were. The challenge before us is to survive and to build a better World for our children and our grandchildren. If it transpires that we are the lost generation whose dreams and hopes had to be sacrificed for the future of our children, is that not a just and proper price to pay for their futures?”
She knew she had most of the people in the Hall in the palm of her hand.
“I was a very lowly cog in Harold Ma
cMillan’s pre-war administration. I was the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Pensions, at the very foot of what some commentators disparagingly call the ‘greasy pole’ of politics. I had never had more than a glimpse of the higher echelons of the Government; in fact I can honestly say that I hardly thought at all about what it must be like to hold senior ministerial positions. My detractors to the right,” he waved in the direction of Enoch Powell and his comrade, Nigel Birch, “and my friend to my left,” Iain Macleod nodded, “held high office in the years before the war as did my predecessor, Ted Heath. But what happened was not their fault. Just as the hard decisions I have had to take in the last few weeks have nothing to do with my being a woman, or any motivation to disparage and undo the traditions of our democracy. We are fighting for our survival and sometimes I think too many of my former colleagues in politics still think they are living in some kind of pre-October 1962 bubble. I am living in the real World, ladies and gentlemen. I live in the real World that you all have to live in; and that you have been living in since that night in October 1962. I doubt if very many of my pampered, privileged detractors could survive without their customary privileges in that World. In Government House everybody lives by the same ration standard enforced in this town. I can look people in the face in this town because I’m hungry a lot of the time. I’m cold a lot of the time. Yes, I bought some new dresses when I was in America! Would you have your leader, the person who speaks for you abroad, dress like a pauper? How many of you – not the people who came down here from the Midlands – how many of you who live in Cheltenham could afford, or get hold of the expensive suits Mr Powell and Mr Birch are wearing? My opponents tonight have castigated me for most of the crimes committed under the sun since time immemorial. But neither of them has ever sought to speak to me face to face, or to converse with me like a normal human being. If they had sought such a dialogue, this confrontation would never have happened.”
The Angry Widow morphed slowly back to Margaret Thatcher, the mother and housewife who had trained to be an industrial chemist and then a barrister, unknowingly preparing for a radically different destiny. Her tone became almost conversational for all that it boomed and echoed around the old auditorium as the public address levels fluctuated.
“My Government has two objectives. Only two! First, we must survive.” She paused, her gaze roving across anonymous faces. “Our first duty is to survive as a nation and as a people and to carry forward into the future the values we hold dearest. Foremost among those values is our love of Parliamentary democracy and our loyalty to our Sovereign Monarch, Queen Elizabeth. If we must fight again we will fight. I will fight to my dying breath to ensure that we survive. If I have to turn this country into an armed camp to survive that is what I will do. But we must survive. And to survive we must be ready, willing and prepared to fight. My Government will fight!”
This sobered the hall.
“Second, it is not enough just to survive. My opponents accuse me of cultivating a cult of personality. I don’t think I am a second Boadicea, ladies and gentlemen,” she protested, quirking a forced smile. “I am a mother, I was a housewife and most days I wish I still was but like so many women I am a widow, and every day I mourn the one I lost, as you must the ones you have lost. I came into politics to make things better. Ladies and gentlemen, I intend to make things better.”
She had to wait for quietness for nearly a minute.
“My Government is settled upon recalling Parliament to sit in Oxford not later than the last day of February this year. At that time Mr Powell and his friends can vote democratically, on my future and on the future of our country. But I tell you one thing; the day when one class or vested interest determines the fate of us all is gone forever!”
This time she had to struggle against the ongoing ovation to continue.
“There will be by elections for all vacant, surviving Parliamentary constituencies during the next year. Parliament will sit every month until the next General Election which will be held before the end of 1965. I will not have petty self-appointed demagogues pretend that they speak for my people!”
Fortuitously, Cheltenham Town Hall was stoutly built and the roof did not come off. To her right a small group of Powellites stood, arms crossed in murderous silence staring at the shameless ideological apostates all around them. The Angry Widow fixed them in her sights; deciding that they were a rather well-fed, well-dressed little clique in the pale, shabby mass populating most of the hall.
Did I really just say ‘my people’?
“One day we will rebuild the shattered cities. In a decade from now we will have rebuilt the Houses of Parliament and we will have reclaimed our great capital city, making it once again the premier metropolis of the Commonwealth. Only when we have healed ourselves can we heal Europe and repay our Commonwealth brothers and sisters for the bounty of Operation Manna. Whatever appearances to the contrary, we are bound to our former colonies around the globe more strongly, more profoundly than ever we were in the days of Empire. We must survive and we must rebuild. Every hand must be turned to the reconquest of our broken lands and to the regeneration of hope for generations to come!
The man with the gun did not emerge from the ranks of the ruddy-cheeked, well-fed outraged Powellites. The ragged, bearded man in his thirties had been sitting in the third row from the stage, one seat in from the central isle on the right hand side of the auditorium.
He was perhaps fifteen feet away from Margaret Thatcher when he fired the first shot.
Should I duck?
The Prime Minister’s Royal Marine Commando bodyguards had strict orders not to open fire in a crowd; their Sten Guns were loaded but were for show only. There had been a heated debate about that; she had held firm. Her life was only one life and she did not want an inadvertent bloodbath on her conscience just because somebody ‘sneezed at the wrong time’ in her vicinity.
The muzzle flash of the gun, some kind of old-fashioned revolver was very smoky, she observed idly as her assassin fired a second shot. Her senses were at once frozen and impossibly heightened. She watched the circular chamber of the weapon rotate.
Below her the Marines were throwing bemused and terrified bystanders aside in their desperation to come to grips with the gunman.
Four shots.
And another, that’s five!
Margaret Thatcher had not heard a thing; not the concussion of the gun firing or the screaming, the chairs scraping, over-turning and the bodies flinging themselves out of the way.
She watched with a kind of academic, disinterred curiosity as two hulking AWPs bowling into the gunman. He went down as if he had been hit by a speeding express train; the Flying Scotsman, perhaps.
“Prime Minister! Prime Minister!”
Margaret Thatcher blinked back to reality. Slowly, her brain began to register real rather than super-slowed time. She struggled to focus for a moment.
Enoch Powell had taken a hold of her elbow.
“Margaret?” He asked worriedly, his single eye clouded with alarm and concern. “Prime Minster, are you all right?”
She half-turned, looking down the length of the rapidly clearing hall.
Two Royal Marines were dragging the unconscious body of the unsuccessful assassin away.
Iain Macleod was slowly picking himself up off the stage where he had dived for cover, eying the unlikely sight of his crippled former friend, Enoch Powell supporting his detested adversary. Given where the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West now stood, it was obvious that he had made a futile, but nonetheless gallant effort to place himself between the Prime Minister and the gunman.
Every day in every way the World becomes stranger.
Chapter 30
Friday 31st January 1964
The Office of the Vice-Present, City Hall, Philadelphia
The President of the United States of America had not felt this good for years. The gruelling schedule of non-stop flights, speeches, meet and greet sessions,
and packed and chaotic press conferences wherever SAM 26000 touched ground had reminded him that he was not powerless, and that he could still make a difference. In retrospect his personal renaissance had begun that day in Washington he had met Margaret Thatcher the first time. Her people were in a much worse place than most Americans; she was the one who would have been on the losing end of any war between their nations, and yet she had been the one who had talked about the future and what governments existed to do for their peoples. The woman had been both pragmatic and charismatic; and subsequently he had gone straight out on the stump to reconnect with the American people.
He had been shaken up to hear about the assassination attempt in Cheltenham, and appalled when he learned that the Prime Minister’s bodyguards had not been allowed to use their automatic weapons.
It was as if the woman had a death wish!
The details were still a little hazy and the British were not saying much until they had had a chance to interrogate the shooter.
“Okay,” Jack Kennedy drawled, leaning back in the hard chair, balancing his coffee on his right knee. With the members of the Administration criss-crossing the continent and operating out of temporary offices in DC, Norfolk, San Francisco, New York and here in Philadelphia meetings involving senior members tended to be kitchen cabinets. Again, this suited the President just fine. Things could be discussed properly, people did not get to extemporize on areas they weren’t responsible for and there was a lot less in-fighting. “So I don’t get to be impeached this year?”