by Tom Black
“You probably all know the relevant parts by now,” Sir John opened, “but in the interests of fairness, I would suggest that Mrs Wilson be allowed to attend, for our benefit as much as hers.” The Prime Minister’s long-suffering wife gave a brave smile, although both she and Marcia looked ill, their faces almost grey with nausea.
“I would also ask that a decision be made quickly as to who is to inform Her Majesty of the matter at hand before the Cabinet is called,” the Cabinet Secretary continued, “as while the office of Prime Minister is not vacant, for practicality’s sake a senior figure must be in a position to deal with at least administrative matters for the day.”
It had been a frustrating, if fascinating two hours. An unauthorised Prime Ministerial jaunt to East Anglia had quickly been subsumed in the aftermath of a telephone call from the Chief Constable of Norfolk Constabulary, who had wanted to know fairly urgently why a government car had been found abandoned next to four corpses, two of which had their fingers closed round Soviet pistols. Even Short had felt rather faint at hearing that discussion, playing as it did on a few nagging doubts that he had always had about his party leader.
“I feel it must be Ted,” Roy Mason said, “Speaking from the view of the Labour Party, he is Deputy, and thus only he has authority until Harold turns up, or the party’s National Executive Committee can formally meet.”
“Whilst I agree with that point, Defence Secretary,” Sir John responded, “Mr Short’s party position carries no constitutional duty. I informed him in his capacity as Lord President of the Council, not as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. It certainly should mean that he has the duty of informing the sovereign, but it would require discussion with the rest of the Cabinet. I spoke to you owing to the national security implications in lieu of the Home Secretary, being as he is engaged in Europe.”
Short paid little attention to this, aware of the pressing reality that between them, Denis and Tony would probably rip this argument to shreds. Noticing that five pairs of eyes were now converging on him, he made to speak just as the first footsteps come hammering up the stairs. Leaning back once again, he hoped against hope that Harold would leap out of the Ottoman stuffed in the corner of the room, ideally clutching a rubber chicken, to inform them all that it had all been a hilarious jape.
It was not forthcoming.
As the two Ministers went through the connecting door into the Cabinet Room, Sir John hurried back towards his Office, pausing only to look at the small portrait of Lord John Russell that sat forlornly in the hallway leading towards the kitchen. Russell had made a decent stab at it, Sir John mused. There was no reason Ted Short wouldn’t be able to do the same.
Nevertheless, circumstances demanded that other people be informed. Not for the first time that evening, the Cabinet Secretary darkly wished that Wilson had been shot as well, it would certainly have made the transition far easier to deal with. As it was, what should have just been a constitutional problem had become a constitutional crisis. Picking up the receiver, he paused just before calling the switchboard. There was no alternative, he thought.
“Would you put me through to Mrs Thatcher, please?”
Chapter three
Saturday 1st November 1975 – 5:15am
Denis Thatcher had never liked having a telephone in the bedroom. But, being married to the Leader of the Conservative Party and former cabinet minister, it had been necessary to get used to it. Since Margaret had moved the first Bakelite monstrosity onto the bedside table, he had developed a series of systems for dealing with the various rattles, rings and clangs that seemed determined to ruin his sleeping pattern. On this particular occasion he elected for the ‘Old Dependable’, whereby he placed himself face down on the bed and pulled his pillow over his head, applying pressure to bend it to cover his ears. He heard Margaret lift the receiver, and sighed into the sheet as he removed the pillow from his ears.
“-at once. Of course,” his newly-unmuffled wife was saying as she swung her legs out of the bed. Denis sighed again and rolled his eyes.
“What now?” he said, slightly too loudly, as ever. Margaret shushed him with her hand before continuing to whoever was on the other end of the line.
“I understand. Thank you.” She replaced the receiver.
“Well?” her husband asked.
“I have to go to Downing Street.”
Denis sat bolt upright in bed.
“At this hour? Is there a war on?”
“Not yet,” his wife replied, walking over to her wardrobe and starting to dress.
“A national emergency?”
“Not yet,” she said again, picking out a pair of simple black shoes.
“Well, Margaret, why the bloody hell are you going to Downing Street? Has the establishment spontaneously decided they want you to become PM?”
Margaret Thatcher permitted herself a smirk.
“Not yet.”
“No. No. No.”
Tony Benn was in full swing. Pipe in hand, he looked like he might at any moment remove one of Denis Healey’s eyes with it as he gestured with gusto unseen in a politician since Eisenstein’s depiction of Lenin.
“This simply isn’t on, Ted, and you know it. Harold has clearly just had one too many in some watering hole somewhere and a misunderstanding involving the robbery of two unfortunate Russian diplomats cannot be taken as evidence that—”
“Diplomats with automatic weapons, comrade!” said Tony Crosland, bitterly.
“Semi-automatic. They had handguns,” corrected Roy Mason, leaning back in his chair.
“Pardon me for not being particularly interested in the distinction at this juncture!” snapped Crosland. Benn thundered again.
“As I was saying, this entire proposition is nothing but right-wing bunkum. With respect, Ted, you’re doing an admirable job, but it’s not one you should have been asked to do.”
Ted Short couldn’t agree more, but for somewhat more selfish reasons. He stifled a yawn as Benn continued.
“For Sir John to accuse Harold of, well, let’s be honest, treason,” he paused for effect, achieving none, “is completely unacceptable. I move we call for his resignation forthwith.”
“Seconded,” remarked Michael Foot drily, continuing to give off the impression that he found this whole affair highly amusing. Healey banged the table in support while Jim Callaghan looked daggers at Sir John. Ted turned to him, trying his best to look helpless. The mandarin simply smiled.
“Gentlemen, if I may be so bold as to invite some guests into the room?” he allowed the question to hover in the air, before adding, “I would be very happy to tender my resignation should you still require it after this short briefing.”
There was a pause. Sir John walked to the door.
“Briefing?” spluttered Benn, who had been in the middle of a puff on his pipe as Sir John opened the door, “what is there to be briefed about?”
The tall, red-faced man in the grey suit threw a thick bundle of papers onto the table as he entered. Sir Michael Hanley, Director-General of MI5, was at his shoulder. The tall man spoke.
“The fact that your Prime Minister is a fucking traitor, that’s what.”
Tony Benn’s pipe hit the floor.
The cause of the commotion in Whitehall was, at that very moment, perched nervously in a hedge in East Anglia. The barn now a few hundred yards behind him, he had cautiously moved around the edges of the farm to avoid the increasing number of policemen and women searching the field where Tulip and Lily had had their date with buckshot. He was reminded, as he bent to retie his shoelace, that he was not an active man in his thirties any more, able slip in and out of October Books on Commercial Road without anyone seeing him pocket the third copy of Das Kapital from the left. Sixty next year, he thought. Probably time to retire anyway.
It was this sense of fatigue that had set his mind working, which was far less encumbered with age. Now, as he remained crouched in the hedge and his target – a slowly trundling tractor –
approached, Harold licked his lips and scanned the newspaper under the driver’s arm. He couldn’t make out all of the main headline, but it was decidedly not about the exposure of a KGB agent at the very top of the British government. Looking back over his shoulder for the police, he jogged out of the bush and put on his best canvassing smile.
“Excuse me!” he called, waving. The man in the driving seat turned lazily toward him.
“Yes?” he called back as Harold approached, and opened his mouth to say something which started with ‘a’ but quickly turned into, “‘ere, you’re ‘im, aren’t you?”
Harold froze. He was sure his heart had stopped. The farmer continued.
“You’re the Prime Minister!” There was nothing loaded about the statement, or at least nothing more loaded than would be expected of an East Anglian farmer’s dim view of the government.
Harold’s feet began moving again, as if of themselves.
“That’s right! Harold Wilson, pleased to meet you,” he said, outstretching his hand. The man swivelled around and shook it.
“Benjamin Croker. Don’t get many of your lot down here, you know.”
Whether he meant Prime Ministers, KGB agents or Labour Party members was unclear, but all three were equally true. Harold ploughed on.
“No, you’re quite right, this is an area I’m not proud to say I haven’t visited very much. Listen, Mr, er, Croker, I hope you won’t consider this an imposition, but I need to ask you a very great favour.”
Benjamin Croker’s eyebrows went up.
“Anything for the Prime Minister,” he said, not without a hint of irony.
“I need to borrow your tractor,” said the Prime Minister, “I’m meant to be travelling with my people, but they’ve left me behind—”
“I wondered why you was alone, yes.”
“Indeed. Anyway, what we’d established was that I’d meet them about a mile that way in the event of a separation like that. Typical protocol.” This sounds absurd, he thought, no-one in their right mind is going to believe it. But Croker smiled.
“Of course, Mr Prime Minister, happy to help. I can give you a lift—”
Harold politely raised his hand. His heart was thumping against his chest in way it hadn’t done since Marcia whispered in his ear after the Huyton count in ’64.
“That’s very kind, but I don’t want to take up any more of your time, and I’ll see to it that you’re handsomely reimbursed for the temporary loss of your vehicle.” To add weight to his words, he produced his – still thick, thank God – wallet. Croker’s eyes narrowed.
“Well, Mr Prime Minister Wilson, sir,” there was that irony again, thought Harold, “I can’t really get on with my work without this old girl here,” he gave the tractor’s engine an affectionate kick, “but I don’t want to keep the Head of State from his business.”
There was a pause, during which Harold decided not to point out he was technically the Head of Government. Croker continued.
“So I’ll tell you what. A bit of compensation would be handsome,” he began, swinging himself out of the tractor’s driving seat, “so I’ll happily take some off of you, for the trouble.”
He grinned and Wilson allowed himself to breathe normally for the first time in ten minutes, reaching into his wallet for some notes. Croker placed a hand on his, however, stopping him short.
“But, Mr Prime Minister,” the farmer said with a twinkle in his eye, “I’d never hear the end of it if before you went I didn’t tell you what my wife and I think are the main reasons you’ve got to get us out of this Common Market.”
Harold smiled, hoping his eyes didn’t betray the scowl he was fighting off. Of bloody course, he thought.
Sir Michael Hanley had remained silent while Peter Wright, the upstart intelligence officer dismissed as a conspiracy theorist with an overactive imagination until last week, ‘briefed’ the cabinet on the full extent of what lay before them. Now, though, Peter had fallen silent, and it seemed that someone with more gravitas would have to move matters along. The Director-General of MI5 took a step forward.
“It seems they got to him when he was at Oxford,” he said.
“Not Cambridge, then?” piped up Crosland.
“He didn’t go to Cambridge.”
“I was making a joke.”
“Secretary of State, I’m not sure this is the time for jokes.”
Crosland shifted in his seat like a naughty schoolboy. Benn, still almost catatonic with shock, managed to speak.
“What proof do you have?” he said, though in a wounded, guarded tone. Peter Wright gave a dark grin and opened up the bundle of papers before speaking in short, excited bursts.
“He makes contact by telephone. Receives his instructions. For years the higher-ups—” he paused to shoot a discretionary glance at Sir Michael, “refused to investigate the various hotels, bed and breakfasts and the like that he had been using. They said there was no evidence that he used them for any reason other than extramarital sex.” He spat this final syllable as if it were somehow alien to him, before continuing. “That didn’t put me off, however. I’ve been on the bastard’s trail for years. Some of you around this table,” his eyes darted about the room, “will have loudly scoffed at my theories, whether you read them as footnotes in briefings or laughed them off in the pub. Who, gents, is laughing now?”
Sir Michael gave a firm cough, bringing him back to reality.
“So,” Wright went on, “my team and I looked through his past. It’s more than phone calls. There’s meetings. Dozens of them. All off the record, some in Moscow restaurants, some at the UN and some at fringe events at your bloody conference!”
Tony Benn had rallied slightly.
“Off the record. So no records. No notes. No proof,” he said pointedly.
Wright’s mouth curled into a vicious smile.
“You’re quite right, Viscount Stansgate,” he began, not flinching from Benn’s scowl, “to prove anything we’d need something more solid. Well, allow me to set something out for you.”
He glanced at Sir Michael, who nodded his approval, though his face gave nothing away. Wright smiled and continued.
“Anatoly Golitsyn. We’ve all heard of him.”
“The KGB defector,” said Foot, still somehow sounding bored.
“The very same. The man who’s told us more about how the KGB operate and who they have working for them than anyone else. A man who has been telling MI5 that Harold Wilson is a spy since before poor Hugh Gaitskell snuffed it.”
Crosland stiffened at the mention of his friend. He looked daggers at Wright, who continued unperturbed.
“For all these years, I was the only one ready to listen. Combined with his dodgy movements and the pattern of these electricians who turn up whenever he’s going to stay in a room – we assume they’re setting up a line to Moscow but the higher-ups time and again refused to let us investigate – it seemed obvious that your man was a traitor through and through. But yesterday morning, everything changed.”
Sir Michael stepped in at this point, and explained the events of the previous twenty-four hours. The discovery of the Soviet document in East Berlin. Then, the realisation of its implications. Then the trick in Vienna with the deliberately ‘forgotten’ papers. Finally, the expectation that a rattled Soviet Union would, if it were all true, try to extract its finest intelligence asset.
Michael Foot, inspecting the crude caricature he had drawn of Wright, drummed his fingers on the table.
“And I suppose that is what we are supposed to believe they have now done?”
Sir Michael turned to look at the Foreign Secretary.
“Mr Callaghan, would you be able to inform us if there was any emergency business at the United Nations last night?”
“There was an urgent address by Gromyko on the situation in Spain.”
“Thank you, you are quite correct. Had you watched it – perhaps you did – you would have seen that the Soviet foreign minister was wearin
g, and occasionally gesturing with, a peculiarly-tinted handkerchief. This is unusual for him. Further. it was this broadcast that Mr Wilson watched just before leaving for Norfolk. Mr Haines – who is helping police with their enquiries at present – has confirmed that for us. This, combined with the alleged Russianness of the bodies found in the field near Mr Wilson’s P5, leave us with few other possible conclusions than that which we have drawn.”
Denis Healey had loosened his tie. Tony Crosland was staring, stunned, at his glasses as he cleaned them. Jim Callaghan was sat perfectly still. Tony Benn, by contrast, was pacing furiously around the Cabinet Room. Sir Michael Hanley was still stood close to the door, calmly laying out the documents that Peter Wright had brought with him on the table so that the members of the cabinet who wished to inspect them more closely – among them Rees, Short, Mason and Foot – to do so. Sir John Hunt had disappeared a few minutes earlier, and now reappeared in the doorway with a polite cough. Sir Michael turned to face him, and the civil servant spoke.
“She’s in the building, Sir Michael.”
“Very good, Sir John,” the Director-General of MI5 replied enigmatically, before turning back to face the room.
“If I may have your attention once again,” he began, “I am afraid I must inform you of a rather important change in circumstances.”
Tony Benn stopped pacing and snapped at him.
“What? Have you caught him singing The Internationale and bathing in the blood of capitalists?”
“No, Mr Benn. You are, however, as of this moment, relieved of your duties as Secretary of State for Energy.”
There was a long, nasty pause. Benn drew himself up to his full height.
“I beg your pardon?” he said, unnaturally quiet.
“The same can be said for all of you. Mr Short, in your capacity as Lord President, I am informing you that it is very much in the national interest for this government to be dissolved forthwith, given the investigations that are underway.”