by Tom Black
“I think it does,” said Vladimir Semichastny, eyeing the scale model in front of them, “and the location – Dzherzhinsky Square – will make it a popular site for pilgrimage. I do, however, have reservations about the expression—”
The terrified cough from the nineteen-year-old courier behind them alerted Vladimir Semichastny and Yuri Andropov to his presence. Without a word, the young man handed the Commissar for State Security a note. Semichastny read it, gave an approving nod, and handed the note to the General Secretary. After a moment, the most powerful man in the Soviet Union patted the KGB courier – now white as a sheet – on the back.
“Thank you for informing us,” Andropov said, placing the folded note on his desk, “you may return to the Lubyanka.”
Andropov and Semichastny stood in silence as the courier scurried out of the room, closing the door behind him.
“Well?” asked Semichastny.
“Harold Wilson has been shot. Now please, Vladimir Yefimovich, continue.”
“I see. Well, as I was saying, General Secretary, I personally favour a more defiant expression on the face. His coat being blown by the wind is, however, a masterstroke for which the sculptor deserves full credit.”
“I am in agreement on both counts,” said Andropov, removing and cleaning his glasses, “but what should the plinth say?”
The head of the KGB grinned.
“Simple, elegant and to the point: ‘Harold Wilson, 1916-1977: Hero of the Soviet Union.’”
The two men laughed, embraced twice, and called for more vodka.
“You took your time,” said Sir Stafford Cripps, drily, holding the door open as Harold Wilson walked into a working men’s club. Jacob Brimley, his nose in a book, gave Harold a friendly wave from a corner booth. Wilson took in his surroundings. James Connolly, pint in hand, was sharing a joke with an inebriated Eugene Debs. Paul Robeson’s voice, deep and rich, brought The Red Flag to life, to a piano accompaniment by George Cole. Over by the toilets, Rosa Luxemburg was giving Stalin a piece of her mind.
As Harold plucked up the courage to order a pint of bitter – from John Maclean, no less – a hand on his arm made him turn around. There, bearded, broad, and unmistakably German, stood a man he thought he’d never meet.
“Glad you could make it, comrade,” said Marx, “I have a beer here for you.”
Wilson’s eyes widened, and he tried not to stammer as he shook hands with the wisest man in history.
“Thank you,” Harold said, “but do you have any sandwiches?”
The room erupted into friendly laughter. Mao clapped Harold on the back. Marx wiped a tear from his eye as Lenin clutched his sides. Jacob Brimley began to applaud. Harold caught sight of himself in his glass – he looked younger. Trimmer. In his prime.
“Welcome, comrade,” said Marx with a warm smile, “welcome to the party.”
Harold beamed, raised his glass to the assembled throng, and drank.
As Paddick pumped Harold Wilson’s chest more fervently than ever, he called out for an ambulance for the umpteenth time. A hand on his shoulder told him it was too late.
“Radio it in,” he sighed, his temper flaring as he took a good look at the man whose life he’d tried to save.
“Look at him, Gerry.”
“What?” shouted Gerry above the din from the roaring, scattering crowd.
“The bastard’s smiling.”
And he was.
My mother said, “Don't worry about what people think now. Think about whether your children and grandchildren will think you've done well.”
Lord Mountbatten
Afterword
Tom Black
This story began in the St Stephen’s Tavern in Westminster. Eagle-eyed readers will recognise that name, as might politicos: it’s a popular haunt of MPs and political bods in Westminster, as well as being the pub where Airey Neave and the anti-Mountbatten Conservatives plot to bring down the government in chapter twenty-five.
In reality, and a long time after 1976, Jack and I met up for a drink in the summer of 2012 in the St Stephen’s. We chatted, as we often did, about ‘what ifs’ that had always fascinated us. As we were ordering a pint of cider (for me) and a pint of something bitter but not for hipsters (for Jack), Jack idly remarked, “I’ve always wanted to do something where all the rumours about Wilson being a spy were true.”
It was love at first pitch. Pretty soon, Jack had posted the prologue (which in the original story, was Wilson watching television with Joe Haines and Marcia Williams) on AlternateHistory.com and we had attracted some interest. In the early days, there was an informal demarcation: Jack would handle the heavy-duty politics, while I took the lead on the ‘action’ scenes that took the book into thriller territory.
Over time, we began to work more closely together on everything, and Agent Lavender eventually became was an exercise in exploring two questions. The first was ‘what would actually happen if…’, with the phrase usually being followed with something absurd, like ‘...the Prime Minister was outed as a communist spy’ or ‘there was a general strike in the 1970s and paramilitary thugs tried to break it up’. The second was ‘how can 1970s Britain start to look a little bit like a dictatorship but remain recognisably British?’
This was more difficult, but also very interesting to explore. It’s where things like Civil Assistance (General Sir Walter Walker’s goons, who were a very real and, at one point, feared organisation) were a godsend. So too was the British Army’s unannounced occupation of Heathrow Airport as a ‘training exercise’ in 1974. But we needed to go a few steps further if we wanted to examine explicit authoritarianism in the modern British context. That’s how we ended up with Mountbatten being unfairly blamed for ‘putting tanks on the streets’ because an administrative error leads to a parade going awry. It’s just like how Jim Callaghan was blamed in our world for letting ‘the dead go unburied’ when in fact there was one area of one city where for two weeks there was a backlog at one cemetery. It’s all, we hope, thoroughly British.
One thing the book was praised for when serialised online was its depiction of Enoch Powell. A few of our friends have pointed out to us that the nuanced Enoch you find in these pages may not go down as well in the wider world as it did in our stuffy, history-obsessed corner of the internet. We hope it does. The journey Enoch takes is from outsider everyman observing the action to reluctant participant, then from dictator-in-waiting to hero of democracy, and finally a fall back down to determined racialist demagogue. Through this journey we tried to depict the many facets of the historical Powell: his undeniable intellectual genius, his impossible stubbornness and bookish awkwardness, his adoration for the British constitution and his deeply problematic views on race. In the world of Lavender, torn apart by extremes as it is, it would be easy to turn Powell into a two-dimensional bogeyman. We have tried our utmost to avoid that.
Margaret Thatcher is someone we struggled to write in the initial draft. The Thatcher of Lavender is the Thatcher of 1975: an unpolished and poor media performer with an unfair and sexist reputation for sounding ‘shrill’. The steel and fire that characterised her leadership were present, but the iconic voice and ‘image’ were yet to be created by Gordon Reece and Saatchi & Saatchi. Some readers criticised the original depiction of Mrs Thatcher for this, some simply because they couldn’t believe that she was ever anything other than the Iron Lady. But others had a point – we had perhaps gone too far the other way. Some careful rewrites in this final version have hopefully made clear what we originally intended – Thatcher is forced out by a jittery and still fundamentally sexist Conservative Party, after poor media performances and the appearance of losing control of the situation. By the end of the book, she appears to be preparing her comeback, though it is up to you to decide how far she will get. And we should not forget it is Thatcher who makes the single most important decision of the story: recommending the Queen send for Lord Mountbatten rather than one of her Conservative colleagues.
> Then, of course, there’s Harold. As the disclaimer says at the very start of this book, we don’t believe for one moment that Wilson was a spy in real life. We also don’t think he had a deep, burning hatred of the British establishment. As a result, he is by far the most heavily fictionalised of our characters. None of them should be taken as realistic portraits, for the circumstances in which they find themselves are so extreme, but Wilson in particular has had his whole life altered by that extra glass of port with G.D.H. Cole (who, by the way, wasn’t a recruiter for the NKVD either – though he was very much the sort of chap who could have been). We hope he was an enjoyable protagonist to follow in Agent Lavender, but would always stress that he is effectively a fictional creation – an ‘echo’ of our Harold Wilson in some parallel universe somewhere.
Speaking of parallel universes, the slow sundering of the Labour Party is something that readers of the original serialised version of Lavender will recognise as a big change. In the original, the Labour Party saw a united front of Jenkins and Benn come together to save it from itself and, in doing so, change its name to ‘the Democratic Party’. While neither Jack nor I thought this was particularly bad or impossible, it was one of the less plausible elements of the political shakeup that follows Harold’s departure. So instead, we doubled down on Benn’s stubbornness, accentuated Jenkins’ own unhappiness within Labour (he had become disillusioned with the party in 1972 in our world, and would leave it altogether to form a new party in 1981), and ended up with what you read here. What this new storyline isn’t is an analogue of Corbynism or ‘the Corboom’ of the summer of 2015. We were at first stunned and then a little annoyed that something we had been crafting for some time had begun to – in a manner of speaking – play out in the present day before our very eyes. Whether Jeremy Corbyn will face a ‘Reform Party’ schism of his own one day remains to be seen, though it’s unlikely that John McDonnell will abruptly leave the country after the Chinese premier makes a speech wearing a lilac-coloured tie.
It’s been an enormous pleasure and privilege to work with Jack in writing Agent Lavender. We aren’t quite done with it yet, as you’ll find out in the coming pages. But we’re very proud to have got this far and to have published it through Sea Lion Press. Above all, we hope that our aims – to explore the plausible outcomes of an utterly bizarre event occurring in a highly strained period of British history, and to import Cold War-era authoritarian tropes to Britain’s streets – have been achieved. We also hope you laughed a fair bit.
Thank you very much for reading. And if you’re ever near Huddersfield railway station, keep an eye out for a statue of one of Britain’s most significant post-war leaders. His coat is crumpled and his eyes are defiant, and it might remind you of a certain statue that stands in Dzerzhinsky Square in another universe somewhere. In ours, though, it’s a monument to a great patriot, a skilled politician, and a leader who set off ripples that are felt to this day.
Tom Black
May 2016
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, we would like to thank everyone at AlternateHistory.com who read and offered feedback on the original story when it was serialised there from 2012 to 2014. There are too many people to name here, but they know who they are. Thanks also to everyone who voted for Agent Lavender and its characters in the annual Turtledove Awards. Across those years, it won eight. Ian Montgomerie, who set up AlternateHistory.com and still runs it entirely out of his own pocket, is also someone without whom this book would not and could not have been written.
Special thanks go to V-J, whose detailed feedback and encouragement are what put us on the path to eventual publication, and Nick P, whose rewrite of Harold’s journey along the railway line to Great Yarmouth was the geekiest unsolicited correction we ever received. To think that in a book about a Prime Minister exposed a communist spy, somebody would find the time to point out that our depiction of a double-track railway was inaccurate. It makes you proud to be British.
Agent Lavender was begun a few months after we both left university, and some thanks is due to the academic staff who fed our love of history and politics during our degree courses. Dr Mark Smith gave Tom invaluable insights into the Soviet Union of the ’60s and ’70s. Dr Tim Heppell’s course on the post-war Labour Party also proved immensely useful in the writing of the civil war that engulfs the party in parts three and four. Tom’s tremendously supportive final year tutor, Dr Malcolm Chase, cameos in the Chartist meeting in chapter 29.
Jack would like to praise the entire Department of International History at the London School of Economics, but particular thanks is due to Dr N. Piers Ludlow for his fantastic efforts as a dissertation supervisor and for his invaluable insights on the politics of European integration and the Labour Party, to Dr Kristina Spohr for her fantastic course on the Cold War end-game, and to Dr Paul Keenan for his constant encouragement and for aiding in the development of a passion for Russian history and culture.
Matthews Yard in Croydon was the site of many joint writing sessions. Its warm atmosphere, good coffee and free wifi were probably responsible for at least a third of the book. Our thanks to Saif, Leoni and everyone who made Matthews Yard happen, and made us feel so welcome there. For hosting and feeding us during an intense long weekend of rewrites, thanks must go to everyone at The White Horse Inn, Overstrand. Not far from Cromer (and thus the fictional Winstanley Cottage), this pub/hotel made for fitting surroundings when we completely restructured the book. The National Theatre, in all its brutalist glory, was a suitable venue for our final meetings in the run-up to publication.
Our proofreaders Iain Brown, Chris Nash, Edward Feery and Stephen Black provided not just spelling corrections but very useful thoughts on anachronisms, historical titbits, and the story itself. Edward Feery deserves another round of thanks for taking on the final proofread shortly before this book’s publication (and also telling us, thanks to first hand knowledge, that there is no ‘High Street’ in Huyton town centre).
Thanks to all who got involved with and supported Sea Lion Press since its establishment in 2015. Initially expected to be a small project to bring great timelines to a slightly wider audience, it’s now an ever-growing publishing house through which we are very proud to be publishing Agent Lavender. Keep an eye on sealionpress.co.uk and sign up to the mailing list!
Finally, to the family, friends, colleagues and bosses who supported us as we behaved antisocially, obsessively, and occasionally downright unprofessionally in our pursuit of getting this labour of love done at any cost: thanks for not only putting up with us, but going the extra mile and enabling our unhealthy writing habit.
Appendix A: British cabinets, 1975-1977
Final cabinet of Harold Wilson, March 1974 – 1st November 1975
Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Labour)
Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey (Labour)
Lord Chancellor The Lord Elwyn-Jones (Labour)
Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords The Lord Shepherd (Labour)
Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons Edward Short (Labour)
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs James Callaghan (Labour)
Secretary of State for the Home Department Roy Jenkins (Labour)
Secretary of State for Defence Roy Mason (Labour)
Secretary of State for Education and Science Fred Mulley (Labour)
Secretary of State for Employment Michael Foot (Labour)
Secretary of State for Energy Tony Benn (Labour)
Secretary of State for the Environment Anthony Crosland (Labour)
Secretary of State for Social Services Barbara Castle (Labour)
Secretary of State for Industry Eric Varley (Labour)
Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection Shirley Williams (Labour)
Secretary of State for Trade Peter Shore (Labour)
Secretary of State for Scotland William Ross (Labour)
Secretary
of State for Wales John Morris (Labour)
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees (Labour)
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Harold Lever (Labour)
Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Fred Peart (Labour)
Minister for Planning and Local Government John Silkin (Labour)
Also attending Cabinet
Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury and Chief Whip in the House of Commons Robert Mellish (Labour)
Attorney General Samuel Silkin (Labour)
Minister for Overseas Development Reg Prentice (Labour)
‘The Transitional Authority’
Cabinet of Margaret Thatcher, 1st November 1975 – 8th November 1975
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Conservative)
Deputy Prime Minister William Whitelaw (Conservative)
Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Keith Joseph Bt (Conservative)
Lord Chancellor The Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone (Conservative)
Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords The Lord Carrington (Conservative)
Lord President of the Council and Minister of State for Constitutional Reform: Jeremy Thorpe (Liberal)
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Leader of the House of Commons John Payton (Conservative)
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Reginald Maudling (Conservative)
Secretary of State for the Home Department Ian Gilmour (Conservative)
Secretary of State for Information The Earl Mountbatten of Burma (Independent)