by James Philip
According to Andropov, Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin was co-leader of the Central Committee of the surviving Soviet Communist Party. He and his fellow comrade in the new ‘collective leadership’ – Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev - of the post-war Soviet empire ruled over a part devastated, widely dispersed nation of perhaps as many as forty million people. From the Caucasus in the south to the Arctic in the north, and east of the Ural Mountains all the way to distant Manchuria whole cities and regions remained untouched, in some remote areas there were probably still Soviet citizens who did not yet know that there had been a war. European Russia was gone, a radioactive wasteland mostly. But in the East the Mother Country lived on, damaged but whole; and reconstruction had already begun. There was no Troika, and Krasnaya Zarya had always been the outlier, the pre-prepared shockwave cutting edge of the Soviet Union’s defences in the event of a catastrophe as annihilating as the Cuban Missiles War.
Kosygin had come to Bucharest to promise increased military and economic aide in the event the West did not retaliate. In the event of American or British retaliation the mission to Bucharest was academic because they would all be dead. If the West failed to retaliate – showing their moral weakness – the Provisional Government of the USSR had made an irrevocable decision to support the Party leadership in Bucharest and to grant Romania a seat on the newly re-constituted Politburo based in Chelyabinsk. Of course, this pre-supposed that those in the Romanian Communist Party who had collaborated with the criminals responsible for launching the unauthorised first strike against the British and others in the Mediterranean, would be purged.
Nicolae Ceaușescu picked up his phone again.
His Securitate switchboard operator asked him which number he required.
He waited until he heard his wife’s vexed voice.
“Shut up and listen, Elena,” he barked. “Take the children to the grey house. We have to get out of the city.”
“The grey house?” His wife checked. “Are things that bad?”
“Yes. I will come as soon as possible.”
He hung up.
He hit the red button on the top of the handset.
“I need my personal security detail.”
Another man would have attempted to rationalise how he had blundered into the worst mistake of his life. Not Nicolae Ceaușescu. He had been beguiled by the experts, betrayed by his friends, sold down the river by that scumbag Shcherbytsky. Krasnaya Zarya traitors and counter-revolutionaries had subverted the legitimate Government of the People’s Republic of Romania. He had been a good communist and an honest patriot; he was blameless for the unmitigated disaster that was about to befall his country. One day he would have his revenge on the traitors who had sold out the Party.
It crossed his mind that perhaps he ought to order the elimination of the Soviet prisoners. He hated loose ends, hostages to fortune. No, somebody was bound to ask for written confirmation of an order like that, there would have to be some kind of time consuming process. Andropov, Kosygin, Chuikov and the others were not anonymous nonentities. There would be questions and inevitably delays, and the one thing he was critically short of was time.
There were booted feet in the corridor.
Nicolae Ceaușescu sighed and got to his feet.
Chapter 14
Thursday 13th February 1964
Tudor Hall, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
“Everybody is present and correct, Prime Minister,” Sir Henry Tomlinson, the grey-haired éminence grise of the Home Civil Service, the Secretary to the Cabinet of the Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland as constituted by the provisions of the War Emergency Act.
Margaret Thatcher looked up from her desk in the small ante-room to the Tudor Hall of Corpus Christi College, the room assigned to host the first Cabinet meeting of her Unity Administration in Oxford.
Sir Henry Tomlinson was pleased to see that a little of the lustre had returned to the Angry Widow’s cheeks. Whether she was happy, exhausted or worried sick his Prime Minister was never less than immaculately, marvellously turned out, not one hair out of place, and to a casual observer she was always overflowing with keen intelligence, vivacious energy and enthusiasm. However, he knew her well enough – since her accession to the Premiership they had lived through harrowing and tempestuous times fraught with unimaginable dangers in which a week had seemed like months, and a month, years and aged accordingly – to know that sometimes even she was prone to the predations of human weariness and melancholy. However, this morning was not one of those times; because she had enjoyed and only recently concluded - ‘enjoyed’ was exactly the right descriptor - an uninterrupted twenty-five minute conversation with the ‘Fighting Admiral’ upon whose capable shoulders so many of their hopes rested.
“How is Mr Powell today, Henry?”
“He seems in good form,” the Cabinet Secretary reported. Unlike his Prime Minister he was not convinced that the practice of keeping one’s friends close and one’s enemies even closer was necessarily wise in all cases. The Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, Enoch John Powell, was completely unlike any of her other high-profile detractors – presently relatively few in number – because he was never going to forgive her for being what she was; the charismatic leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party that he imagined himself to be. The man was a near genius polymath, a singular classical scholar, poet and immensely gifted linguist in his own right, a University Don at a ridiculously young age, whose ambition in his student days had been to be Viceroy of India; but it did not matter how much he talked about or claimed to be able to relate to or to connect with the man on the street, because he never would. Margaret Thatcher did not have Powell’s towering analytical intellect, or his magical public speaking aura but her outrage and her hopes were perfectly aligned with those of her millions of supporters in the country. When Margaret Thatcher spoke from the heart she was talking for her people, the British people, not for some clique of little Englanders who yearned for a return to Empire and the so-called ‘good old days’.
Margaret Thatcher tidied her papers, and reached for her handbag.
Today’s handbag was an elegantly practical Navy blue model bearing the internal label of a fashionable Knightsbridge ladies’ couturier, a present from an admirer that had arrived with a covering letter from the husband of its former owner who had asserted: ‘my late wife would have cheered every step you take...’
Before the war the Cabinet had comprised twenty-one ministers, a formula that Edward Heath had adopted in his United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration in the immediate aftermath of the October War. However, Margaret Thatcher had decided that a model based more closely on the latter day streamlined configuration of that Cabinet was more appropriate to the needs of the country and to promote good governance. Her Cabinet comprised twelve members, including the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, currently the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce. Of the eleven other members of her Cabinet, the Foreign Secretary was a political appointment with no Party affiliation – notwithstanding his avowedly centre-leftist inclinations - and of the remainder six were drawn from the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and four from the Labour and Co-operative Party.
The Prime Minister headed the Conservatives who included in their number the Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir Basil Brooke – a nephew of Lord Alanbrooke, Churchill’s Second World War Chief of the Imperial General Staff - who was attending full Cabinet for the first time today having previously been reluctant to leave his headquarters at Stormont Castle due to the fluidity of ongoing events in Ulster. In this case ‘fluidity’ was a convenient euphemism for the near civil war that was tying down the equivalent of five brigades of infantry; over twenty-three thousand trained and equipped men whose presence in the Mediterranean would have enabled the C-in-C in Malta to have mounted a successful defence of the island of Cyprus. Northern Ireland was a canker that was going to h
ave to wait for another time; likewise the disgraceful behaviour of the Government of the Irish Republic in Dublin in stoking sectarian tension in the north.
The other Conservative Party ministers around the oval table were: William Whitelaw, at Defence; Peter Thorneycroft, the member of Parliament for Monmouth and the most senior pre-war surviving Tory grandee from MacMillan’s last administration reinstated as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a post he had held in the 1950s; Airey Neave at Supply, which now also oversaw Transportation; Iain Macleod, the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party at the Ministry of Information; and holding down the Scottish Office, the one largely intact pre-war ministry, John Scott Maclay, the fifty-eight year old MP for Renfrewshire.
The ‘opposition faction’ was led by James Callaghan, the Leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party, who was formally acknowledged as Margaret Thatcher’s deputy. There had been no mandatory order of succession in Edward Heath’s Administration, but if anything untoward happened to her – for example, in the event she got shot by a madman at a public meeting which had very nearly happened at Cheltenham Town Hall not so long ago – Jim Callaghan would automatically become the next Prime Minister and would remain in post so as long as he retained sufficient support in the country and Her Majesty’s confidence. Jim Callaghan also held the portfolio of Secretary of State for Wales. To balance the ‘unity’ of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, the posts of the Home, the Labour and the Health departments had been assigned to Labour Party nominees; respectively Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crosland and Christopher Mayhew.
Charles Anthony Raven Crosland, the forty-five year old MP for Grimsby, was one of the finest minds in British politics and sooner or later would have become a candidate for the leadership of his Party regardless of the intervention of the October War. His Labour Ministry portfolio included a brief to explore options for re-creating a functioning national education system. At present the surviving Universities were being left to their own devices, other than where their funding was directly related to Government defence research, development or other priority projects; while the school system was currently administered by the eleven Emergency Regional Administrations. Margaret Thatcher had decreed that one day the old, fragmented system would be in unified. It was Anthony Crosland’s job to identify practical options and to report back to Cabinet by the summer.
Christopher Paget Mayhew, the forty-eight year old MP for Woolwich East, the former seat of his old friend and mentor Ernest Bevin was a pro-Arabist with openly big ‘L’ liberal views that had sat uneasily in his own Party before the October War. Margaret Thatcher had hesitated before rubber-stamping his appointment to the Health Ministry but James Callaghan had offered no obvious or better qualified candidate, so she had accepted Mayhew.
This morning three Privy Counsellors had been invited to ‘observe Cabinet’. This was not a gimmick but a genuine attempt to reflect the composition of the surviving electorate and a broader variety of views and opinions across the country. While the Cabinet operated at approximately half its pre-war size, this seemed to be a sensible compromise given that shortly it was planned to reconvene Parliament and once that happened, Margaret Thatcher had no intention of allowing her Cabinet to operate in a vacuum. To this end she had personally invited Enoch Powell, the most prominent Conservative MP not in government to attend this inaugural Cabinet in Oxford, and two high profile female Labour and Co-operative Party members.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the Prime Minister called as she swept into the oak panelled Tudor Hall of Corpus Christi College to an unmelodic accompaniment of scrapping chair legs, “and ladies,” she remembered. She stopped to shake hands with Enoch Powell, at his most stiffly, severely punctilious, and then, somewhat mechanically, with the two women who had been invited to ‘observe’ proceedings alongside the MP for Wolverhampton South West.
The Honourable Member for Blackburn was the elder and the feistier of the two women ‘observers’. Fifty-three year old Barbara Ann Castle had joined the Labour Party while still in her teens. She came from a family active in the Independent Labour party in the 1930s; her father a tax inspector by profession becoming at one point the editor of Bradford’s socialist newspaper, the Bradford Pioneer, while her mother had run a soup kitchen for local miners. That had been in the era when the Labour Party was in schism - after Ramsey MacDonald had split the faithful by forming a National Government with the Tories and the Liberals - the hard school in which most successful British post Hitler’s-war socialist politicians had cut their teeth. Barbara Castle’s activism had bloomed first in nearby St Hugh’s College, where she had earned a third-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In London before the Second War she sat on St Pancras Borough Council and wrote for Tribune, then as now a leading mouthpiece of the left in British politics whose editor, William Mellor - a married man some two decades her senior – she was said to have been having an affair with at the time of his death in 1942. When she married in 1944, she was the housing correspondent of the Daily Mirror, the populist broadsheet of moderate socialism. Margaret Thatcher’s briefing was that Mrs Castle had been nothing if not true to her leftist principles down the years, ploughing a singular path for a woman in politics as an unapologetic socialist on the Bevanite wing of the post-war Labour Party, who had promoted the accelerated decolonization of the Empire and vociferously opposed the South African Apartheid regime. Before the October War the Prime Minister and her left-wing counterpart had had little time for each other and the feeling had been entirely mutual.
Barbara Castle’s chaperone in this otherwise all male and largely hostile environment, was Eirene Lloyd White, the fifty-four year old Belfast-born Member of Parliament, since 1950 for East Flint. Educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and Somerville College, like Barbara Castle she had won a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Later she had studied for a year in Heidelberg before crossing the Atlantic to work for the New York Public Library. During Hitler’s War she had joined the civil service, and afterwards become the political correspondent of the Manchester Evening News and worked for the BBC. In 1948 she had married another House of Commons lobby correspondent, John Cameron White. In her own way she was every inch the feminist that Barbara Castle was, but unlike Barbara Castle she was a political moderate in most things. As long ago as 1953 she had resigned from the National Executive Council of the Labour Party in disgust because of the constant internecine warring between the left and right.
“Let me welcome our guests,” Margaret Thatcher began. “Before we begin I would like to explain for the benefit of Mr Powell, and Mrs Castle and Mrs White, how we go about our business in Cabinet.” She ignored Airey Neave’s rolling eyes; knowing he would not dare to be such an incorrigible rogue if he was not that horribly rare thing, a living national treasure. Her forty-eight year old friend had escaped from Colditz, read the indictment of their heinous crimes to the major Nazi war criminals at the Nuremburg Tribunal, and had been her indispensible chief of staff in the months leading up to her unexpected assumption of the Premiership. Airey and Ian Macleod, the often angry, impatient, remarkable man who had held the Conservative party together in the last year, were her staunchest confederates in the Party and in Cabinet, the men she trusted most in the World after a certain Fighting Admiral who, regrettably from a selfishly personal viewpoint, had unavoidably been detained on vital duty overseas virtually since the day they had met.
“I like to open Cabinet with a few thoughts of my own; particularly if there have been important developments overnight which aren’t necessarily included for discussion as an agenda item. The first formal item on today’s agenda is a briefing by the First Sea Lord on the war situation...”
“Excuse me, Prime Minister,” Barbara Castle said with a wavering stridency.
“Yes, Mrs Castle?” Margaret Thatcher was not incommoded by the interjection. In fact, she had hoped to engage each of the ‘observers’ at some stage that morning. There was no po
int attending a meeting unless one had something to contribute; and she badly wanted backbenchers to re-engage with her Government before Parliament reconvened in a little over a fortnight. “What is it?”
“I would like to ask a question.”
The majority of the Angry Widow’s ministers were grumbling under their breath.
“By all means, Mrs Castle.”
Barbara Castle was a sparsely made, not over-large woman with auburn to ginger hair and a habit of leaning towards an opponent with her jaw jutting defiance. What she lacked in feral intelligence she made up for many times over in political mouse, and cunning of a sort that had, and no doubt would in the future, trip up a lot of people who ought to have known better than to underestimate her formidable powers. She and the other two ‘observers’ were seated along the wall close to the left hand head of the Cabinet table. Now she rose to her feet.
“I would like to know what this country’s policy is on the first use of nuclear weapons, Prime Minister?” This asked Barbara Castle fixed Margaret Thatcher with an unforgiving, unrelenting glare.
“That is a very pertinent question, Mrs Castle,” the younger woman replied. She did not bother to smile, her stare met steel with more steel, of the cold blue tempered variety. “It would be true to say that this country has no policy on the first use of nuclear weapons.”
“That is a disgrace!”
“No, it is pragmatic, Mrs Castle. The United Kingdom does not have such a policy because if we had, then our enemies would know our minds. Our enemies would be able to make their plans based on that knowledge of our policy. Forgive me, I mean this in no way to be condescending or patronising, but I believe that what you are really asking me is whether I am currently contemplating a retaliatory strike in response to the attack on Malta last week?”
The older woman nodded jerkily, visibly feeling herself to have been on the wrong end of a very ‘condescending’ and ‘patronising’ put down.