by James Philip
The Angry Widow.
By tomorrow Margaret Thatcher might not be the British Prime Minister.
“What’s Bill going to be telling the British, Jack?” Bobby Kennedy asked his brother.
The President’s smile was not sanguine. The finest intelligence analysts in the country were unable to settle upon a coherent story. Nobody really knew what was happening in the territories so recently conquered by Red Dawn; or why the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean had suddenly fallen quiet in recent weeks. A unilateral unspoken ceasefire was in place from Cyprus to Belgrade, Bucharest had been nuked off the face of the Earth and Red Dawn seemed to have turned inward upon itself, except very little of that made sense. In the last few days the RAF had flown a number of Canberra spy missions over the Balkans, Greece and the northern Aegean and into the Sea of Marmara; tantalisingly, the images these flights had brought back were still being analysed in Malta.
“That the only thing which unites Nasser’s so-called Arab League is a mutual hatred of Israel,” he said, recollecting his most recent conversation with his peripatetic Secretary of State. “Nobody in ‘the league’ trusts anybody else; the Saudi’s think that their neighbours are looking for an excuse to march in and steal their oil, none of the smaller Gulf States want to upset the Saudis or us or the British but they all wish we’d all just go away, and Oman and Yemen are too preoccupied with their own civil wars to worry about anything else.”
The British understood all of this and they actually had small numbers of fully acclimatized troops – no more than a dozen under-strength infantry battalions across the whole region - in Aden and elsewhere attempting to keep the warring factions at arm’s length. The only way America could paper over the existing fracture lines and build any kind of united front in the region was to buy the allegiance of the parties. Even in the short term that was not going to address the Arab-Israeli problem. More pertinently, neither he nor Margaret Thatcher currently had the deployable military assets available to guarantee the security of any – forget all – of the ruling elites in the Middle East; ignoring the question of whether spending precious and very limited military treasure in the sands of Arabia was actually a good thing in the first place.
Bill Fulbright had summed the whole debate up in half-a-dozen words: ‘We don’t actually need the oil anymore!’
Jack Kennedy clasped his hands over his stomach and looked around the room.
“Okay. I’m about to be impeached; in Bill Fulbright’s absence General LeMay has been subpoenaed by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, presumably in an attempt to upstage the opening sessions of the Warren Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War; our closest and most reliable overseas ally, Margaret Thatcher may not be the British Prime Minister this time tomorrow; and somebody in the former Soviet Union has unexpectedly remembered how to shoot down our spy planes.” He paused in his assessment of the current situation. “The USS Enterprise is on her way home so badly damaged she might have to be scrapped; and the USS Independence is still tied up at Gibraltar with catapult ‘trouble’. Closer to home Congress is perfectly willing to fund aide and arms shipments to the Irish Republic on allegedly ‘humanitarian’ grounds despite having been informed, privately and publicly by Director McCone that every dollar they send to the Republic of Ireland is fuelling the civil war in Northern Ireland and tying down troops the British desperately need in the Mediterranean.”
He had mentioned this last complaint with only mildly scathing disbelief because nothing that Congress did these days could surprise him.
“Gentlemen, has anybody got any good news for me?”
Chapter 24
Thursday 27th February 1964
RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, England
The rain slashed down from a leaden sky as Senator William Fulbright, Secretary of State of the United States of America hurried down the steps to the wet tarmac, and shook the British Foreign Secretary’s hand. The two men abbreviated the normal civilities and soon dropped into the back of the waiting Rolls-Royce.
“What was the weather like in Malta, Bill?” Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson inquired as the downpour hammered the car’s windows with fresh violence. The Secretary of State’s Boeing 707 had had to orbit the airfield for nearly an hour before a break in the storm had allowed it to land.
“Warmer!” The fifty-eight year old Arkansan guffawed. If anybody had told him eighteen months ago how easily he would relax with, and how completely he would let down his guard in the company of a British Foreign Secretary he would have laughed out aloud. Now it seemed like the most natural thing in the World. Of course, it helped that the British Foreign Secretary in question was Tom Harding-Grayson. Dean Rusk’s people at the State Department had regarded the slightly built scholarly Englishman as a closet socialist and anti-American agitator. Nobody in the State Department had shed tears when he had been sidelined as Harold MacMillan and Dwight Eisenhower rebuilt the ‘special relationship’ splintered during the Suez Crisis. The State Department had never cared for Anthony Eden, MacMillan’s predecessor. Eden had never forgotten how long it had taken the United States to get blood on its hands in the 1945 war; nor how shamelessly America had claimed the laurels at its end. The doomed British, French and Israeli conspiracy to seize back the Suez Canal from Gamal Abdul Nasser’s grasp in 1956 had worked out well for the State Department. True, the Soviets had used the American distraction over the Suez Crisis to put down the Hungarian uprising, but Eisenhower was never going to go to war with the Soviet Union over a country about which he and the American people knew next to nothing. No, Suez had worked out just fine for the State Department; Britain’s declining military clout and her total dependence on American dollars after her humiliating withdrawal from the Canal Zone, had signalled the accelerated disintegration of the British Empire and confirmed the United Kingdom’s status, in many eyes across the Atlantic, as a client rather than a partner of the United States in World affairs. Unseating Anthony Eden had been the icing on the cake; and MacMillan, Eisenhower’s old World War II buddy had wasted no time plunging the knife into his Party leader’s back. “But,” Fulbright added, “I’m Southern Democrat, so what would I know?”
Tom Harding-Grayson chuckled.
“How did your ‘briefing’ with the Fighting Admiral go, Bill?” The Secretary of State had visited Malta specifically to ‘get better acquainted’ with the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean.
“Your guy doesn’t take any prisoners,” the American replied cheerfully. “But that’s good. Until I met Curtis LeMay I wasn’t used to senior military men giving me straight answers to straight questions.”
“Admiral Christopher understood he had been dealt a weak hand when he accepted the post.”
The Secretary of State hesitated.
“Sir Julian arranged for me to have a brief private meeting with Captain Collingwood,” the American continued.
“Ah,” the Foreign Secretary had asked Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord, if he could engineer this very interview. However, he thought it best not to mention this to the Secretary of State. “How went it?”
“Is it right that HMS Dreadnought didn’t fire a single torpedo on her first war patrol?”
“I believe so.”
“Captain Collingwood said it was his opinion that the captain of the Scorpion manoeuvred so as to make it impossible for the anti-submarine aircraft in the area to attack the Dreadnought without endangering his own ship?”
Tom Harding-Grayson remained silent.
“I’ve had members of the House and senior US Navy officers queuing up to swear on their mother’s graves that Collingwood murdered all those men on the Scorpion, Tom.”
“I’m sure a properly convened and conducted Board of Inquiry will establish the facts, Bill.”
“If only!” The American groaned. “Captain Collingwood offered to travel to the States to give evidence under oath. That was after I tol
d him he had be lynched as soon as he got off the plane,” Fulbright breathed a long, reflective breath. “Do you know what he told me?”
Having spoken to the First Sea Lord about the remarkable man in whom Sir David Luce had personally entrusted the command of the Navy’s most modern and most dangerous warship, he did not actually need to hear what Captain Simon Collingwood, RN, had said to the US Secretary of State because he could guess exactly what he had probably said.
Fulbright told him anyway.
“He said he owed it to the memory and to the friends and the families of his fellow submariners who died on the Scorpion to make public what really happened that day.”
“The Prime Minister won’t consider it,” Tom Harding-Grayson told the other man. “Nor will Her Majesty. Her Majesty has taken a particular interest in Captain Collingwood’s career.”
The two men thought their thoughts as the big car purred down the narrow, uneven roads towards Oxford, paced ahead and behind by Ferret armoured cars and trucks carrying the Secretary of State’s personal close bodyguard. Overhead, an RAF Westland Wessex helicopter thrummed low, quartering the countryside ahead of the convoy with machine gunners ready at both port and starboard open doors.
“Funny old business in Bucharest, don’t you think?” The Englishman asked presently.
“It is a ‘funny old business’,” Fulbright agreed, noncommittally. “When will you know the result of this ‘no confidence’ vote in your Parliament, Tom?”
“The vote will be a ten o’clock tonight.”
“I was surprised when you said you’d come out to the airport? I thought you’d want to be there?”
“I’m not a Member of the House of Commons. Margaret’s given me my marching orders; I am to stand in the next General Election or if there is a suitable by-election in the meantime. I warned her I’d be standing as a Labour candidate most likely but she did not bat an eyelid.” He sobered a little. “I’m not at all sure what we will do if the vote goes against us tonight. There will probably have to be an election of some kind although the state the country is in at the moment I don’t know how practical that would be.”
The Foreign Secretary checked his watch.
“Would you care to visit our new Parliament? They’ll be getting under way about now?”
Spaces had been reserved for the two men in the Great Hall of Corpus Christi College. They entered just as Iain Macleod was settling back onto the pew below the Speaker’s low raised stage and a scrawny man with tousled fair hair and a disjointed, disorganised air slowly rose to his feet several rows back on the opposite side of the hall.
Fulbright did an inadvertent double take at the eccentric figure around whom so many uniformly grey, sour-faced and dourly dressed people had clustered with such undisguised malicious anticipation. He was a little surprised by the pleading, almost sorrowful voice that after several moments waiting for quiet, projected itself effortlessly into the corners of the ancient auditorium.
“Mr. Speaker,” Michael Mackintosh Foot, the fifty year old Member of Parliament for Ebbw Vale began, “I beg to move, that this House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government.”
The American Secretary of State was struck by the inherently gladiatorial nature of the debate, face to face, the challenge hurled down like a gauntlet at one’s opponent’s feet; for all its gentility this substitute chamber was more bear pit than debating club.
The man at Fulbright’s side observed the slowly unfolding drama with mixed and somewhat perturbed emotions. He had known Michael Foot for many years. Not that closely, admittedly, because they moved in different social circles, but as acquaintances who sometimes talked in corridors, and occasionally at literary and journalistic events which they had coincidentally both been attending. The Foreign Secretary’s wife, Pat, had made a name for herself as a novelist in the early fifties, her material going out of fashion a little when she began to introduce politics to her writing. Pat had always been more publicly open about her left of centre leanings, not an option open to him as a career civil servant in the Foreign Office. In any event, he had enjoyed friendly relations with Michael Foot, a profoundly decent, kind and well-intentioned man who was always happiest operating on the left wing of his Party, and was, to boot, a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
“In this debate I do not plan to rehash the mistakes that were made by ‘Supermac’,” Harold MacMillan’s nickname, spoken in a fashion dripping with sarcasm, stirred a rumble of discontent on the rows behind Margaret Thatcher’s front bench. “What profit is there dwelling on the mistake’s of ‘Supermac’s’ motley collection of Tory time-servers, placemen and relations? The dead cannot speak and the broken and the disposed have no voice in our National Government!”
If Michael Foot had stepped across the aisle and slapped his Party Leader James Callaghan in the face with a wet fish – a large flounder - he could not have signalled a more fundamental personal breach, or made certain a more final and irrevocable fracturing of the Labour and Co-operative Party of the United Kingdom.
“Oh, my goodness,” Tom Grayson-Harding muttered.
“What is it?” Fulbright asked lowly, the keenest of political animals sensing that he was missing something important.
“I’ve just realised what Margaret is up to, Bill.” As he spoke an unconsciously impish smile played on Tom Harding-Grayson’s pale lips. He suddenly found himself considering what part his old friend Henry Tomlinson might have played in the setting of this particular trap; and then took himself to task for thinking his old friend capable of such Machiavellian logic. No, this was the Angry Widow’s doing. Either she was the most naturally gifted and cunning strategic political thinker of her generation; or she had inadvertently stumbled onto a magic formula with which to change the rules of the game.
Michael Foot had just hurled the most dreadful insult any member of the Labour Party could throw in the face of his leader; he had accused him of betraying his roots and siding with the enemies of the working classes. He had accused him of aping Ramsey MacDonald, who had joined the Conservatives and the Liberals in the National Government of the 1930s. MacDonald had torn the Labour Party asunder, split it down the middle and the scars remained, red raw and livid. Whatever happened today a significant part of the Labour Party would go its own way, fatally undermining James Callaghan’s leadership. Callaghan must have known this was the most likely outcome of any attempt to validate the Unity Administration’s ongoing mandate but if he had baulked at the prospect, he could have resigned from the Government at any time in the last few weeks and probably, still retained the leadership of his Party. That he had elected to await the outcome of the confidence vote suggested that he too had identified a once in a generation opportunity to decisively break and remake the landscape of British politics.
In the same way James Callaghan had written off the left wing of his own party, Margaret Thatcher had realised that little could be achieved while she, and the nation, were weighed down by the rump of ‘Supermac’s’ faithful old guard. The back woodsmen from the shires, the little Englanders, the men who dreamed of no more for the country than its restoration to some idyllic rural stasis that had never actually existed other than in the poems of A.E. Houseman, and who saw everything in terms of class and one’s rightful station, had no role in any of the futures envisaged by the grocer’s daughter from Grantham. The class which had sleepwalked into the Third World War had had their day and if they chose, en masse, to march out of the Conservative Party and enlist in the ranks of the Powellites, well, she would be the last person in England to shed a tear. Margaret Thatcher was a small ‘c’ conservative who had been tolerated and condescended to by the grandees of her Party before the war, one of a handful of token women in what, under Harold MacMillan, had been a middlingly indolent and very complacent privileged Gentleman’s club populated by and large by the ‘right sort of chaps’ who belonged to the ‘right sort of clubs’.
Michael Foot had thrus
t his left hand inside his jacket and adopted the declamatory pose he had patented on a hundred platforms; the exact pose he had struck at the end of each annual Aldermaston CND march in Trafalgar Square. He fixed the Prime Minister in his sights.
She met his stare with steely blue eyes that glinted with the light of battle and a hint of something that he thought, just for a moment, he recognised as pity...
No, I must be imagining it.
The public knew Michael Foot for his fiery rhetoric and his deeply held convictions. He was a man who had remained true to his socialist beliefs through thick and thin. He had condemned Neville Chamberlain’s Government for appeasing fascism; he had been Aneurin Bevan’s biographer and disciple but broken with him and for some years with the rest of the Labour Party, after Bevan had renounced unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1957. Returning to Parliament after a five year absence in 1960 he had promptly rebelled and had had Labour Whip withdrawn by the Party’s then leader, Hugh Gaitskell. The rift had been so deep he had not come back into the fold until Gaitskell’s death – or rather, disappearance – on the night of the October War. Outside of Parliament Foot had enjoyed a long and varied career in journalism including becoming the editor of the major organ of the left in British politics, Tribune, and writing for the Evening Standard and the Daily Herald. Before the October War he was one of, if not the most high profile political pundit on British television, and despite his chronic asthma no man had worked harder, or spoken on more soap boxes than Michael Foot in opposition to Supermac’s ancien regime. Michael Foot’s many friends and widespread admirers knew him to be a generous man whose motives were pure and whose disputatious nature was leavened with a gentleness of spirit and a disinclination to cling overlong to a grudge.