by James Philip
‘Highly secret, sir,’ Captain Schmidt retorted. ‘I can assure you that the old girl can store up to twelve hundred sixteen inch rounds and we’re not going to wear out any of our barrels if we have to use them all.’
Lyndon Baines Johnson had breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.
Regardless of the machinations of the House of Representatives across the Delaware River at City Hall, the Administration’s fortunes were on a seemingly unassailable upward trajectory. All over America men – and a significant number of women - were receiving their re-enlistment papers, the shipyards, aircraft factories and a thousand other defence contractors were recruiting again. Army and Air Force Bases were re-opening, units reforming. The reactivation of the USS Iowa was like a beacon lit to signal the reawakening of the nation. That very morning the New York Stock Exchange had finally broken through its pre-Battle of Washington level.
Before being driven down to the dock to board the Iowa ahead of her departure from the Naval Inactive Maintenance Facility for her trip up river, Johnson had breakfasted with Lord Franks, the urbane, unflappable British Ambassador.
The British build up for the expedition – Operation Grantham - to liberate Northern Cyprus from the now entrenched remnants of the Red Dawn invasion force was going ahead, albeit a little behind schedule. The ongoing troubles in Northern Ireland had necessitated the transfer of another two battalions of mechanised infantry to the province. Troop levels in the six counties of Ulster now exceeded twenty-five thousand, of which some eighteen thousand were trained infantrymen of exactly the type desperately need for the Cyprus operation, and to reinforce British outposts elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Not least around the periphery of the Arabian Peninsula where the Sultan of Oman, and several other neighbouring local potentates were crying out for troops to prop up their tottering regimes.
Oliver, Lord Franks, had been exasperated to learn that Irish-American allegedly ‘charitable’ and ‘humanitarian’ groups and societies in Chicago, Boston and New York were still sending financial support under the cover of a high-profile ‘Irish Aid’ program to the impoverished Government of the Irish Republic. The British believed that only a tiny proportion of the largesse of American donors was finding its way to the ‘impoverished citizens of the twenty-six counties of the Irish Republic’. The situation was intolerable, he complained. But for the maintenance of sea and air communications with Eire from Britain – at no small cost in vital resources to the rest of the United Kingdom – and the Thatcher Administration’s willingness to permit food, medicines and other essential ‘peaceful’ traffic to be transhipped from the United States via English and Scottish ports and airports, the Irish Republic would be on its knees, and people would probably be starving in the streets of the capital, Dublin. And yet the current Taoiseach, Fianna Fáil leader Seán Lemass, who before the October War had seemed to be a man with a genuine desire to heal at least some of the old wounds and develop closer relations with the outside World, was apparently powerless to control the more extreme Republican and Nationalist elements in his own party and throughout Southern Ireland. Elements of a revitalised Irish Republican Army were waging an increasingly overt war against the British and Loyalist – the latter represented by the Ulster Unionist Party – cause in the North from bases in the Republic. Lord Franks had cautioned that if the current situation deteriorated to the point at which the territorial integrity of Ulster was threatened, Prime Minister Thatcher would come under ‘extreme and sustained pressure from many sides’ to authorise the use of deadly force against the IRA’s bases across the border. In that eventuality, the nightmare prospect of British ground troops invading the South would become inevitable.
Given that the Angry Widow had just delivered a crushing blow to her political opponents in the United Kingdom, Oliver Franks had warned the Vice-President: ‘It would be as well to remind the President that my Prime Minister’s over-riding concern is for the security of her own people. If it is a choice between alienating a section of the President’s natural constituency and doing her duty by the people of the United Kingdom and the six counties of Northern Ireland, she will not be amenable to calls for moderation.’
The Vice-President had tried to put the discordant note to the back of his mind. The Kennedy brothers – the whole Kennedy clan for that matter – still had a partial blind spot when it came to Ireland. The British had not minced their words with Jack and Bobby, the trouble was that Bobby in particular, was so out of touch with reality when it came to the ‘Irish Question’ that he had suggested at a dinner – less than a week ago - held in honour of the British Ambassador, sending a US ‘peace-keeping force’ to Ulster. Lord Franks had been so astonished he had almost choked on his steak.
LBJ hated hostages to fortune.
Chapter 28
Friday 6th March 1964
RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire
Margaret Thatcher interpreted the sunny morning as an unequivocal endorsement of her decision to fly to Malta. Not even a very unpleasant meeting with the American Ambassador – a man whom she liked and in many ways admired – Captain Walter Brenckmann on the subject of Irish-American ‘meddling and rabble-rousing in Ulster’ had substantially dented her good humour. She planned to forget about Ireland for the next three days. She and the twins were flying to Malta to attend the wedding of the Commander-in-Chief’s son to - from everything she had heard - a most remarkable young Maltese woman.
“Jim,” she sighed, throwing a patiently exasperated glance at the big, lugubrious man seated beside her in the back of the first of the two armoured Rolls-Royces in the heavily guarded convoy snaking across the English countryside. “I am not going to change my mind. I shall only be gone for seventy-two hours and as you well know, I have complete confidence in your ability to deal with whatever comes up in my absence.”
James Callaghan, the Leader of what little was left of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition – the Labour and Co-operative Party had splintered into three major and several smaller non-aligned factions after the resounding defeat of the no confidence motion – was in no mood to share the Prime Minister’s optimism or confidence. In fact, he did not really understand what she had to be so pleased about! If the Labour Party had been holed below the waterline and sunk; the dismissive way in which the Angry Widow had seen off the third of her own Party that had rallied behind Enoch Powell, had been just as fatally destructive to the long term unity of the Conservatives.
His own problems were, of course, the most acute. Anthony Crossland, the Minister of Labour in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, and a likely opponent of Michael Foot for the leadership of the newly mooted Independent Labour Party, had resigned from the Government, and the National Executive Committee of the rump of the old Labour Party and had tabled a motion demanding his resignation from the Government as a condition of its backing for him as Party Leader.
It was one thing for Margaret Thatcher to talk about breaking the mould of British politics and remaking it in a shape more suited to ‘the age in which we live’; but she should not have done it before they had worked out what they were going to put in its place!
“Look,” he explained flatly, “let’s get one thing straight, Margaret.”
“I’m all ears, Jim.”
“I will have no part in forming some kind of National party. I am a socialist. You are not. Sooner or later, if and when we return to ‘politics as normal’ we will be on completely opposite sides of the political divide.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “So far as I am concerned ‘politics as normal’ resumed over a week ago. The Government has a mandate to govern in the short term that it never had before. A real democratic mandate, Jim. In a year’s time when we go to the British people; that will be the time to worry about party politics and the verdict of history. By then we shall have made a start to the reconstruction and hopefully we will have crushed Red Dawn forever.” As always, she was a woman in a hurry. “I think Anthony Crossland acted hastily,�
�� she went on. “However, he has made up his mind and that’s that. Who did you have in mind to replace him? The Ministry of Labour remains in your Party’s gift for the lifetime of this Parliament.”
“Barbara Castle,” Jim Callaghan retorted, half-expecting an immediate rebuke.
“Oh,” the Prime Minister murmured. “I thought she was one of Michael Foot’s closest comrades?”
“Philosophically, yes. But not necessarily in terms of practical politics, Margaret.”
“Of course.” Margaret Thatcher sometimes wished she could think more like a professional politician, less intuitively, less literally. That was precisely why she needed men like Iain Macleod, Airey Neave and perversely, Jim Callaghan around her. She needed people who did not automatically agree with everything she said, and in some cases, were vehemently, ideologically against her. “How will she work with the other members of the Cabinet?”
“That remains to be seen, Prime Minister.”
Margaret Thatcher thought for a moment.
“Very well. If you would arrange to informally offer Mrs Castle an invitation to join the Government while I am in Malta please. If she is agreeable please ask Sir Henry Tomlinson to draft an appropriate letter and we will both sign it when I get back.”
The twins were already waiting at RAF Brize Norton.
The two freshly scrubbed and presented ten year olds were sitting with Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson, the wife of the Foreign Secretary, in the VIP Lounge – nothing very grand, a moderately well-heated room in a Nissen hut behind the hangars guarded by a cohort of the Prime Minister’s personal Royal Marine bodyguard – with excited, expectant eyes. Margaret Thatcher hugged her children with unrestrained maternal abandon in a way she would never have done in public before the October War. Presently, she looked up and met the eye of her friend. Pat, ‘Patricia’ was a name she had only remembered when her husband had been knighted, was sixteen years the Prime Minister’s senior and worldly in ways Margaret Thatcher was not and probably never would be. Pat had become the twins’ nanny and tutor, and in their mother’s long absences, their de facto guardian.
Pat Harding-Grayson had travelled with the Prime Minister to the United States in January when she had engineered the Trans-Atlantic rapprochement; she had been Margaret Thatcher’s quiet, reassuring female counsellor during those fraught days, as well as her trusted couturier and style advisor. Subsequently, Pat had become so involved looking after the twins that she had been unable to travel abroad again. However, for this particular overseas foray there had never been any prospect of her staying at home.
The Prime Minister’s personal protection detail – the hand-picked Royal Marines proudly called themselves the AWP, the Angry Widow’s Praetorians – formed a machine-gun toting honour guard as the two women and the twins bade farewell to the Deputy Prime Minister and boarded the awaiting Comet 4 at the nearby hardstand. A second detail of Royal Marine Commandos had already travelled to Malta to ‘secure’ the ground ahead of their ‘principal’s arrival’. The Royal Air Force had wanted to lay on a special flight for the Prime Minister; she had insisted that her small party – Pat, the twins, herself and two secretaries, one military and one from the Cabinet Secretary’s Office – would fly to and return from Malta on scheduled flights. Aviation fuel was still relatively scarce and the RAF’s fleet of transport aircraft was hard-pressed enough without having to accommodate ‘freeloading politicians’. Besides, all the papers would report that she had travelled ‘tourist class’ and appearances mattered. She was not one of those Tories who thought it was her class’s right to rule, or who believed she was automatically entitled to every imaginable available perk and privilege. She was determined to be a part of a new classless, one nation Conservative Party. If she stood for anything; it was for change.
What had happened in the Great Hall of Corpus Christi College a little more than a week ago had convinced her that the shackles of the past were far from unbreakable. The Powellites and the socialists had persuaded only ninety-eight members of Parliament to join their unlikely alliance. Another twenty-one MPs had abstained. The other two hundred and sixty-eight Members of the reconvened House of Commons had voted down the ‘no-confidence’ motion.
After Michael Foot had cavilled scornfully for over an hour Enoch Powell had got to his feet and delivered a withering, positively excoriating – somewhat theological – critique of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s legitimacy, competence and ‘societal morality and high-handed, arrogant usurpation of the fundamental tenets of a constitution born in a field at Runnymede’. The Prime Minister had not been alone in trying and failing to work out what all that had meant in the Queen’s English. The only thing that had not gone to plan was that most of the Ulster Unionists had voted against the Government or abstained because she had not yet declared war on the Republic of Ireland. Thus far, Sir Basil Brooke, the Leader of the Unionists had not resigned from the Cabinet but he was living on borrowed time. If he could not deliver his Party or do anything to quieten the situation – even with half the British Army currently committed to the six counties - in the province then by what right did he remain in the Government?
If Margaret Thatcher had learned – perhaps, re-learned was a more accurate description – anything in her short tenure as Prime Minister it was that sooner or later it was pointless compromising with people who simply would not, or could not meet one half-way. The Ulster Unionists had sided with the Conservative Party for a generation while remaining a distinct sect within the body of Tory politics; now she realised, not without a little sadness, that their singularly undiluted sectarian interests would be almost impossible to accommodate in, or reconcile with practically any future she foresaw for the United Kingdom. However, this was an open sore upon the body politic of the British Isles that she would leave unpicked today. Today she was off on an adventure with her children and her best friend, and awaiting her in Malta was the man she planned to marry.
Assuming, that was, he still wanted to marry her.
It was a mistake to take things for granted these days.
Chapter 29
Friday 6th March 1964
HQ of the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, Mdina, Malta
Admiral Sir Julian Christopher refrained from beating about the bush because he understood exactly why the man sitting in front of him did not want to hear what he was going to say next. This being the case the deed was best done swiftly so they could both swiftly move onto more agreeable territory.
“I’m not quite sure exactly what kind of medal Her Majesty plans to stick on your chest when you get home, Collingwood,” he smiled wryly, “but take it from me that it will be a bloody big one!”
Captain Simon Collingwood, still a little pale-skinned in his tropical rig although his forearms, brow and the point of his nose were pink, freshly burned by the Mediterranean sun, wore a studiously neutral expression. He had no intention of blotting his copybook with an ill-advised remark.
“Thank you for saying so, sir. One was only doing one’s duty to the best of one’s ability.”
“Quite,” the older man agreed. “The First Sea Lord has instructed me to inform you to hand over command of HMS Dreadnought to Commander Forton not later than 23:59 hours this day, Collingwood.”
“That’s a bit sudden, sir.” This was not an objection, merely a dead pan observation in lieu of an objection.
“You will be flying back to England with the Prime Minister on Monday morning. Mrs Thatcher wants to hear all about your adventures.”
“Oh, I see...”
Julian Christopher had never met the Dreadnought’s illustrious commander until two days ago, at which time he had had no opportunity to exchange more than a few passing professional courtesies. Collingwood had given him a whistle stop tour of his command, introduced him to his officers and men. Every single one of his men, in fact, because that had mattered more than anything to him. Now he viewed the younger man thoughtfully. The astonishing t
hing was that but for the October War this extraordinary officer would almost certainly never have got the chance to command HMS Dreadnought! So much for the Submarine Service’s command appraisal systems!
“We’re sending you home to take over the Bureau of Submarine Construction. The ‘Bureau’ doesn’t exist yet so you’ll start with a clean slate. The First Sea Lord has ordered me to notify you that on arrival in England you will be promoted Rear-Admiral. In your new post you will report to Flag Officer Submarines but will have direct access to both the First Sea Lord and the Secretary of State for Defence. Sir David,” Julian Christopher explained, trying to remember what his old friend had said verbatim in yesterday’s telephone call, “Sir David has advised the Minister of Defence that all work on uncompleted conventional submarines should be halted and that all available resources should henceforth be devoted to the construction of nuclear-powered vessels. He believes that you are the best man to head up the program.”
The commanding officer – for the next few hours, anyway – of the Royal Navy’s first and only nuclear-powered submarine took the news stoically. Lieutenant-Commander to Rear-Admiral in eighteen months was a lot to take onboard all at once. Ought he to pinch himself?
The thing that registered was not his unexpected promotion – bypassing ‘Commodore’ – to Admiral, a thing unheard of in modern times but that through his own moral cowardice and unforgivable dithering, he now found himself in a somewhat deep personal hole that was entirely of his own making.
“I’m flattered, sir.” Collingwood hesitated. He badly needed to confess his sins. “It was just that I was hoping to have a little longer to, er, address certain personal matters here on Malta before I was, er, posted behind a desk.”