by James Philip
“Let me do that, sir,” offered one of the Sten-gun toting Warwickshires, a small man who also wore spectacles.
Beeley peered myopically at the soldier as he doused his glasses liberally with water from his canteen and produced a small, apparently clean cloth from his top left battle dress tunic pocket. Presently, the Ambassador perched his spectacles on his nose and for the first time in the last hour gained a relatively uncluttered, unobstructed view of his surroundings.
He thanked the soldier.
“Don’t mention it, sir.”
An Egyptian Air Force officer with staff tabs on his lapels and a bloodied right arm in a clumsy sling indicated for Sir Harold and his two civilian secretaries to follow him deeper into the palace.
“Please mind where you step, sir,” he observed in English so perfect that it would have shamed a BBC announcer. “I’m afraid there will be a lot of cleaning up to do after this is over.”
Presently, the wounded staff officer led the Englishmen down into the bowels of the building, along poorly lit passageways for what seemed like many minutes. There were wounded men lying on litters, other soldiers tramping past, and the muttering sound of voices in side rooms. Below ground only the occasional thump of a big explosion resonated.
Gamal Abdul Nasser had donned battledress adorned with the badges of a Colonel in the Egyptian Army. He stepped towards the British Ambassador and shook his hand.
“This is a bad day, Sir Harold,” he remarked in English. “Come to the map table and tell me what you saw on your way from the Embassy to the Heliopolis Palace.”
Beeley respectfully suggested that the commander of his ‘protection detail’ might be better qualified to provide ‘useful military intelligence’. There was a short delay while Lieutenant Winter was summoned. The young man snapped to attention before the Egyptian President.
“At your ease, Lieutenant,” the Egyptian President said, beckoning the young man to approach the map table in the middle of the commandeered abandoned kitchen which now accommodated the headquarters of the Republic’s legitimate government.
Harold Beeley stood at the young officer’s shoulder listening as he described the journey from the Nile across the embattled eastern city. Winter’s report was matter of fact, keenly observed and obviously of huge interest to all of the Egyptian officers gathered at the table. Telephones rang in an adjacent bunker, outside in the passageway there was constant footfall, the clicking and clunking of firearms bumping webbing, and of magazines locking home.
Oh, my God...
The thought hit the British Ambassador like an unexpected blow to the solar plexus.
This coup, this bloodshed, this futile mayhem was always likely to happen if the Egyptian leadership got back into bed with the perfidious former colonial overlords!
Tom Harding-Grayson would have known that; the man had a mind like a bear trap when it came to Realpolitik, a poker player’s morals and an astonishingly low opinion of human nature, even for an old Foreign Office hand. No, he could not have known that there would be a coup, not for a certainty; just that once the news and the implications of the movement of two armoured divisions to the Persian Gulf broke that the risk of a coup would inevitably spike.
Was that what embroiling Nasser in the coming Gulf War was really all about?
No more than a cynical attempt to salt the battlefield?
He had never imaged even Tom Harding-Grayson was that cynical...
But suddenly all the pieces of the jigsaw fitted together.
How did you prevent Egypt – the one major regional military power, more powerful than all the other Arab states put together – from taking advantage of the aftermath of a general war in the Persian Gulf?
Answer: by so comprehensively hobbling it politically and militarily in such as way as to not invite the Israelis to undertake a tempting, but in the long-term a disastrously destabilising adventure into the Sinai or elsewhere while the Gulf War raged. The United Kingdom would have made it known to the Israelis that it had made a pact with Nasser. That was a given...
How were the Israelis supposed to know that it was a sham?
Tom Harding-Grayson had offered Nasser the one thing he dreamed of most. He had allowed the Egyptian President a glimpse of a way to begin to unite the Middle East under a single pan-Arab flag; a way to make real the ‘string of pearls’, Nasser’s vision of nations linked under a pan-Arabist banner all the way from the Atlantic to the Alborz Mountains of Iran, and from the Nile Delta to the very Mountains of the Moon in the southern uplands of the wilderness sheltering the source of the Blue Nile. Nasser, given a free hand in the west to secure the Mediterranean flank of the British position in that sea had dared to believe that he, in his lifetime, might be the man who began the historic reconciliation and reconstruction of the great Islamic caliphate of yore.
But now that his own Army had turned on him it would be months, more likely years, before the regional ‘superpower’, the Egyptian colossus would again be in any condition, let alone inwardly united enough, to again flex its muscles and assert its ambitions. What little impetus there might previously have once been for some kind of Arab renaissance had been quashed overnight. And in the meantime Tom Harding-Grayson’s alternative great design – whatever it was - would be free to unfold unmitigated by the one regional player capable of frustrating his Machiavellian schemes.
It could not be that simple of course.
The big questions was: what other consequences, intended and unintended lay in store as Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson’s personal great game began to play itself out in the coming days, weeks and months.
Chapter 11
Saturday 6th June 1964
Junior Common Room, King’s College, Oxford
“Everybody should sit down,” the Queen commanded.
She remained standing as the members of Her Government settled in their chairs. This occasion put her in mind of a similar crisis back in December when things had looked very nearly as grimly dark as they did today; and although at the time she had hoped and prayed that she would never have to again assert, and thereby endanger her constitutional primacy, she had always feared that one day there would be another, even greater test. When everybody was seated and all eyes were upon her she took a final moment to review what she needed to say, collected her composure and began to speak in a quiet, determined soprano.
“Some of you will recall the last occasion I addressed the Cabinet,” she prefaced. “On that occasion my son, Andrew, had just been murdered, my husband,” tight-lipped she glanced sidelong to Prince Philip who smiled encouragement, “lay critically injured in a hospital in Edinburgh, and over a hundred brave men of the Black Watch and members of the Royal Household – many of whom I had known all my life - at Balmoral had been killed and terribly hurt by terrorists.”
The thirty-eight year old mother still grieving for her dead son and for all those who had died in Scotland that awful day late last year, and since on land, sea and air battlefields thousands of miles from home, hesitated, swallowed and raised her head to continue.
“We have all lost so much. We have all lost so many loved ones,” she sighed, looked around the table, “and so very many good people close to us. Sometimes I fear that we are in danger of losing sight of who we are and what we are. If it is hard for we around this table, we the privileged few, to remember the things that really matter I wonder how hard it must be for those over whom we claim the right to rule.”
The monarch had ascended to the throne in February 1952 at the age of just twenty-five; at the time there was a mood abroad in the country that her accession had ushered in a new and supposedly glorious ‘Elizabethan Age’; a nonsense that in the event turned out to be more cruelly false than anybody imagined possible in the early 1950s. Like the first Elizabeth whose reign was beset by religious strife, war and constantly threatened by the mendacity of the great World superpower of that age, Catholic Spain; the present Queen’s dominion had initially been mark
ed with a period of national decline, retrenchment and a series of disastrously miscalculated foreign adventures culminating in the Suez fiasco of late 1956. She had been crowned in a crumbling imperial epoch, watched the winds of change blowing down the last bastions of empire and lived through the cataclysm which had – at a conservative estimate – killed between thirteen and fifteen million of her subjects in England alone in the last nineteen months. Her own extended family had been decimated; her mother and sister, Margaret Rose, had been consumed by the firestorm which destroyed Greater London on the night of the war, and with them many of her senior courtiers and advisors. She and her children had only survived because they had been at Windsor Castle that night, and many, so many of those closest to her who had been spared in October 1962 had been murdered at Balmoral in December.
Somehow, she had contrived not to shed a single public tear until the day of the investiture of the heroes of the Battle of Malta, since then she had cried many times but had sworn never again to do so in front of Her people. They needed her to be strong for if she weakened then what hope was there for any of them?
The Queen eased herself into her chair, mindful of the recently healed broken bones from the latest attempted regicide at Brize Norton in April. Her bones might have knitted together again but the flesh and sinew around them was wasted and disturbed yet, and every day she ached like an old woman.
“We have all lost so much,” she repeated, “that I fear that there are times when we forget how much we still have. We do the living a great disservice to live in the past, and to wish that things were not as they are.”
The silence was such that the conversation of two passersby in the quadrangle outside was faintly audible within the ancient common room.
“I have no opinion on the political decisions of My Government or upon the direct employment of the military forces available to it. It is however, my prerogative to do whatever is necessary to ensure that My kingdom is governed,” the Queen continued. “Yesterday’s events in the House of Commons give me little faith that the House, as presently constituted, shares my preoccupation or is ready, willing and able to assume the profound challenges of the governance of our land.”
Her voice was hoarse, her throat suddenly dry.
“Might somebody bring me a glass of water please?” She asked.
Sir Henry Tomlinson was half-way to the door before she had finished speaking. There was an awkward interregnum, and then Major Steuart Pringle the Commander of the Prime Minister’s Bodyguard entered the room bearing a tray with a single glass upon it, which he laid almost tenderly before his monarch. The glass was a broad, crystal tumbler three-quarters filled with clear liquid. The queen sipped daintily.
“Thank you so much, Sir Steuart,” she nodded.
Sir Henry Tomlinson retook his place at Margaret Thatcher’s right hand as the tall Royal Marine departed. The Prime Minister never knew how to address her ‘chief minder’, whom, strictly speaking, was Sir Steuart, 10th Baron Pringle.
“Oh, that’s better,” the Queen declared. “Where was I?” She asked rhetorically, gathering her thoughts anew.
Aware that in recent weeks the UAUK was haemorrhaging support in the House of Commons, and that yet another vote of confidence was pending on the Prime Minister’s return from the ‘Cape Cod Summit’ with the Americans, she had spent practically every waking hour of the last few days listening to the opinions of the most learned constitutional lawyers in Christendom, making discreet soundings with the Chiefs of Staff and studying the cables she had received from Ambassadors and the Prime Ministers of Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
As was her custom she had bounced the things she had learned, suspected and feared off her husband. Her consort was no strategist or tactician and he was far too much the bluff former naval officer to be overly politically adroit; but as the son of a fallen royal house – he was Prince Philip of Greece, after all – who had grown up under the wing of that wise old owl, and master-puppeteer Lord Louis Mountbatten, he possessed a hard-headed, pragmatic mind alert to the harsh realities of the real World.
‘Uncle Louis’ had been her husband’s self-appointed ‘father’ figure, the shrewd guiding hand who had steered him into the orbit of the Windsors before the Second World War when she was still just a very young teenage girl. Uncle Louis had probably hoped that one or other of the two princesses would be swept off their feet by the dashing young Prince in his tailored dress uniform, but the Queen had never resented her ‘Uncle’s’ motives. Of all the ways to make a royal marriage, the old rascal’s subterfuge had turned out marvellously well for all concerned and that was a very rare thing in the long unhappy history of dynastic marriages. She had actually been ‘swept off her feet’ by the dashing young naval lieutenant but that had been later, there had been no impropriety, and many years and a World War had passed before they were properly affianced and eventually wed.
“Yes,” she murmured as her thoughts clarified. “Even in the hours since yesterday’s sitting in the House of Commons affairs overseas have taken a grave turn for the worse.” She was mindful not to make any reference to the fact that the code breakers at the Government Communications headquarters at Cheltenham were no longer able to ‘crack’ two of the four Soviet Jericho codes they had been ‘reading’ since mid-April, or to inadvertently announce the key – ultra secret – elements of the quid pro quo that Margaret Thatcher had negotiated with President Kennedy at the Cape Cod Summit. Project Jericho was only known to a handful of Cabinet members, and the full scope of the ‘Fulbright Plan’ only to the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and to Sir Henry Tomlinson because nobody could keep anything secret from that particular wily old fox.
The news of widespread fighting in the streets of Cairo; of the potentially disastrous sabotage of the American War Stores Depot, and the blowing up of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ammunition Ship Retainer at Damman in Saudi Arabia had been new and unexpected body blows overnight. In Iraq the latest GCHQ traffic analysis indicated that elements of several Red Army mechanized formations had finally struck out south from holding areas around Baghdad, and according to the Chief of the Defence Staff ‘there are no major coherent Iraqi forces between Baghdad and Basra to inconvenience the enemy’s line of march’. The Red Army could be opposite Abadan Island and lodged on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf well before the end of the month.
“Suffice it to say that this moment demands if not national unity, then a national unity of purpose,” the Queen declared. “We find ourselves fighting a war on three fronts; three wars not of our choosing but which I believe it is in the national interest to fight. We must defend the oil of the Middle East. We must uphold the sovereignty of British Crown Dependencies and Overseas territories in the South Atlantic. We must respond to unprovoked aggression in the Western Mediterranean. We are committed to fighting the Soviets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. We will not bow to Argentine threats and atrocities in the South Atlantic. We will not permit the regime in France – whatever its nature – to interfere with the free movement of British and Allied air or sea movements in international airspace and in international waters. It is our policy to meet force with force to protect our legitimate national interests.”
The words were spoken softly, without heat or angst and as Cabinet members digested what they thought but did not entirely believe what they had just heard their monarch annunciate, the faces of several ministers were wearing vaguely pole-axed expressions.
“Sections 4(paras a, b and d), Section 6(paras b and c), and Section 9(paras b to e) as amended on the 12th day of our Lord, February 1963,” the Queen went on, “vest in the Head of State, powers that are extra-constitutional in the sense that they grant the sovereign extraordinary, albeit time-limited, freedom to in effect, suspend the constitution.”
Barbara Castle made a surprised choking sound, while Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary raised a hand as if he was a schoolboy in a class room wanting to a
sk a question. William Whitelaw groaned very loudly.
“The Prime Minister submitted her resignation to me last night,” the Queen reported, making no sign that she had heard or in any way registered the ripples of consternation around the Cabinet table. “I must tell you that I categorically refused to accept it.”
The Queen paused as moment, comforted by the knowledge that had he had a gun – Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Consort par excellence - would now be waving it at the members of Her Government.
“Prior to leaving Blenheim Palace I signed a decree proroguing Parliament until such time as a General Election can be held. I give you due warning that I will not grant a writ for such an election until three conditions are substantially met. Firstly, there can be no General Election while our brave fighting men are engaged in a major war in the Persian Gulf. Secondly, a census of Parliamentary constituencies must be conducted at the earliest possible time so that an election may be held that accurately reflects the wishes of the surviving population of the kingdom. Thirdly, regardless of the outcome of hostilities in the Gulf, the Mediterranean or in the South Atlantic, robust arrangements must be in place to ensure that My people are fed, and that sufficient fuel stocks have been secured to keep My people warm in the coming winter.”
The monarch sniffed.
“The last British Head of State to suspend Parliament came to a sticky end, I recall.” This prompted uneasy mutterings, mostly of shell-shocked amusement. The Queen looked thoughtfully to the three Chiefs of Staff. In this new era no government could rule without the implicit support of the armed forces, likewise, no sovereign could exercise his or her prerogatives without the acquiescence of these three men. “I applauded the initiative to restore politics as normal at the earliest practical time but that experiment has failed. If in years to come I lose my head for my temerity, so be it.”