Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Sir Henry Tomlinson, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service ever since he and his oldest friend, Tom Harding-Grayson had fetched up at Cheltenham in the days after the night of the October War, had been ill for over a month.

  The Foreign Secretary slumped into his chair.

  Robin Butler, one of Henry Tomlinson’s protégés, today sitting in for him at the Prime Minister’s right hand with his big notebook open and pen poised, had gestured for somebody to bring the latecomer a glass of water, which the old man gratefully accepted.

  He sipped, and waited for his pulse to steady.

  “Happily, I am able to report that Henry is a little better today,” he declared as if in his heart he knew such things were hardly comforting. In fact, his friend was slowly fading away and everybody around the table knew it.

  “Sir Henry is in all our prayers,” Margaret Thatcher said with none of her customary hutzpah.

  First, she had lost her own dear, roguish Frank, and in the last year three of her stalwarts from the 1965 election victory had passed away in office. Consistent with trends now becoming evident in the general population, now that it was understood that the directly attributable post-war ‘die-off’ had run its course by the winter of 1965-66, other, cruelly insipient forces were at work, still winnowing the ranks of the survivors.

  The combined effects of the shock of the war, the last real hardships of which were only lately decreasing for the majority of the British people, and probably – although there was as yet insufficient radiological evidence to conclusively prove the support the thesis – the war-legacy elevated levels of ionising background radiation, mainly isotopes of strontium and iodine with half-lives measures in tens of years, was taking a new, steady, remorseless toll of both men and women in their fifties and sixties.

  Moreover, on top of this the demographic of the aged - men over their retirement age of sixty-five, and women over the age of sixty - already ravaged in the general population in the eighteen months November 1962 to April 1964, was suffering disproportionate morbidity to anything experienced pre-war; and worse, the generation coming up behind them was approaching, and crossing some unseen, debilitating line which, as many had postulated as long ago as mid-1963, seemed to confirm fears that the longer-term effects of the war would most likely be a uniform, and long-lasting statistically significant decrease in overall life expectancies in the Northern Hemisphere.

  Before the October War life expectancies had been steadily ticking upward since longevity statistics were first systematically collected back in the mid-nineteenth century. A baby born just before the war might have had a life expectancy of sixty-eight if he was a boy, and seventy-four if a girl, not far short of double the average life expectance of their ancestors born in the early to mid-1850s. But the evidence, thus far statistically flimsy, was that in the foreseeable future the best anybody could hope for was a shorter life span most likely increasingly blighted by global epidemics previously in retreat, and a range of familiar and exotic cancers in ‘later’ life, which might not, in most cases extend beyond one’s mid-fifties for males, and the late-fifties, for females. It was an unhappy prognosis and it would be some years before anybody knew if the gloomiest long-term epidemiological projections were accurate.

  Sixty-one-year old Selwyn Peake-Jones, Secretary of State for Wales had been the first of Margaret Thatcher’s senior ministers to succumb, taken by pneumonia before his cancers could consume him.

  Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, had passed away shortly after Frank Waters had died in France. He too, had been aged sixty-one at the time of his death.

  The most shattering loss had been that of Sir George Edward Peter Thorneycroft, Baron Thorneycroft, the perfect gentleman grandee of the pre-war Tory establishment, and MP for Monmouth, who had been Margaret Thatcher’s devoted lieutenant from the outset of their time together in the early days of the Emergency Administration in Cheltenham in 1963. He had been taken quickly by cancer two days after his fifty-eighth birthday last July.

  The Prime Minister had spent two hours at Henry Tomlinson’s bedside yesterday afternoon, discussing exactly how the loss of so many people with irreplaceable experience had begun to change the country, and the temper of its people. The old man, goodness, he was only sixty-four, had always been the one she turned to in the direst times. Henry, and Tom and Pat Harding-Grayson, along with Airey and Diana Neave, they were her dearest friends and most loyal bulwarks against the pain and anguish of the outside world, the five people she could tell…anything, and to whom she could trust at least a few of her doubts, fears, and terrors.

  Oh, she was very close, personally and politically to her deputy, Peter Carington, and increasingly to Philip Sidney, Viscount De L’Isle, and to several other colleagues of her own generation, whom she knew would always stand behind her. But she was about to lose Henry Tomlinson, and Pat had not been well for the last two years, and even Tom, well, his strength came and went and he had confessed to her that he longed for a time when he might step back from public office and…rest.

  “Tom and I met with Ambassador Rush last night,” the Prime Minister said, kicking off that morning’s Cabinet.

  Notwithstanding his problems at home President Nixon had been careful to replace Iowan-born Ambassador John Nichol Irwin II in Oxford, with another very safe pair of hands. Irwin had acquitted himself well, been publicly somewhat anonymous presence in England during his year in post and had recently been recalled to Washington to fill the Under Secretary of State role as deputy to William Pierce Rogers, the newly-appointed Secretary, in what Tom Harding-Grayson had described as an ‘extraordinary reshuffle’ which he speculated, signalled that President Nixon had ‘given up on domestic politics’ and decided to ‘throw all his energies into foreign affairs following the success, as he would see it, of his Soviet policy initiatives.’

  The changes at the State Department had come out of the blue, a radical episode of ‘musical chairs’ in the last few weeks interpreted in DC, by Sir Nicholas ‘Nicko’ Henderson, the United Kingdom’s trusted Ambassador and these days, prime ministerial confidante, as part of a concerted attempt by the Administration to alter the narrative of the scandal-dominated news agenda in the United States.

  The sudden resignation of Henry Cabot Lodge, supposedly for ‘reasons of health’ had, actually, been flagged as early as January. Seen as an ‘honest broker’ within the Administration, it was unclear whether he had remained on board so long simply out of a sense of duty, or been fatally undermined by the cabal around the President; or if, perhaps, both clauses were true.

  In either event, Nicko Henderson in Washington had only been echoing the FCO’s fears when he commented that: ‘Sadly, this feels to me like a retreat to a selective embracing of old, cold war attitudes, directed at the Far East and as such, bodes ill for the future.”

  That said, the new man at the US Embassy in Oxford, fifty-eight-year-old David Kenneth Rush, a native of Washington State had been the President of Union Carbide until a month ago. He was hardly any kind of make-weight ambassadorial replacement for the departed John Irwin. A graduate of Yale he had taught law at Duke University before the Second War, where he had met and started a lasting friendship with one of his students, a certain Richard Milhous Nixon.

  Both Margaret Thatcher and her Foreign Minister had gone away from their initial meetings with the new man impressed. Rush was a pragmatic deal maker, a man preoccupied with the possible, and not apparently a slavish Presidential mouthpiece. He had made it clear, repeatedly restating it, how much his boss in Washington still felt himself to be indebted to the British Government’s ongoing political and diplomatic support, and understanding, in the difficult times his country had been going through ever since the New Year’s Eve atrocities of December 1965.

  This was a message the Prime Minister passed on to her colleagues around the table, some of whom, she was well aware, were little short
of appalled by the way the Nixon Administration had been ‘going about its business for some time now’. However, just because that was not the way things were done over here, that was no reason to publicly voice criticism of the ‘goings on’ in DC, in Oxford.

  The Foreign Secretary had not slept last night.

  “It is evident to me, that President Nixon sent the US Navy into the Taiwan Strait to provoke the Communists. And, that is now what has transpired. US warships have been fired upon. There is little question as to who fired the first shot. The Chinese. Sadly, Ambassador Rush was of the opinion that US Naval and Air Force aircraft were likely to retaliate with disproportionate violence. Escalation, however undesirable, is therefore inevitable.”

  He shook his head, pausing to take another sip of water.

  Everybody could tell that the overnight events had taken a toll on their customarily wryly phlegmatic colleague. There was a deep, disappointed weariness in his voice and for the first time, a hint of quiet despair.

  “Frankly, I don’t understand what the Americans are trying to achieve in the Far East. One school of thought is that the White House is seeking to manufacture a foreign crisis to distract its critics, another, less plausible explanation, is that the President honestly believes he is acting in accordance with the promises he has made the Soviets. Personally, I cannot see any compelling argument for recklessly starting another war.” He groaned, and sipped water again. “I thought we had all learned the lessons of 1964; but I was wrong.”

  Nobody spoke, knowing Tom Harding-Grayson was not finished.

  “So, what do have now?” The old man continued, rhetorically. “Whereas, until yesterday, the Taiwan Strait was, nominally at least, open to merchant shipping and to fishing boats, it is now closed. Shortly, the US Army will begin to transfer one, perhaps two divisions – twenty to thirty thousand men and their equipment - to Taiwan to prop up Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt and morally bankrupt regime in Taipei. If President Nixon had been less dismissive of the United Nations last year, we might have had a ready forum in which to condemn Communist aggression, and viable back channels available to negotiate if not a solution, then at least a de-escalation of tensions in the Far East. As it is, the US will soon have denuded its garrisons in the Philippines, which are indisputably of greater strategic importance to it, given that Japan is already a well-defended barricade against Chinese, and Soviet, seaborne aggrandisement in the North Western Pacific region. Lately, the President has been talking, less than coherently in my opinion, about a renewal of US South East Asian policy. The miracle is that the US-supported regime in Saigon has not already collapsed under the weight of its own brutality and indolence; and if it eventually does, collapse, that is, because the United States has already shifted its regional reserve forces to Taiwan, the Nixon Administration won’t have the military resources in theatre to do anything about it. The point that needs to be emphasised here,” he sighed, “is that President Nixon, whether badly advised or having ignored the wise counsel of others, has, wittingly or otherwise, just perturbed the peace and it is impossible to predict with any degree of certainty, what will happen next. Things are, to my mind, so opaque that the only good news coming out of Washington is that nobody is seriously talking about deploying Arc Light against either the Koreans or the Chinese.”

  This prompted jaundiced, very impatient glances from all around the table and no little clearing of throats.

  The reports coming in from the Western Pacific were still garbled, and if the ministers gathered around the Cabinet table had learned anything from the travails of the last few years, it was the value of patience. It was always best to wait a little while longer, until one had all the bad news to hand before one attempted to work out what it meant.

  The Prime Minister cut short further discussion or extemporisation on the subject of the latest American foreign policy miscalculation. Any moment now her Foreign Secretary was going to switch into an ‘I told you so mood’ and for once, she was in no frame of mind to humour him.

  She moved on with her customary alacrity.

  Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinets were not talking shops, they were meetings by which Government furthered its policy objectives. Woe betide anybody who had not posted a query on one or other of the Cabinet Papers circulated in the previous week by the evening before the weekly gathering. Invariably, policy was finalised by Cabinet sub-committees and rarely discussed at the Tuesday meetings.

  However, if ministers chaffed at the Prime Minister’s ‘presidential style’ few actually cavilled, even privately. The Lady was not inflexible, she was no dictator, she was just very hard, near impossible, to sway once she had made up her mind about something. Which was why all the real business of Cabinet was conducted behind the scenes, and if and when, very rarely, a minister was cornered, they either had to request a ‘personal conversation’ with the Prime Minister, or shut up. Besides, the men around her – the Prime Minister apart there were only two other, each in many ways, as equally remarkable and unique, women in the Cabinet – had worked out that charm worked a lot better than confrontation. Moreover, it was hardly immaterial to collegiate cohesion that there were many men among Margaret Thatcher’s circle who were if not infatuated, then thoroughly dazzled, bewitched by her.

  Some four-and-a-half years into her premiership, the Prime Minister – with whom the whole nation had mourned this time last year – was at the height of her powers and personal popularity, and in the minds of her adoring, devoted followers an admixture of Boadicea, Joan of Arc and Britannia incarnate, capable of implacable defiance and moments of heart-warming compassion, a woman whose tears had, time and again, been the tears of her people. Within her National Conservative Party, of which the old Conservative and Unionist Party was now little more than a marginalised sect, as were the re-admitted, forever troublesome Ulster Unionists, she was more than primus ultra pares – first among equals – she was unchallenged and unchallengeable: as witnessed by the stability and apparent equanimity of the Cabinet in the last three years.

  Proceeding anti-clockwise around the Cabinet table, the Prime Minister’s forty-four-year-old Private Secretary for the Civil Service Department – Geoffrey Johnson-Smith - the MP for the Constituency of Wealden in Sussex, flanked stand-in Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler, the youngest, although not by that many moons, man in the room.

  Next to him sat the Minister of Labour, Sir Edward Colvin Jackson, the forty-three-year-old son of a Derbyshire mine owner elected to Parliament on the Lincolnshire List, who having once been a marginal member of the Government was now one of its staunchest pillars.

  As was his neighbour at the table, the Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons, forty-year-old James Michael Leathes ‘Jim’ Prior, the MP for Lowestoft whose reputation had been hugely enhanced by his unflinching performance in the pre-1965 Parliament, and since.

  The Home Secretary, Geoffrey Ripon, the forty-four-year-old former lawyer and Mayor of Surbiton, the MP for Hexham, was universally acknowledged to have one of the most onerous tasks in government. It spoke volumes for his tact and political acuity that the 1965 re-jigging of the Cabinet in which both the Welsh Office and the Northern Ireland Office had been subsumed into the Home Office brief; with the ministers for each retaining cabinet rank whilst reporting to the Home Secretary, had thus far been an accident waiting to happen, which had not come to pass.

  Upon Selwyn Peake-Jones having to stand down from illness, the Welsh Office brief had been handed to Peter John Mitchell Thomas, the forty-seven-year-old MP for Conway. The son of a solicitor, he had begun his legal studies at Jesus College, Oxford – where coincidentally, he now had his Parliamentary Private office – he had been shot down flying for Bomber Command in 1941 and continued his studies while a prisoner of war, eventually being called to the Bar of the Middle Temple in 1947, thereafter, plying his profession on the Wales and Chester court circuit at the time of the October War, a thing which had been the saving of he and his
family. A Welsh speaker he was one of the few ‘coming men’ in the Party - remembered also for having been PPS, Parliamentary Private Secretary to a former Speaker of the House, Sir Hylton-Foster - and had been a member of the Council of Europe for two years in the late 1950s. One of the busiest of ‘lawyer’ parliamentarians, he had been appointed Under Secretary of State to then Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, as long ago as 1961.

  The poisoned chalice of the Northern Ireland Office – the unkindly dubbed ‘Stormont ducking chair’ – was in the long-suffering, capable hands of forty-six-year-old Francis Leslie Pym. Eton and Magdalene College educated, one of three Conservative members elected to the Cambridge List, Pym had earned a Military Cross with the Lancers in Italy. Welsh-born, the son of an MP and a grandson of a Bishop of Bombay; he came from the old landowning wing of the Party. Before the October War in every way the proto-Tory grandee, he had accepted and held down the Ulster portfolio without complaint.

  Like John Thomas, Pym was a well thought of, long shot candidate to replace ‘the lady’ if and when, many, many years hence Margaret Thatcher decided to step down.

  The anointed Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords remained fifty-year-old George Patrick John Rushworth Jellicoe, 2nd Earl Jellicoe, the youngest and only male progeny of the great admiral who had commanded the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916.

  The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Maurice Victor Macmillan the forty-seven-year-old only son of the late Prime Minister, who had been re-elected to Parliament for the undamaged constituency of Halifax, had been invited to join the Cabinet in 1965 as Pay Master General but at Peter Thorneycroft’s request, been moved to Chief Secretary of the Treasury when he first acknowledged the advanced, terminal nature of his illness, and on his passing, had succeeded him at the Treasury..

  Eton and Balliol College educated, Macmillan had served with the Sussex Yeomanry in the Second War and like his father, had sat on the board of Macmillan Publishers. He and his family had only survived the war because that fateful weekend in October 1962, they were at their country residence, Highgrove House, near Tetbury in Gloucestershire over eighty miles away from the nearest Soviet strike on Greater London.