Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Thorneycroft’s old deputy, the Chief Secretary of the Treasury was forty-eight-year-old Northampton solicitor and the former finance director of Allied Breweries, East Midlands List MP Sir Thomas Gray Boardman, MC. Debilitated at the time of Peter Thorneycroft’s death with a malaria-like recurrence of the previous winter’s influenza epidemic, he had only recently resumed his duties, with bull-dog determination, at the Exchequer. A wartime tank commander, he had won his Military Cross in Normandy in 1944, during an Army career in which he had progressed from the rank of Second-Lieutenant in 1940 to Lieutenant-Colonel in 1945.

  Dame Alison Munro, the fifty-four-year-old incumbent at the Ministry for Reconstruction - previously the Ministry of Supply - had briefly been Home Secretary but requested her present appointment. Within the Party there was talk about Dame Alison being the only woman in Cabinet who was ‘man enough to stand up to the Lady’, even though nobody could cite an occasion when the two formidable women had ever argued in public.

  Nonetheless, people repeated the gossip, knowing that Dame Alison had, among other things been the wartime personal assistant of Robert Watson Watt, the man who invented Radar, and after the Second War the woman who ‘sorted out’ the regulation of international civilian aviation.

  The third woman in the Cabinet, Miriam Prior-Bramall, who had been a member of the official Labour Party in March 1965 – and subsequently expelled for collaborating with the enemy – had been co-opted into the Government as Minister for London, responsible for overseeing the Garden City Projects charged with initiating the partial reconstruction of the ruins of the metropolis. She was the wife of Major General Edwin Bramall, the recently appointed Director of Operational Planning (Land Forces) at the Ministry of Defence, and had accepted her role in a strictly non-political capacity. Liked and respected by the majority of her senior colleagues, in the National Conservative Party as a whole, there were many who resented her intimacy with the Prime Minister and the fact she had been ‘parachuted’ into the heart of things when they, had not.

  Politics was ever thus…

  The Minister for London scrupulously absented herself from Cabinet when ‘party political’ matters were tabled, and in deference to wider National Conservative Party sensitivities, she never voted, abstaining other than on matters directly pertinent to her own brief.

  The Secretary of State at the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Hector Seymour Peter Monro, the forty-five-year-old former Sunderland flying boat pilot, who had been elected MP for Dumfries in 1965 under an old-fashioned ‘Conservative and Unionist’ banner, was a Dumfriesshire farmer. Initially, it had been on the strength of this alone that he had been plucked from obscurity to fill his current portfolio. However, in common with all the other ministers in the room; had he not done a better than adequate job in his post, he would have been long gone.

  Lord Carington sat opposite the Prime Minister. Originally, he had served as Secretary of Defence, while also filling the position of First Secretary of State, effectively making him Margaret Thatcher’s deputy. In recognition of the increased burden on his shoulders the Prime Minister had initially given her friend two extremely able – non-Cabinet ranking – lieutenants at Defence: Fitzroy MacLean and Ian Gilmore, whom Peter Carington’s departmental successor, William Philip Sidney, Viscount De L’Isle, VC – today’s one Cabinet absentee, in France engaged in talks with the Free French Government - had gladly inherited.

  The Lord De L’Isle and Dudley, the fifty-eight-year-old former Governor General of Australia, had been a Cabinet insider, a key advisor and confidante to his Prime Minister from the day he accepted her invitation to join her Government.

  Of his three Ministers of State, forty-one-year-old Sir Ian Hedworth John Little Gilmour – 3rd Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar, who had inherited his father’s baronetcy in the chaos of the October War – was by far the steadiest operator, and the more accomplished Parliamentarian. Gilmour’s family still held estates in Scotland and shares in Meaux’s Brewery. Gilmour, a multi-faceted man, had been called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1952, and edited The Spectator which he had owned, for five years in the 1950s, before entering Parliament in a by-election in 1962.

  De L’Isle’s second lieutenant, was Sir Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, the fifty-seven-year-old 1st Baronet Maclean of Strachur and Glensluain. This was his second ‘tour’ in government, having been an undistinguished junior War Office minister in the mid-fifties before Macmillan had dispensed with his services, lamenting that although he was sorry to lose him ‘he is really so hopeless in the House that he is a passenger in office [which is] a great pity, since he is so able’.

  MacLean was one of only two men to have risen from the rank of private soldier to Brigadier in the course of the Second War – the other being the late Enoch Powell – and in this post-October War epoch it happened that the boundless energy and never say die spirit that the extrovert MP for Bute and North Ayrshire, who had fought beside Tito and his partisans in Yugoslavia, brought to the government, outweighed any trifling considerations about his occasionally ‘spotty’ performance in the House.

  The newest member of the ‘defence team’ was forty-nine-year-old Harold Julian Amery, who had been Minister of Aviation in October 1962. The son-in-law of the late Harold Macmillan, he had been MP for Preston North since 1950, and sat squarely in the heart of the old Conservative Party which had largely been swept away by the war. Eton and Balliol College, Oxford educated, with a stellar Second War record – like Fitzroy MacLean, he too had served, among other places, in the Balkans - he had been brought into to oversee the secretariat of the ongoing Defence Review 67 program, and to calm internal Party worries that it might just be a penny-pinching exercise designed to beggar the nation’s armed forces.

  It had gone without saying that fifty-two-year-old Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave, DSO, OBE, MC, would retain – pretty much in perpetuity - the ‘National Security’ portfolio overseeing and supervising MI5, MI6 and the Government Communications Headquarters in the Benhall and Oakley facilities located at Cheltenham, he had inherited back in 1965. These days, he was ensconced in his newly completed departmental compound a hundred yards or so from Churchill House.

  The Scottish Office was in the capable hands of the sixty-two-year-old MP for West Renfrewshire, John Scott Maclay, the Winchester and Trinity College-educated former bowman in the winning Cambridge boat in the 1927 Boat Race.

  The President of the Board of Trade was forty-eight-year-old Anthony Perrinott Lysberg Barber, a survivor from the Macmillan era. A representative of Oriel College, Oxford, in the Cabinet Room; Barber had flown photo reconnaissance Spitfires during the Second War until he was forced down over occupied territory in France in 1942; whereupon he had embarked on a second career as a would be ‘escapee’ with a record hardly less flamboyant than that of Airey Neave’s, albeit somewhat less successful. Prior to the October War he had held junior posts in the Treasury in the Macmillan years and been one of several peripatetic ministers without portfolio in the pre-March 1965, Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.

  In the old days Prime Ministers traditionally reserved the right to carry out an annual ‘spring clean’ of their administration; just to encourage the others; but this was not a tradition Margaret Thatcher had embraced in the last couple of years and, earlier that year, had seen fit to inform her colleagues that there would be no such major re-shuffle until after the ‘next’ general election.

  Constitutionally, there was no requirement for the Prime Minister to go to the country anew until the summer of 1970, although the majority of the players around the table that morning suspected there might be an election sometime in 1969, if only because with the return to ‘normal’ politics, once a government reached the last eighteen months or so of its tenure it was common sense to ensure that it went to the country at a time of its, not the constitution’s choosing.

  Subordinate to Barber was the Trade and Industry Department, not deemed to warrant a Ca
binet member under the post-March 1965 arrangements. To head up the ‘DTI’ the Prime Minister had promoted thirty-two-year-old Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine, a youthful businessman who had lost practically everything on the night of the October War. Heseltine had bounced straight back onto his feet starting up and running a string of new businesses in and around Coventry, where he had been elected to Parliament from the East Midlands List.

  Barber had suggested that Heseltine might sit in on Cabinets where trade and industrial policy was tabled, and Margaret Thatcher had consented. Possibly, this was because she recognised that there were not many out and out, ‘hungry go-getters’ in the Parliamentary Party; so, men like Heseltine had to be given the opportunity to show their mettle, if she was to seriously consider promoting them over the heads of older, more senior men – presently, there were only nineteen women MPs in her Party’s ranks – in the years to come.

  Nicholas Ridley, had moved from the defunct Ministry of Information to take over at the Education Department at the end of July 1965. Since then, he had been embroiled in what he sometimes called a ‘real dog fight’ with the war-splintered educational system in England, attempting to undo the damage the now disbanded Regional Seats of Government – RSGs – had wrought during the twenty-eight months of ‘the emergency’ officially brought to an end in the summer of 1965. The thirty-nine-year-old alumnus of Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, a grandson of Sir Edwin Lutyens, who was the MP for Cirencester and Tewkesbury, operated, his detractors noted, much in the fashion of a disciple at his Prime Minister’s feet.

  The man with the brief to re-connect the nation at the Ministry of Posts and Communications, forty-seven-year-old Christopher John Chataway, the former Olympic runner who had in 1954, held the World Record in the 5,000 metres, had been running the hardest race of his life for the last three years and like many of his friends and colleagues around the Cabinet table, the wear and tear and sheer bone-numbing weariness of just ‘keeping the show on the road’ had taken a heavy toll on him.

  Forty-four-year-old Sir Edward Charles Gurney Boyle, Baron Boyle of Handsworth, had taken over as Paymaster General when Maurice Macmillan had moved to the Treasury. Another product of Eton College, he had worked at Bletchley Park during the Second War and subsequently studied history at Christ Church, Oxford before entering Parliament in 1950 as MP for Birmingham Handsworth. At the time of the October War he was Minister for Education, returning to public service with the civil wing of the RSG responsible for the governance of the West Midlands, and only belatedly resuming his Parliamentary career in March 1965.

  In the last year, the Position of Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, the man responsible for the efficient running and impartiality of the judiciary of England and Wales, had been filled by three men. Lord Dilhorne’s successor had been David Patrick Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir, this latter ennoblement being granted him after his culling in Harold Macmillan’s famous night of the long knives in July 1962, who had held the role for some eight years between 1954 and his sudden sacking. Already sixty-seven-years of age and in failing health, he had resigned after four months, and been replaced by forty-two-year-old Geoffrey Howe, elected on the Wirral-Cumbrian List in 1965.

  Called to the bar in 1952, Howe’s major claims to fame were that as a result of his National Service in East Africa he spoke conversational Swahili and he had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro; oh, and he had served on the Bar Council since 1957, and been building his reputation as a quietly incisive, tenacious barrister at the time of the October War.

  In Harold Macmillan’s final administration, the Housing and Local Government Ministry and the Duchy of Lancaster, had both been Cabinet-ranking portfolios. Not so in Margaret Thatcher’s administration the former now falling under the Department of Reconstruction, and the latter under the purview of the Lord President of the Council.

  The last, but not the least significant member of Margaret Thatcher’s slimmed-down, re-configured Cabinet – in comparison with its pre-war model – was forty-seven-year-old Sir Keith St John Joseph, elected as one of the Leeds MPs from that damaged city’s lists alongside the Labour Party’s Denis Healey in 1965.

  Joseph had become a well spring of National Conservative social and industrial policy in the last three years; a man prepared to think the unthinkable, to question every last shibboleth of the old Tory dogmas, and as such an increasingly contentious presence within the Party and something of a hate figure to the heavily outnumbered opposition parties in Parliament. Harold Macmillan had been the first man to see something ‘different’ in Keith Joseph, without really ever trusting his instincts to advance him against, as it were, the grain of the received wisdom then underlying the stagnation of a Conservative Government which had been in power too long, already lost impetus and forgotten why it had wanted to be in power in the first place.

  Keith Joseph, notwithstanding he was a man of quirky manners who enjoyed uneasy relations with many around the Cabinet table, and Margaret Thatcher had become both close friends and - such a thing would have been viewed as odd in Macmillan’s days - ideological allies in the last three years. It was unlikely that she met, or spoke more often with any of her other colleagues, with perhaps the exception of Tom Harding-Grayson, or Airey Neave, or with greater freedom than with Joseph, whose radical ‘social theories’ had struck a deep-seated chord in the mind of a Prime Minister preoccupied with reconciling the impossible conundrums of how to retain the United Kingdom’s place in the world, while devoting the maximum possible resources to reconstruction.

  Joseph had inherited his baronetcy from his father – Samuel Joseph, the head of the Bovis construction empire, and a former Lord Mayor of London - in 1944, and become chairman of the company in the late 1950s. A leading voice in the Central British Fund for German Jewry, late in the last pre-October 1962 government he had sat in Cabinet as Minister of Housing, planning a program to build at least four hundred thousand homes a year by 1965...

  All that seemed like wanderlust now.

  Millions of houses had been destroyed, the capital and other cities wrecked beyond ‘economic’ repair; and now there was a still greater crisis to be surmounted, the stubbornly declining health of the nation. That the prickly, unapproachable, introspective son of a Jewish construction magnet, should be given the task of overseeing the department that the Prime Minister clearly believed to be responsible for delivering the number one domestic priority of her administration, said everything anybody needed to know about the trust and respect she had invested in her friend.

  No description of the Government would, or could, in any way be complete without the inclusion of one last player; the man whom these days combined the roles of the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS), Appointments Secretary and in the absence of a ‘Chief Whip’ – a Parliamentary position regarded as superfluous given the current numerical state of the parties in the House of Commons – Margaret Thatcher’s ‘enforcer’, a veritable fixture at Churchill House and who now sat, as an impeccably gentlemanly, courteous secretary or acted as a Prime Ministerial messenger, on a raft of Cabinet sub-committees.

  Thirty-one-year-old Ian Reginald Edward Gow was the son of a Harley Street physician, who had been President of the Debating Society at Winchester College, and who, commissioned into the 15th/19th Hussars, had served in Ulster, Malaya and Germany before pursuing a career in law, qualifying for the Bar just before the cataclysm.

  Promptly returning to the colours, he had been elected to Parliament in 1965 on the Berkshire ‘List’; a thing which had come as something of a surprise to him given that he had been placed only a lowly, seemingly unelectable seventh on the Conservative section of that list.

  Before that election Airey Neave had ‘talent-spotted’ Gow for a job on ‘his team’, and had had a huge, unresolved ‘difference of opinion between friends’ with the Chairman of the Berkshire Party about that ‘seventh position’. The veteran of Colditz Castle and the secret war before and after 19
45 prided himself on his ability to recognise the ‘right stuff’ when he saw it, and he had wasted no time persuading his friend, the unexpectedly victorious Prime Minister, to accept his protégé as her PPS within days of the election.

  In fact, by then Ian Gow had already fallen under Margaret Thatcher’s spell when by chance he had been briefly assigned to her protection detail – or rather to beef it up – around the time of the assassination of Secretary of Defence Whitelaw and his wife, for her tour of the IRA-bombed cities of Coventry and Birmingham during the election, and subsequently, for the trip up to Lanarkshire for the funerals of the assassinated couple.

  That attachment had been Airey Neave’s doing of course.

  Ian Gow was both the Lady’s liegeman and if it came to it, human shield, her utterly dependable and discreet gatekeeper, and her unbreakable link to the man who had done more than any other to elevate her to power, and to keep her firmly in charge. Not for nothing did staffers in the Prime Minister’s Private Office chortle to themselves that many of the duller-witted, surviving Macmillanites of the ancien regime, the so-called, tiny ‘MT-resistance’ faction within the Party were convinced that ‘Machiavelli’ was an anagram of ‘Airey Neave’!

  Today, Ian Gow was immaculately attired in his Hussars uniform sporting the new tabs reflecting his recent promotion to major. He was a stocky man with thinning hair, keen-eyed and tirelessly attentive to his Prime Minister, forever viewing and studying the interplay of the personalities around her.

  Fate had been doubly kind to him: he had survived Armageddon and he had lived to serve, to dedicate his life to the saviour of his nation.