by James Philip
The layout of the old chamber of the House of Commons in the now wrecked shell of the Palace of Westminster had owed its configuration to that of an earlier chamber, St Stephen’s Chapel, destroyed by fire in 1834. The construction of St Stephen’s Chapel within the old Palace of Westminster had been completed around the year 1297 during the reign of Edward I. It was only after Westminster ceased to be a royal palace that Henry VIII’s son Edward VI had passed the Abolition of Chantries Act in 1547, making the chapel available for the Commons. Thus, St Stephen’s Chapel had become the debating chamber of the House of Commons for nearly three centuries until its destruction by fire in 1834.
The mother of Parliaments was nothing if not faithful – some said ‘the prisoner’ - of its traditions and what it saw as its ancient prerogatives. In the rebuilt Victorian Palace of Westminster the layout of the chamber of the Commons had been religiously copied from that of St Stephen’s Chapel; the Speaker’s chair was placed upon the altar steps as if still in a church, where a lectern had once stood the Table of the House was positioned, and as they had from time immemorial the Members of the House sat facing each other in medieval fashion in opposing choir stalls. True to that tradition in recent weeks carpenters and joiners had been industriously re-creating those uncomfortable, tiered pews, intent on partially recreating the old bear pit in the image of its former glory.
Furniture requisitioned, borrowed and ‘found’ around the College had been returned and today the chamber smelled of freshly sawn wood, varnish and resin. The Prime Minister had been informed that the Chamber theoretically ‘comfortably sat’ some three hundred and eighty Members, preserving a standing area for ‘gentlemen of the press’.
Oddly, although the Great Hall of Christ Church College was probably not that much bigger than the previous home of the Commons it seemed, to the Prime Minister, significantly less claustrophobic.
Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for approximately six tumultuous and mostly disastrous months. Her attempts to rebuild the ‘special relationship’ with the United States had been doomed from the start, little or no progress had been made in beginning the great work of national reconstruction, she had split her own party, fragmented the political system of the country and presided over one military disaster after another. Back in the darkest days of the Second World War Churchill might have survived the Norwegian fiasco, the Fall of France, the supposed ‘miracle’ of Dunkirk, and later the fall of Singapore and a catalogue of disasters in the Western Desert at the hands of Rommel; but he had had years of experience in the highest government posts and his disasters had happened over a period of many years. Her disasters had all happened inside six months and each new setback had come hard on the heels of the last. Yes, the Royal Navy had held on in the Mediterranean. Yes, Cyprus had been re-taken but the trouble was that these were isolated bright spots in a universally gloomy canvas painted by one humiliation after another. But for the suicidal bravery of the crews of two outgunned British warships Malta might have fallen; the outrages at Brize Norton and Cheltenham which had signalled the breakdown of Anglo-US relations closely followed by the Kennedy Administration’s mendacious decision to respect the letter, rather than the spirit of the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty that she had signed in January, had been the last straw.
The British people craved peace.
Her people wanted to rebuild, to properly grieve for and to come to terms with what had been lost.
Instead, all she had given her people was war and more war.
War without end...
Margaret Thatcher cleared her throat.
Although not a single hair was out of place on her head every time she looked in the mirror she saw the premature age lines in her face, the weariness in her blue eyes, and she seriously wondered how long she could go on...alone. The death of Julian Christopher still cut her to her soul. Had he been at her side these last few terrible weeks she could have faced anything. No matter how she bluffed and brazened her way through the intolerable obstacles placed daily in her path, she knew that her strength was, slowly, surely failing.
“There are those who say that after all we have been through,” she declaimed, empowered and energised by the one thing which had never let her down, her anger. “There are those who say we should retreat back into our island home. There are those who are tired, tired of the battle to live day by day; tired of going to bed each night hungry, and sick to their hearts that their children are growing up in the World that we have made for them.”
The Prime Minister had expected heckling, to be shouted down.
However, unhappy muttering aside her most vociferous public detractors on the other side of the chamber seemed unnaturally subdued. It was as if they too recognised at last that the country was at the crossroads.
“Today I have no intention of mounting a defence of my leadership of our country,” Margaret Thatcher said. “Today, I propose to share with the House my view of the situation that we find ourselves in. I plan to speak plainly. This is not a time for eloquent extemporizations about what, in the best of all Worlds, we would do next or even, dare I say it, of what we might or ought to have done in times past. Today, we must address the reality of our situation.”
She could feel the restiveness behind her on the government benches; and idly wondered who would be the first to plunge a knife between her shoulder blades.
“President Kennedy has invited me to America to discuss a new resolution of our long-term relationship. When an old friend offers such an invitation it must be accepted. If I remain Prime Minister after this day I will fly to American on Friday.”
Margaret Thatcher let this sink in.
“Immediately prior to leaving my private office for this House I was informed that a Royal Navy submarine had attacked and sunk the Argentine aircraft carrier the Indepencia. The Indepencia was fifteen miles outside the declared air and maritime Total Exclusion Zone mandated by the UAUK,” she paused as the mutter of voices in the hall threatened to sweep her away. “However, in the last twenty-four hours Argentine warships and aircraft flying from the Indepencia, have harassed and threatened British registered vessels sailing in international waters inside and outside the total exclusion zone. Another of our submarines has since attacked and sunk an Argentine destroyer that was attempting to illegally escort the British registered Motor Vessel Stanley Caird towards Argentine territorial waters after firing on and apprehending that vessel in international waters.”
To the Prime Minister’s surprise the threatened uproar subsided to a whimper of bad tempered growling. She had anticipated and prepared for many things; she had not seriously contemplated the possibility that Honourable Members on both sides of the House would be genuinely shocked.
“The blockade of the Falklands Archipelago will continue to be vigorously enforced. If the Argentine wishes, by pursuing aggressive measures against British shipping and interests in international waters or anywhere in the Southern Ocean inside or outside the specified exclusion zones, we will meet force with force. Honourable Members should know that the captain of every Royal Navy submarine deployed to the South Atlantic was handed a sealed envelope bearing orders signed by Flag Officer Submarines and countersigned by me. Our captains are authorised to take whatever offensive measures they deem appropriate including the sinking without warning of merchant vessels conveying supplies to the Argentine forces currently occupying the Falklands Archipelago in breach of international law.”
Margaret Thatcher had found her second wind.
The pitch of her voice became hectoring, defiantly angry.
“RAF bombers have mounted attacks against Red Army troop concentrations and communications targets in Northern Iraq for the third successive night. During these attacks several large ‘Tallboy’ type six-ton bombs were dropped on bridges around Sulaymaniyah and elsewhere. No aircraft were lost or damaged in any of these missions.”
The Prime Minister’s gaze swept around the chamber.
�
�Neither I nor any member of my government will be supplying daily updates on the war in Iraq, or on the measures that we are taking to protect our interests in the Persian Gulf. However, I will tell you that if the High Command of the Soviet Union thinks, for a single minute that we and our allies will sit back and allow the Red Army to invade and rape Iraq and Iran without exacting a terrible cost on it in terms of men, materiel and morale, it is tragically mistaken. It is the policy of my government to resist tyranny; and while I live we will never surrender. I say to the men in the new Kremlin – wherever that vile new incarnation of the evil empire may now be located in southern Russia – that no matter what ground your tanks seize we will never rest until you are expelled from it. You may defeat us in one battle, you may defeat us in many battles but we will never, ever give in. You are responsible for the abomination of Red Dawn, for the despicable use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Egypt.”
She had grown breathless with rage; forced herself to take several deep breaths.
“You are criminals responsible for the obliteration of Tehran,” she spat. “After that atrocity I warned you that a further use of nuclear weapons would result in an all-out strike against your remaining centres of population. I have not yet received an unequivocal acknowledgement of this warning. I demand that the Soviet High Command provide such an unequivocal acknowledgement not later than midnight on 27th May,” she paused, “or be prepared to face the consequences.”
Chapter 33
Thursday 21st May 1964
Heliopolis Presidential Palace, Cairo, Egypt
Muhammad Anwar El Sadat was a cautious, calculating man; it was no accident that he had risen to be the President of Egypt’s right hand man and at some stage, possibly, his friend Abdel Gamal Nasser’s successor. But all that was a long way in the future – if it happened at all – for he and Nasser were relatively young men in their mid-forties, and Nasser was one of those rare, once in a lifetime men, who was touched with greatness. While Sadat was less enthralled by dreams of a pan-Arabic, or some kind of ‘united’ Arab Republic enfolding the ‘Arab World’ like a ‘string of pearls’ than his friend, if it was any man’s destiny to reunite the ‘Arab World’ that man was almost certainly Nasser and his time was now.
Or if his time was not now then it was very soon.
Becoming embroiled in the Yemen civil war last year – contained mostly in the north of that country, thank Allah – was in retrospect a false start in the process of reunification. But of course nobody had actually known what sign they were waiting for in the first place. The bombing of Ismailia and the Soviet Invasion of Iran and Iraq had changed all that. Egypt had been a Russian client in the years before the October War, and consequently its Army and Air Force was largely equipped with Red Army and Red Air Force surplus weaponry. The failed attack on Cairo – the missile launched, according to the United States and the British from within the borders of the old Soviet Union had detonated beyond the Pyramids of Giza – and the devastating strike on Ismailia, had given the government the excuse to round up former Soviet observers and advisors in the country, and hopefully, freed the Egyptian military from their grasp.
Nasser had no more wanted the Russians in his country than he had the British but timing was everything; and now fate had gifted Egypt a fleeting opportunity to achieve in weeks and months the task that Nasser and Sadat had hardly dreamed of even beginning in their own lifetimes. The prize was so immense it justified almost any risks and that was the problem, because if they were thinking in such terms then surely, so were their real enemies among whom they included both the Americans and the British.
Gamal Abdel Nasser was standing framed in the window of his opulent Presidential Office when Sadat was shown into his presence. Nasser had been staring out across the inner courtyard of the old hotel, lost in his thoughts. The idea of laying the foundation of an unbreakable United Arab Republic which might one day stretch from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to the Zagros Mountains of Western Iran, and from the Anatolian plains to the Mountains of the Moon, the fabled source of the great Nile was fatally seductive. It was a thing more to do with myths and legends; a challenge best taken up by a modern day Alexander and Nasser understood as much. However, with the Americans gone, the British otherwise engaged, the Iraqi Army routed by the invaders and the whole Middle East in turmoil; when would there ever be a better time to assert Egypt’s ancient supremacy?
“So,” the President of Egypt asked rhetorically, his tone thoughtful and strangely distracted, “it is true that a large British fleet has docked at Damman?”
“Yes. There is talk of an ANZAC Brigade being formed for service in Kuwait,” Sadat explained. “Australians, New Zealanders with modern tanks and artillery to fight beside the infantry formations the British have already flown out to the Kingdom.”
“The British are making a lot of the bombing raids being carried out from Cyprus. What do our people in Iraq report?”
Our people in Iraq referred in the main to members of the Muslim Brotherhood too distant from Cairo to have been purged and harassed by Nasser’s security service and a dwindling handful of Iraqi Army officers sympathetic to Nasser’s dream of a pan-Arab republic, rather than any kind of coherent intelligence network.
The two men sat down, the President behind his desk and Sadat, weary from his travels in the chair before it. Notwithstanding their friendship there was never a scintilla of doubt as to who was the real master.
There was a hiatus while strong bitter coffee was poured by staff acolytes and both men collected their thoughts.
Muhammad Anwar El Sadat had come a long way from his humble Upper Egyptian roots. Born one of thirteen children of a poor family at Mit Abu al-Kum in December 1918 to a Nubian father and a half-Sudanese mother, he had faced insults and racial jibes from the first day he was exposed to the milieu of Lower Egypt and the alleged sophistication of contemporaries and enemies from Cairo, Alexandria and the Delta. Throughout his adult life he had known his opponents and detractors had never regarded him as being ‘Egyptian enough’, and latterly they sniggered behind their hands and accused him of being ‘Nasser’s black poodle’. As a boy his heroes had been Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the leader of the ‘Young Turks’, Mahatma Gandhi, and as a young man he had been fascinated and excited by the early success of the Nazi ‘Blitzkrieg’. It was shortly after graduating from the Royal Military Academy in Cairo in 1938 that Sadat, a conflicted proto-revolutionary had been posted to the Sudan – then a part of Egypt under the ‘protection’ of the British – where he had met Nasser and with other officers founded the Free Officers, committed to expunging the two great evils then afflicting their country; the British presence and the endemic corruption of the ruling royal regime.
During World War II the British had jailed Sadat for making approaches to the Italians and the Germans for help. He was by nature a profoundly political animal; during and after the war, acting on behalf of the Free Officers he was involved with and penetrated the Muslim Brotherhood, the fascist movement Young Egypt, and the pro-palace Iron Guard of Egypt. When in 1952 the Free Officers had overthrown King Farouk it was Sadat who had made the announcement over Egyptian radio. That had been a momentous moment in his life; and shortly ‘Nasser’s black poodle’, the second most powerful man in Egypt and his ‘master’ had to make a decision upon which, literally, the fate of their nation hung.
“The British bombing is being undertaken by a small number of aircraft,” Sadat reported. “We believe they have persuaded the Syrians, and possibly the Lebanese to allow the RAF to overfly their territory enabling the bombers involved to carry the heaviest possible bomb loads. The Soviets probably meant to use Sulaymaniyah as a concentration point and logistics hub, a ‘pause point’ before renewing their invasion. However, the bombing seems to have forced them to proceed in a somewhat ‘piecemeal’ fashion. If our Iraqi friends only stopped fighting among themselves,” he observed resignedly, “the Britis
h bombing might actually have given them a chance to at least slow down, if not halt the Russians before they get to Baghdad. But,” he shrugged, “we know that won’t happen.”
“Have the Iraqis started moving forces to reinforce the Baghdad garrison yet?”
Sadat shook his head.
“No, the forces in the south have drawn back around Basra. For all we know they might be about to mount another idiotic incursion into Iran.”
Nasser turned the possibilities in his head.
“You spoke to the Iraqi Ambassador?”
“The man was more concerned with seeking asylum for his family and business associates in Baghdad than he was about seeking our help on the battlefield,” his friend responded, quietly contemptuous. “He seems to be under the impression that the British or the Americans will come to Iraq’s rescue at any minute. He kept on saying ‘surely they will defend their oil’ to me!”
Nasser nodded.
By the grace of Allah he led a ‘historic’ country, not a collection of ethnically, religiously and culturally incompatible ‘provinces’ cobbled together by British and French diplomats over forty years ago at a now ruined French palace outside Paris. Egypt had existed throughout recorded history; it was the great power of the Middle East, situated astride both Africa and Arabia. From its history it derived intrinsic and legitimate nationhood and unity; Iraq had none of that for all the fact that its ancient Mesopotamian settlements had been the cradles of civilization. There was no such thing as ‘Iraq’ other than in the minds of map makers and long dead European politicians. Iraq was merely one of the more egregious of the blunders written into the Treaty of Versailles.
Iraq was not worth fighting for.
But Basra?
Well, that was different, likewise Kuwait which the Russians would surely gobble up sooner or later if they gained a secure foothold in the Persian Gulf. If the Soviets ever established themselves in Southern Iraq and Iran what then of Egyptian claims to be a regional power?
