Agent Lavender: The Flight of Harold Wilson

by Tom Black

  “Enoch!”

  The Member for South Down looked up from his tattered copy of The Telegraph to see Harry West waving at him. He furrowed his brow slightly. The last few months had led to a slight estrangement between the two men; Enoch was sure that West had been rather irritated at how many column inches he had received in the newspapers, which had either been calling for his beatification, his imprisonment or – in a rather confused week for the Daily Mirror – both. Powell had not especially liked the attention, especially given that he had done little since November beyond trying to find a quiet place to have a pint, but since the new year had come around, a return to mainland politics had become an increasingly attractive one.

  He shook his head as West walked out into the Lower Waiting Hall. After a pause, Powell followed. Not – he hastened to remind himself – to follow the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, but to find somewhere quieter to think things through. Turning right, he paced the short distance towards the Library Corridor. Even when he had been in the Shadow Cabinet, he had despised the overheated office that had been bequeathed to him by Thorneycroft, much preferring the airier surroundings of the House of Commons Library. Bobbing into the Reference Room, he gave a polite smile at one of the Archivists – perhaps the only group of people in the Palace who actually seemed to treat him with genuine respect – and sat down at a free desk.

  Grabbing a sheet of the Portcullis-headed notepaper, Powell looked down. It had been a funny couple of months, truth be told. He had not had the chance to go over to Ulster nearly as much as he would have liked to, but the one surgery that he had been able to hold between Remembrance Day and Christmas Eve had been pleasantly tedious. Despite the three dead at Charing Cross, the half-dozen injured in Everton and that poor landlord who had been blown to bits at the Crown in Belfast, the Republicans had seemed almost as keen to attack one another as they had members of the public. Powell had found himself half-hoping that Roy Mason would confess to being an Albanian Sleeper Agent. With any luck, it would result in another schism between the three or four Hoxhaist groups that he was fairly sure were operating out of Londonderry.

  That being said, thirty minutes of having his ear chewed by Mrs O’Neill complaining about the encroachment of Mr Andrews’ wisteria onto her side of the semi had been enough to make Powell resolve to find something more interesting to do with his time. He had only ended up standing in South Down to make a point and – if he was being scrupulously honest – to get one-up on Ted, but the idea of being something other than a polemicist sounded increasingly appealing.

  Enoch Powell was not an especially talented artist, but as he began to scrawl out the outline of a lion’s head, an idea that had seemed absurd whilst shaving began to make a great deal more sense.

  The resemblance between the McWhirters was not quite uncanny. One of them – Mountbatten could not remember which, being barely able to recall either of their names – had gained noticeably more weight than the other. His brother was marginally hairier. Mountbatten could just about make out a shaving nick on his-

  “Lord Mountbatten?”

  Ah. Back to reality.

  “Could you repeat that, please, Mr King?”

  A flicker of irritation passed over the newspaper baron’s face. It was not unlike the look of horror that Mountbatten had witnessed when he had told King exactly where to go one night in 1968. Given that King had been right about Wilson, and he had been horribly wrong, he felt he owed the man a hearing now. All the same, he was a frightful bore – and an obvious Mussolini-in-the-Making.

  “...Mr Bentine will provide a popular and calming public face, and I, of course, will grease the wheels of the whole process through my various outlets in the press.”

  King seemed to have finished. This time, Mountbatten had caught the gist.

  “I understand,” he began, “such a measure would be welcome – heavy reliance on D-notices is something the government wishes to avoid.”

  “Quite so, quite so,” said one of the McWhirters, unsuccessfully attempting to hide his excitement.

  “So, in summary—” began the other McWhirter.

  “- we are to aid the government in whatever way we can,” interrupted Michael Bentine. Why was he there? Mountbatten had not quite followed the explanation. Something about Sir Walter feeling dishonoured, and an urge to heed the ‘groundswell of support’ for incorporating Civil Assistance members into the ‘Special Constabulary’. Mountbatten had preferred it when Bentine had made a living out of making people laugh – though supposedly he was doing the same thing now.

  “The various forms of,” Sir Michael Hanley hesitated for half a moment, “aid that we can offer the government mean that the measures being taken can continue – as they must – with minimal resistance.”

  “Obstruction,” corrected Cecil King, very quickly indeed.

  “Obstruction, yes. A slip of the tongue.”

  Mountbatten did not permit his eyebrows to rise, though he had a hard time suppressing the instinct.

  “I understand these concerns, gentlemen. It must be a priority of my government to expose any Soviet agents—”

  “And sympathisers,” chipped in Michael Bentine, whose reason for being present was still, as far as Mountbatten could see, ‘unspecified’ at best. Holding back a frown, the First Lord continued.

  “Any Soviet agents – or fellow travellers – still at large in our country’s apparatus of state. Furthermore, such figures present in our civil society are to be... discouraged from advancement.”

  “There is no shame in a public blacklist, First Lord,” insisted Cecil King.

  “I am not sure I can agree with you there,” replied Mountbatten icily.

  “What I think Mr King is trying to say,” oozed Sir Michael, “is that making clear which elements of society, academia and the political classes are considered subversive is no bad thing.”

  “‘Making clear’?” questioned Mountbatten, “I am still reluctant to agree.”

  “Besides, the Labour Party seem to be doing that for us at present!” chortled Michael Bentine in a presumed attempt at humour.

  “The Labour Party is not the issue,” hissed Cecil King, “although I must admit a degree of satisfaction at learning of the impending self-immolation of their more stubborn elements in Liverpool.”

  Mountbatten grunted. The ‘Liverpool Independent Socialists’ had ‘taken control’ of the Council, which he had been relieved to learn was a matter of City Chamber procedure rather than a storming of a Merseyside Kronstadt. Labour had taken a knock, his sources had informed him, but with the electoral test of the Huyton by-election today – Wilson’s old seat – the less militant members of the LIS were expected to return to the fold in the event of a coherent win for Labour.

  “So,” breezed Sir Michael, evidently keen to get things back on track, “I think we should be able to drum up a working document of some description.”

  There was a pause. Mountbatten, for the first time, was at a loss as to why.

  “I...” began Cecil King, “I think it would be best to keep things informal for the time being.”

  Ah.

  “Yes,” echoed one of the McWhirters, “we think so too.”

  Mountbatten said nothing. Michael Bentine clapped his hands together in conclusion.

  “Quite right,” he said brightly, “no point faffing around with paperwork that the wrong eyes could draw unfortunate conclusions from.”

  Lord Mountbatten uneasily wondered whether ‘the wrong eyes’ referred to Soviet spies working in the civil service, or simply journalists working for the Guardian. Finally, he spoke.

  “Well, gentlemen, it seems we have come to an arrangement. Shall we meet at Chequers in a week’s time? Sunday is usually a good time for these sorts of things.”

  There was a smattering of approving sounds from around the room, with the exception of Sir John, who had spent the last half an hour looking like he was sitting on a pike but was too polite to say anythi
ng. Mountbatten stood by the door and shook each man’s hand as they left the room. As he tried to avoid looking like Noël Coward, he considered what had just taken place.

  Was he, at this moment, on the right side of history? A more effective way of rooting out subversives in the British establishment was undoubtedly welcome – he reminded himself once more that the Prime Minister had recently been outed as a Communist spy – but his paternalistic instincts had balked at some of the more forthright proposals of this... group? What was the word for them?

  What indeed, he thought, and closed the door behind him.

  Chapter twenty-one

  Thursday 22nd January 1976 – 8:30am

  A chill wind whistled down Wick Road and threatened to rip Tony Benn’s coat from his back. Thankfully, it did not, and the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party soldiered on through the frosty streets.

  It had been a difficult Christmas period for the party, he thought to himself as he pulled the grey overcoat tighter around him. Through thick coughs – the old warrior could not be long for this world, Benn thought with a twinge of sadness – Feather had warned that if the TUC got so much as a whiff of a ‘breakaway’, there would be hell to pay.

  “Good morning, Mr Benn,” said Eddie, holding the door open as Benn entered the office. He was a wide-faced boy with a needlessly deferential manner, and Benn wanted very much to like him.

  “Good morning, Eddie,” he replied with something approaching a wave, “what do we have today?”

  “There’s a gentleman with an objection to the proposed route of the sliproad,” Eddie replied as he held open the door to the ‘office’ in which Tony held his surgeries, “and someone with a question about your voting intention on the Public Assembly Bill.”

  “I shall be voting to preserve one of our Magna Carta rights,” said Benn as gruffly as it was possible for Tony Benn to be, “and all the rest of them, should it come to that.”

  “Of course,” said Eddie, glancing at the wall, on the other side of which were three dozen individuals awaiting their chance to speak to their elected representative.

  “A normal surgery, then?” Benn asked with a raised eyebrow as he sat down in his chair, reaching instinctively for the tin of tobacco in the second desk drawer to his right.

  “Oh yes, Mr Benn, quite normal.”

  “Are you quite sure, Eddie?”

  Eddie shifted uncomfortably.

  “Well...”

  “Come on, spit it out. I’m thick-skinned.”

  Eddie went red, and suddenly spoke very quickly.

  “There are about fifteen people who would like you to swear that you are not now and have never been an agent of the KGB. One of them has brought their own Bible. And,” the student said as he flipped through a binder of notes, “another has brought a copy of the Party constitution instead.”

  Benn allowed this to sink in, slowly filling and eventually lighting his pipe before replying.

  “Well, we must see to it that their concerns are satisfied.”

  It turned out that Eddie had been exaggerating slightly. Only nine constituents had apparently attended the surgery purely to test Benn’s patriotism. All but one went home satisfied – and the last, Benn reasoned, was a member of the National Front who had attended surgeries previously to demand ‘the darkies’ be ‘sent home’.

  Oddly, he had not mentioned immigration during this particular surgery. Benn had noticed that the NF thug and his ilk had been tilting at windmills in recent months. ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’ had lost currency, it seemed, although ‘there ain’t no red’ would not have made sense on a number of levels. Anti-Russian and eastern European sentiment had increased, however, and Benn had been so enraged by the deaths in the Russian expatriate community last week that he had not been able to appreciate the irony. British thugs, seeking to ‘retaliate’ for national humiliation and infiltration by the monsters in the Kremlin, were murdering Russians who fled from Communism years ago.

  “Pitiful,” he murmured around his pipe as he struck a match. He made a mental note to bring it up with Roy as something that the Party ought to discuss on an Opposition Day in Parliament soon. It would certainly be a less controversial topic than last month’s series of confused speeches on devolution, pay freezes, and, most farcically of all, electoral reform. It had been Peter Shore who had pointed out that this seemed a spectacular waste of time when it was, at present, unclear that there would ever be another election.

  Tony had always prided himself on never succumbing to Schadenfreude, but while he took no pleasure in Roy’s high-handed mismanagement of the Party’s priorities, he was well aware of the political advantage it was giving him as Deputy Leader. He was being a good listener, meeting disgruntled Labour MPs concerned that Jenkins and Crosland appeared to be drawing up plans for a social market on the bag of a fag packet while Admiral Mountbatten used the latest explosion in Liverpool as a pretext to remain in power ‘just a little bit longer’. Tony was not yet of the view that sections of the Security Services were probably behind most of these ‘politically convenient’ bombings, but he could see why some of his colleagues, key union leaders, and members of the general public were becoming more conspiratorial. The arrest of Wilson had clearly been meant to settle the matter of his guilt, but an absence of any public appearances by the former PM meant this had backfired. The Party, and the country, were still very jumpy indeed.

  And where would Tony Benn fit into the picture? A few had urged him to outright challenge Roy after Crosland’s weak response as shadow chancellor to the emergency budget in December. But the time was not right, and this was not about him. David Owen had once talked about ‘saving the Labour Party from itself’. It looked like it would fall to Tony Benn to save the Labour Party from its leader.

  While his Deputy enjoyed the ‘luxury’ of the occasional constituency surgery, the Leader of the Labour Party found time management rather more of a struggle. Today, however, was not dominated by wranglings with the TUC or ego-massages for Tony Crosland. Nor did it contain a painful interview with the BBC that obliged him to again ‘confirm’ that no employees of Warsaw Pact state security organisations were operating within the Labour Party.

  No, today was dominated by an altogether more run-of-the-mill activity. That being said, like everything since November, ‘recent events’ had taken the mundane and turned it into a high-stakes, high-octane fight to the death. As the lights turned green, Roy felt the vehicle lurch forward. He brought the loudhailer to his lips.

  “Don’t forget to vote for the Labour candidate today – Mr Frank Field will be strong for Huyton, and strong for Britain!”

  Roy hated that slogan, but it ticked a couple of necessary boxes. As a woman waved ferociously from the side of the road, he waved back and weighed up whether or not Field had been the right choice. A thrusting, forward-thinking intellectual from the soft-right of the party, he had been on various lists in various drawers for some time. When it had become clear that all of Huyton Constituency Labour Party’s candidates had been de facto disqualified for having shared an office with Harold Wilson, Field had emerged as the candidate by acclamation.

  As if the ensuing meltdown of the CLP wasn’t bad enough, working the doorstep had been hell. Not since 1945 had Jenkins encountered such hostility – and he wasn’t thinking of the election. Little old ladies calling him a Marxist. A couple of louts from the Young Conservatives drawing unflattering parallels between Crosland and Rudolph Hess. That especially reactionary former Para insinuating that the relationship between him and Benn was rather more than platonic. These attacks had not been as life-threatening as his time in the Artillery, but they had still been rather hurtful barbs.

  In spite of this, and despite the bon viveur air that two decades of foreign travel and fine dining had given him, Jenkins had always tended to enjoy canvassing in the inner cities. It was always enjoyable to meet The Working Man and The Striving Mother in their natural habitat, even if it meant
getting a torrent of abuse. The party was apparently selling out to the vested interests of mass immigration. Usually, Jenkins had been content to put up with the two percent or so that had gone over to the National Front, but this time, the Leader of the Labour Party was worried. The genuine Fascists had selected the usual nutter, but the presence of an independent Conservative – although a welcome sign of the split in the local Conservative Association – was an unhelpful reminder of quite how far the red flag had fallen in her natural constituency.

  Sighing, Roy picked up the loudhailer again.

  “Vote for your Labour candidate, Mr Frank...”

  “If you want a commie for a neighbour, vote Labour!”

  Jenkins ducked just in time.

  “...Field.”

  Three days of this had rather improved Roy’s reflexes. He looked over his shoulder and hoped that the milk-bottle that had smashed against the pavement had been filled with apple juice. The fact that he was here at all was something in itself – even the Liberals would not have sent their leader to a by-election campaign. However, as Joel Barnett had told the NEC in no uncertain terms, “if we lose this one, we are fucked. I mean, literally fucked.”

  Holding the seat of a retiring Prime Minister was usually a given, but all bets had been off since that fateful night in November. Jenkins recalled the late night chat between himself, the Speaker, Walter Harrison and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. He was still proud of the fact that he had been present at the moment of realisation that – thanks to one of the many constitutional quirks that he really wanted to be rid of – they would have to inform an imprisoned traitor that he was required to accept an Office of the Crown.

  A telephone call from the Met the next day had told him that Harold had taken the Hundreds in the end. Soon after, Stonehouse had been declared legally dead (for the second sodding time) and Jenkins had realised that they would have to move another writ. Having both by-elections on the same day meant that Denis and Jim would be receiving the same abuse in Walsall right now.