by Tom Black
“That’s right, David,” John Chancellor responded, “although as you can see from the map behind me, we are now able to confirm the state of Nebraska for President Ford. This takes it out of the ‘Too Early To Call’ column that we previously had it in.”
Heath had never been to Nebraska, but based on the photographs he had seen, no one lived there. This seemed very unfair to the more populated States.
“That is not really a surprise, John,” David Brinkley said, “yet it does seem to be continuing the narrative that we have seen all through this election period. President Ford’s decision to make Senator Baker his Running Mate appears to have been an effective way of getting the South – which formed the core of President Nixon’s electoral strategy in sixty-eight – firmly into the Republican column. However, in doing so, he may have also lost the initiative to Senator Jackson in a number of western states where the Republican Party was previously seen as being somewhat more competitive.”
“True again, Davi...” Heath rose to his feet and bashed the top of the set as the screen once again dissolved into static, “...ut Jackson’s decision to run with Senator Bayh, whilst helping to return a number of liberals to the Democratic column, has also forced the party to make far more of an effort to reach out into a number of New England states, who seem to have decided to rally around the President this evening.”
The Chancellor looked wearily at his watch. One-thirty, he noted glumly. He hated it when there were two one-thirties in the day.
“All of those factors have clearly come together to make this race one of the closest on record,” David Brinkley continued, “whilst the Jackson-Bayh Ticket have run as Washington outsiders in this race, Senator Jackson’s rhetoric on the recent controversies surrounding the CIA has become a major issue in this campaign. Not least because of this perception that the Senator is too headstrong and unpredictable on matters pertaining to national security.”
“Indeed so,” John Chancellor nodded, “and with that in mind, it is also a matter that the President was able to exploit in the debates last month, portraying Senator Jackson as the wrong sort of temperament to deal with General Secretary Andropov.”
As if Andropov mattered, Heath scoffed. There were at least five men running the Soviet Union at the moment. Still, Ford’s determined performance in the final televised debate – a brave move, as they had not been seen since 1960, and had seen his predecessor undone by Jack Kennedy – had given him a small bounce in the polls, apparently. Looking straight down the cameras and declaring, “there is no longer any Soviet domination of the United Kingdom,” had played extremely well. The fact Ford hadn’t fallen over while saying it had probably helped him exceed expectations too.
“With the confirmation of the New York result, it seems that the Conservative Party of New York State – who we heard from a half hour ago thanks to Senator Buckley – were unsuccessful in their campaign to re-elect the President. For newcomers among you, the Conservatives usually endorse and support the Republican candidate for the White House in elections in New York.”
“That reminds me,” muttered Ted as he reached for a piece of paper. But before he could finish writing the words ‘Dear Jeremy’, he was startled by an excited outburst from the television.
“I will have to interrupt you there, John,” David Brinkley said, “we are ready to make our projection for the winner of the state of California, and with it, this election...”
Chapter thirty-one
Friday 24th December 1976 – 10:30pm
’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through Wormwood Scrubs, not a creature was stirring, aside from the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
This was not a surprise. The new Home Secretary – Heath having been promoted to No. 11 – had been clear on limiting Harold Wilson’s comfort even after he had been moved over from military guard to await trial. There was to be no contact with the outside world whenever possible. In order to achieve this, a third of C-Wing was to be blocked off to house Wilson alone, with personally vetted guards that excluded anyone who had so much as looked at a Union flag cross-eyed.
Outside, it had begun to snow, the prison chapel was not especially well sound proofed and, just audible over the breeze outside, came the noise of a badly-tuned organ and some half-hearted rendition of ‘Once In Royal David’s City’. The music dragged Wilson back to a time when things had been simpler – his first Christmas at Oxford – when he had been dragged along to hear the carol service at Christ Church.
He sighed wistfully to himself, only turning around when his thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sound of a truncheon banging against the bars of a cell gate.
“Don’t you go nodding off.”
Wilson didn’t look over to the door. He’d learned to recognise his guards’ voices by now. They were rotated fairly regularly, so that no one man would spend enough time with him to become ‘sympathetic’. Harold still enjoyed an occasional chuckle at the establishment’s terror at the thought of his mere existence.
“I shan’t, Marley,” he replied, staring at the ceiling, “I’ve no intention of missing out on my graciously-awarded privilege.”
Marley grunted.
“Just be ready, and be decent. Any funny business of any kind, and they’re straight out the door again.”
“Privilege,” Harold snorted to himself with a barely suppressed giggle as Marley’s quieting footsteps reverberated down the corridor towards the checkpoint. After more than a year at Her Majesty’s pleasure, some bigwig in Downing Street had decided that, as nuclear war had not broken out, it was agreeable for him to be granted a couple of visitors, on the condition that he was not informed who they were. There was to be no possibility of an escape conspiracy.
Wilson turned around and thought back to the last time he had actually been able to have a decent conversation with someone. Last November? It had probably been with Brimley and Stonehouse about the benefits of Democratic Centralism, but even that would be pushing the definition of “decent conversation” – especially given that the night had ended with a murder and a double-suicide.
Harold Wilson rolled over in bed – trying to shake himself awake. Despite what he had said to Marley, peaceful oblivion was calling. He had not been sleeping well lately, especially since the date of the trial had finally been set for – when was it again?
Well – Wilson thought to himself, yawning – it was going to be a huge...a huge...a hu-
“Hugh?”
Wilson awoke with a start, before realising that he could not have awoken, because the man who was now sitting opposite him had been dead since 1963.
“Harold.”
Gaitskell smiled emotionlessly.
Harold looked around, astonishing, he pondered, just how effective the human mind was at conjuring up places from the furthest recesses of the mind. He had not been inside 18 Frognal Gardens for – well – since Hugh’s Wake. And yet, the whole sitting room seemed exactly as it had been fifteen years ago. There was that wonderful poster from the ’59 election of Hugh, Nye and Barbara standing together, Hugh holding his hat aloft, cheering the forth-coming social democratic victory. Next to it was that dratted miner’s lamp (a gift from one of the Welsh CLPs), and that photograph of Harold shaking hands with Stalin.
...wait, hang on-
“Whisky, Harold?” Hugh was saying, “I don’t like sending you off in the cold like this without a decent amount of warmth in your belly.”
The Bruichladdich was proffered in front of him, accusingly. It was fizzing slightly as the last of the tablet inside it dissipated. He looked up at Hugh, searching his face. It was more hollow than he remembered, the eyes more grey than white – and he was looking at Harold rather like Othello looks at Iago in the final scene.
“Hugh, I—”
“I don’t have any interest in anything you have to say.”
“But, I—”
“Do have a drink, Harold.”
Harold realised that there was no other way to stop the ethereal Leader of the Labour Party looking daggers – nay, broadswords – at him. Resigning himself to his fate, he took the tumbler. A bird call outside – either the house or the dream, it was hard to tell which – momentarily distracted him. He turned back, only to see that Gaitskell had vanished, as had the tainted whisky in his hand. In its place was a pair of jacks. The muffled sound of the Marvelettes from the nightclub over the road had become a tasteful piano rendition of Take Five. The surroundings were different as well, less petty-bourgeois, more bourgeois-bourgeois.
“I think that’s the face of a man with a pair of nines.”
Harold looked up in shock. Lord Lucan was sat at the other end of the table.
“A pair of...? “ he found himself saying, “I don’t think...”
“Another drink, Prime Minister?”
Harold turned to his side. He remembered that Sandra Rivett was indeed serving him a Martini, just like she had done all those years ago when the Clermont Club had not been uncovered as a money-making racket for John bloody Aspinall.
Actually, come to think of it, had Rivett even been there back then? Lucan had only just got engaged that evening. This didn’t make any sense at all.
Only a dream, he thought to himself, only a dream.
“I am waiting, old boy,” Bingham was taunting from the other end of the table, “If I win, surely you can just tax it all off me anyway?”
They were laughing at him now, that horrible, snobby, derisive laugh that had followed him around since that first tutorial at Jesus. He found himself grimacing.
“Oh come on, Prime Minister,” the 7th Earl of Lucan continued, “you’ll beat it out of me.”
His eyes flashed as he threw a bloodied lead pipe on the card table, knocking a few thousand pounds-worth of poker chips to the floor.
“Won’t you?”
Wilson dropped his eyes as he finally reached for the martini.
“I wouldn’t—” he found himself saying, “I am sure that I don’t know what you are talking about...”
“Order,” Horace King said languidly, “the Leader of the Opposition...”
As the Louis XV seat beneath him suddenly transformed into the familiar cushioned leather of the Commons Chamber, Harold realised a pattern seemed to be emerging.
“Mr Speaker,” Ted Heath was saying, “I would like to begin by congratulating the Prime Minister on the tremendous efforts he has made to improve Anglo-Soviet relations.”
Wilson looked behind him and saw he was quite alone on the government benches. Across the despatch box, it was a different story. Heath was there, but the Conservative and Unionist Party was not, replaced as it was by dozens of chisel-jawed, sharp-suited young men. Some wore glasses, some were moustachioed, but all had a fierce brightness behind their eyes. Most of them were unknown to Wilson, but there was something familiar about…
...oh, God.
“I give way to the Honourable Member for Lubyanka,” Heath said with a vicious glare at Harold as he sat down.
“Mr Speaker,” the young man said, his one eye swivelling to face Wilson, “I wondered if the Prime Minister would care to inform the House as to the most effective way of exposing an undercover agent operating in Akademgorodok?”
Jesus.
“If not,” the betrayed agent was saying, his voice turning in the face of a gathering chorus of catcalls from his colleagues, “may I invite him to the torture chambers in my new Constituency, which have the most exquisite forms of...”
“No!” Wilson yelled, throwing himself away from the despatch box and out into Member’s Lobby.
He looked behind him, but the dead agents had not followed him, apparently content to simply sit in accusing silence from the Opposition Benches.
He was still running with his head over his shoulder when he bumped into…
“Nye?”
The father of the NHS steadied himself from the impact. He said nothing, content to look sadly into Harold’s eyes. Wilson looked at him, noticing that he was dressed exactly as he had been on the evening that he had sadly announced the news of his cancer to the PLP.
“No,” Wilson said as his mouth fell open, “no, no. No! I didn’t… you… I always respected you, in spite of everything. I didn’t – I couldn’t!”
Bevan shook his head, looking up at the bomb-savaged archway leading back into the Commons Chamber.
“Nye,” Harold said, feeling real fear for the first time, “you know that I didn’t kill you? Surely?”
There was a pause, followed by a soft, mournful laugh.
“Of course I do, Harold,” Bevan replied, “but no one else is going to believe that, are they?”
Backing away in horror until his back hit the cold stone of the wall, Harold fled again through the ghastly, shadowy version of the Palace of Westminster. As he ran, trying to make it towards Central Lobby, he saw a figure looking up at Edward Ward’s mural depicting the execution of the Marquess of Montrose.
“Another martyr for the English Revolution, eh Hal?” Jacob Brimley said, turning to face the former Prime Minister, “I suppose, in a way, it never really ended.”
Jacob had a greener complexion than when they had last seen each other. This time, Wilson stood his ground.
“Don’t you give me that, Jacob,” he said, wagging an accusative finger, “you know full well that you took your own life.”
“I did, Hal,” Brimley replied, “and willingly, but I would not have had to if you had decided to go another way that evening.”
“That’s not fair!” shouted Harold, but Jacob placed a hand on his shoulder to calm him.
“Life often isn’t fair, Harold. You know that. A lot of people you’ve come into contact with recently know that, too. Why relive the past when there’s plenty of horror in the present, eh?” Jacob gave his pleasing smile, and gestured over Harold’s shoulder. Six feet tall, dressed all in black and soaking wet, John Stonehouse was staring silently at him, his face expressionless. Next to him stood Buster Crabb, neatly stapled to the wall by way of a harpoon through his head. Both men reached out to Harold with their hands.
With a panicked shake of his head, Wilson turned on his heel and slipped on a wet tile. He flailed for something to hold on to, grabbing the overcoat of the shambling figure behind him.
“Thank you,” Wilson said as he recovered himself, “are you here to accuse me of something fraudulent as well?”
The figure removed his trilby, revealing hair matted with blood.
“That’s Wright, Prime Minister,” the erstwhile Deputy Director of MI5 said, “I am indeed.”
Wilson gasped, yet again ducking as a bust of Marx sailed past his head, shattering at the feet of two figures in front of him.
“I think that they call this ‘blood money’, Prime Minister,” Reg was saying, waving a sodden fiver in Harold’s face.
“I used to vote Labour, you know,” Nick Hampton added, a neat hole in his head, “but I think that I will reconsider now.”
Wilson pushed both men aside, running down into Saint Stephen’s Hall. Another two figures, one short, the other tall and broad, blocked his passage yet again.
“Comrade Lavender,” Lily said, “you realise that you never even asked my name?”
Wilson raised a fist.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Tulip said, raising his own arm and crouching down slightly, “I am a Judoka, you know?”
Harold did not know – nor for that matter did he have any idea what a ‘Judoka’ was. Fortunately, some internal decision was apparently made between the two apparitions, and both stood to the side to allow Wilson access to Westminster Hall. Clattering down the stone steps, he turned to his side, looking down towards a crowd that now filled the cavernous space.
There were hundreds of them – young and old, men and women, many of them were wearing overalls and glaring up at Wilson, eyes blazing with fury.
“The masses, Hal,” Jacob
said, re-appearing beside him, “those that have died in the riots since you left, those shot in the purges that you have prompted—” he said, motioning over Kim Il Sung, who had been deposed in April after a final, failed attempt to remove the Chinese influences from his Politburo, “and those who ended up working themselves to death in an attempt to clean up your mess...”
Harold made to leave, but – as the doors to Saint Stephen’s Gate slammed shut behind him – the assembled masses in Westminster Hall, taking their cue, began to advance. One of them began humming ‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen’, and soon there was a festive cacophony in the air. Harold turned, but Jacob had vanished as quickly as he had appeared.
“No!” he shouted desperately, banging on the door, “this isn’t right! It’s not fair! I didn’t mean for anyone to… look, let me out! Whoever you are, let me out! Let me out!”
“Fat chance of that,” said Marley, as Harold came crashing back to reality, “I told you not to nod off. Sounded like you were having a right horrible dream.”
Harold stared at the man in front of him, wanting to be quite sure he was flesh and bone. With a grunt, he rolled over in his bed, trying to make sense of what he’d just experienced. He barely registered Marley’s announcement that he had another visitor.
“Harold.”
There was a hint of a ‘w’ in the ‘r’.
The colour drained from Wilson’s face. Not him. Please, not him.
“Harold, I’d like you to look at me.”
“Well, I won’t,” said the former Prime Minister petulantly. He heard a sigh.
“I have some things I would like to look you in the eye and say. Will you deny me that?”
Harold bit his lip. Damn it all. He turned over in the cot, facing the gate of his cell. Roy Jenkins, immaculate in grey, stood with no colour in his face. Jenkins stared back at him, his glasses failing to hide the emotion in his eyes. Summoning everything he had in him, Roy spoke.
“We did a lot of good, Harold.”
Harold did not blink.
“Not enough.”
Roy continued as if Harold had not spoken.
