by James Philip
“Just because I already know a thing it doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear you tell me about it all over again,” the man declared with utter sincerity.
HMS Talavera had finally been refloated yesterday morning, towed deeper into French Creek and berthed alongside a fitting out dock. Peter Christopher had spent that morning going over the wiring schematics that Ralph Hobbs, the ‘Chief Radar Man’ responsible for overseeing the installation and maintenance of the electronics suites of all the ships of the Mediterranean Fleet passing through the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta, had sent him. Ralph was being run ragged and Peter was one of the few people on the island whose second opinion he not only respected but trusted. The storehouses back in the United Kingdom were being emptied to update and equip the ships sent to Malta but a lot of the aerials, distribution boxes, controls, switches, power boards and cathode ray displays were ‘one off’ constructs lacking comprehensive, or in some cases, any documentation. The people back home were scraping the barrel and hoping experts like Ralph Hobbs would make the equipment they were digging out of forgotten stores and cupboards, work on real ships.
“Ralph Hobbs has put in a request to make me his ‘Technical Naval Liaison Officer’,” he told Marija. “I’m not terribly keen about it because I don’t want them taking Talavera away from me.”
“There will be other ships, sweetheart.” Marija was experimenting with alternative endearments; exploring how each new option rolled off her tongue. My love seemed a little excessive; there would be time for that later. Dear heart sounded like something out of a Jane Austen novel. Within the frame of reference of her own immediate family for as long as she could remember her Mama had called her Papa ‘Husband’, prefixing this with ‘dear’ or ‘my’. Decisions, decisions, so many decisions...
“Not like Talavera,” Peter protested, frowning.
Marija put her right hand over his heart and looked up into his face, instantly seizing his entire attention.
“I should be jealous,” she teased gently, “how can I compete with a great big Battle class destroyer. I mean,” she continued, struggling to keep a straight face, “HMS Talavera has great big guns and she can run at thirty miles an hour for two thousand miles!”
Chapter 22
Thursday 27th February 1964
Great Hall, Christ Church College, Oxford
It had been decided to align the pews and chairs requisitioned, borrowed and ‘found’ around the College in a pattern reminiscent of the old debating chamber of the House of Commons in Westminster. Seating had been provided for some four hundred persons, as well as a standing area for the gentlemen of the press. Although the Great Hall of Christ Church College was not that much bigger than the previous home of the Commons, it seemed to many of those present noticeably less claustrophobic. The Speaker and his clerks sat on a low stage beneath great dark, grime-stained windows.
Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for approximately two-and-a-half whirlwind months. In that time she had begun to reconstruct the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, formed a new Government that she was convinced was capable of leading the nation forward, and staked her Premiership on the earliest possible return to ‘politics as normal’. Fully aware that in a few hours time she might be a footnote in the United Kingdom’s post-cataclysm history she had no regrets. She and her Cabinet sat to the right hand of the Speaker; otherwise honourable members sat in cliques and clubs, clans and loose confederations of a dozen kinds on both sides of the divide between the Government ‘front bench’ and the notional ‘opposition’ across the so-called aisle.
Iain Macleod, the Minister of Information and therefore the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s key propagandist coughed bronchially, breathlessly. He and Airey Neave, Margaret Thatcher’s former chief of staff at the Ministry of Supply, had arrived at a rough and ready accounting for what was laughingly called ‘the state of the parties’.
Perhaps, fifty percent of Labour Party Members of Parliament were nominally loyal to the Party’s leader, James Callaghan. Within that caucus of support there was, however, rumbling dissent. The rest of Jim Callaghan’s MPs were split between factions on the left of his Party, by far the largest grouping being led by Michael Foot, the firebrand pacifist MP for Ebbw Vale in Monmouthshire. However, while Michael Foot’s followers were likely to be a noisy thorn in Margaret Thatcher’s side, the real imponderable was the mood of her own supporters.
At the last pre-war General Election Harold MacMillan had been endorsed with an increased majority. In that election the Conservative and Unionist Party had returned 365 MPs to the Commons, the Labour and Co-operative Party 258 and the Liberals a paltry 6 members. ‘Supermac’ had therefore enjoyed a majority of over a hundred MPs and it was this fact – regardless of casualties in the October War – which had given first Edward Heath, and then Margaret Thatcher, leave to form Government’s under the auspices of the War Emergency Act.
Of the 629 MPs elected to the old House of Commons, 387 had thus far signed the new Members’ Register, of whom 191 were Conservatives or Ulster Unionists, 192 Labourites and 4 Liberals. Notwithstanding that the head count was significantly less in the Labour Party’s favour than she had expected, the Angry Widow had resolved in advance that she was not willing to continue in office without a ‘properly’ expressed democrat mandate.
New elections would have been her first choice; that was neither practical nor sensible in the present climate. The war in the Mediterranean might have gone cold in recent weeks but preparations were well-advanced to re-conquer Cyprus and to re-establish the Anglo-America presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. Grim times lay ahead and increasingly, she was afraid that the cataclysm – far from brutally concluding the clash of irreconcilable East-West ideologies – had settled nothing. In any event, she was not prepared to carry on without the transparent consent of the surviving elected representatives of the British polity.
The Speaker of the House of Commons banged his gavel.
“The House will come to order!”
Sir Harry Braustyn Hylton-Foster had practically had to be carried into the Great Hall. Illness and the routine privations of the age had taken a heavy toll on his constitution, leaving his formerly military bearing hunched, diminished, and his gaunt face an ashen mask. In this cruel new age when a man began to decline, that decline tended to be rapid and terminal.
Margaret Thatcher was humbled by the daily examples she came across of men and women surmounting terrible adversities simply to carry on doing their jobs and fulfilling their duty.
Sir Harry Hylton-Foster had been Speaker of the House of Commons since 1960. Like many of the MPs present today in the House he now represented a ‘rotten’ war constituency; the Cities of London and Westminster. The Angry Widow’s own constituency of Finchley had been similarly obliterated, and a head count of the MPs who had thus far signed the new Members’ Register, indicated that over twenty percent represented non-existent or sorely reduced ‘seats’. Exacerbating the self-evident ‘democratic deficit’, in the chaos of the last year as many as fifty, more or less intact, Parliamentary constituencies had been without a legitimately elected representative. Of the 232 absent Members of the old House of Commons, at least a hundred had perished on the night of the war, mostly in the capital, a dozen were known to have died elsewhere, killed in the Soviet strikes or dying shortly thereafter of injuries or radiation sickness. Another forty to fifty MPs of the class of 1959 were thought to have succumbed to old age, pre-existing medical conditions or disease in the intervening months. In total, 74 members of the last House of Commons remained unaccounted for; it was not known how many had abdicated their responsibilities, cultivated local fiefdoms in their own backyards, or were serving in the armed forces – although anecdotally, at least a score of men were believed to have rejoined their old Regiments of Squadrons and not requested leave of absence to attend the Great Hall – and as many as thirty MPs in the ‘old House’ had simply disappea
red without a trace.
Margaret Thatcher had been chilled but not overly surprised when the details of the Members’ Register had been correlated against the death and casualty rates among the general population. Death, it seemed, was intrinsically democratic; its geographic and demographic signature roughly matching the fates of the Members of Parliament in the 1959 House of Commons.
At the time of the cataclysm the population of the United Kingdom was around fifty-three million people, some seven to eight million of whom lived in the Greater London area, over four million in Scotland, a little under two million in Wales, and some one-and-a-half-millions in Northern Ireland. The weight of the Soviet strike had fallen exclusively on the forty-five million people living in England, disproportionately impacting the capital where between five and six million people had died in the first twenty-four hours after the attack. However, if London, the East Coast and both the urban and rural North-West had been hit hardest, the subsequent breakdown of basic services and the inability of the surviving health services to in any way deal with the enormity of the disaster, had made cholera and typhus, influenza, measles and poliomyelitis prolific killers of the old and the young, the infirm and the injured alike, scourging every corner of the United Kingdom with similar cruelty. Malnutrition, lack of heating fuels, the breakdown of the electricity grid and damage to or the destruction of as many as a third of all the homes in the country had probably doubled the death toll of the actual Soviet retaliatory strike. Between thirteen and fourteen million people had perished in England since the October War; only the young, the vigorous and the fit had survived. Tragically, the latest statistics showed that infant and post-natal mortality rates were still running at somewhere around nine times the rates calculated for 1961. The parlous state of the nation was best illustrated by the fact the most optimistic of the recent estimates for population decline produced by the Home Office’s statisticians; projected a fall of only two to three percent in the overall population in the coming year. The man factors offsetting a drastically reduced birth rate included an influx of survivors from the continent into the south coast ports, and a lower than expected ‘die off’ in the last two winter months. This latter was wholly attributable to the success of Operation Manna. The arrival of the great convoys had reversed planned cuts in the standard food ration and dramatically eased the fuel situation at exactly the same time that the previous year’s intensive winter planning ensured that a large number of lightly damaged houses and buildings had had their roofs repaired and windows boarded over. The provision of dry, heated, sheltered places in which the majority of the surviving population could see out the winter was probably saving tens of thousands of lives every week.
Set against this qualified good news there was overwhelming evidence that a contributory factor in the projected ongoing population decline was the – understandable and entirely rational - unwillingness of women of child-bearing age to risk conceiving a child. Who could blame any woman for not wanting to bring a baby into this cold, hostile, radioactively poisoned new World?
Margaret Thatcher’s anger threatened to choke her every time she stopped to contemplate the folly of the men – and it was the men – who had sleep walked into the cataclysm of October 1962.
Looking around the Great Hall, the Prime Minister saw relatively few of the old, grey men of that generation which had dominated the higher echelons of British political life before the war.
The sleep walkers’ time had come and gone.
“The House will come to order!” The Speaker demanded.
The groundswell of conversation subsided to a mutter.
Several MPs coughed, practically everybody had rattling chests.
Across the Great Hall sitting a little apart on the crowded front bench Enoch Powell eyed his quarry with hungry intent. His faction had coalesced around him. Not all his supporters were back-woodsmen or traditionalists who viewed Margaret Thatcher as a usurper. Several of the Powellites had been passed over for ministerial posts in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, others had refused to serve in junior positions that they regarded as being beneath their dignity. Others had been alienated by Edward Heath’s belated attempts to purge the dead wood he had inherited from Harold MacMillan’s administration. A small number of the Honourable Member for Wolverhampton South West’s most devoted followers actually believed – or had at least, honestly convinced themselves - that they were obediently acting in accordance with the wishes of their constituents.
It would have surprised her opponents to discover that Margaret Thatcher had not, in truth, worried overmuch about the numbers game. Iain Macleod, still the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party, guessed that as many as forty percent of the Tory MPs in the Hall would back her; either because she was, whatever they thought, their leader or because of their visceral detestation for Enoch Powell and the pseudo-Leninist wing of the Labour Party.
By far the largest anti-UAUK clump of MPs straggled about the tall, spindly tousled-haired former journalist, Michael Foot. While he was unlikely to acquire new converts to his cause this afternoon, Foot’s eloquence and the fervour of his ‘party within a party’ as Jim Callaghan put it, might well give wavering moderates cause for thought on both sides of the political spectrum.
Iain Macleod thought the House was split three ways, with the Government guaranteed perhaps as many as one hundred and forty to fifty votes, including as many as sixty from Margaret Thatcher’s own Party, and about ninety from the Labour side of the Unity Administration. Michael Foot could depend on thirty or forty true believers, Enoch Powell sixty to seventy exclusively Tory votes. Inevitably, with so many undecided, undeclared and frankly, bewildered MPs’ votes to be played for, the debate was likely to be ferocious.
The Speaker was making a meal – a veritable dog’s breakfast - of restating the protocol of Parliamentary business appropriate to a debate consequent upon the emergency recall of the Commons.
Margaret Thatcher tried not to scowl too obviously.
“This is not an emergency recall of the House!” She hissed to Iain Macleod. “What on earth is the old fool up to?”
“None of the previous senior clerks to the House survived the war, Margaret,” her Party Chairman reminded her lowly. “We had to recruit clerks locally. They know all about administering College meetings and the modes of service in chapel, but...”
“The bloody man ought not to have to rely on his clerks, Iain!”
Iain Macleod did not attempt to argue the point or to defend the Speaker further. There had been talk about appointing a new Leader of the House to manage the UAUK’s business in Parliament; but they had never got around to organising it and it had not seemed to be a problem until now. The Angry Widow fulminated as she awaited her turn to take her bow.
One of Enoch Powell’s acolytes had been invited to lodge an early day motion with the Speaker, and now that the game was afoot she wanted to get on with it. It was a peculiarity of the faulty memories of the main protagonists, and symptomatic of the desperate times in which they lived, that nobody on the front benches of the re-called House of Commons recollected, or initially, gave the weight and credence it deserved to the fact that the last – pre-war - Leader of the House of Commons had been none other than the Honourable Member for Enfield West, presently an uninhabitable bomb site, a certain Iain Norman Macleod. The role had been superfluous in the aftermath of the cataclysm. Within days of the October War a provisional government had emerged, which in turn had hastily developed into the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, at which juncture Iain Macleod had ceased to be a member of ‘the Cabinet’ and therefore, technically ceased to be the lawfully appointed Leader of the House of Commons...
However, now that Iain Macleod thought about it – not that anybody had thought over much about it since the Prime Minister’s rash promise to re-open Parliament in such an insanely crashing rush - he was probably still the best candidate for the job. Except he had not thought
about and now he felt like an ass! His old One Nation Conservatism partner in crime across the aisle, Enoch Powell, whom he had regarded as a close personal friend in those heady days working together in the Conservative Research Department after the 1945 war was silently laughing at him.
The Speaker, resplendent in his powdered wig and eighteenth century finery leaned towards him.
“The correct procedure is for the Leader of the House of Commons to make himself available to the House for questions after he has made a business statement. This would have enabled the proposer of the EDM – the aforementioned Early Day Motion – the opportunity of mentioning it in the chamber by referring to it by its number in the list of questions to the Leader of the House that day. This would allow the EDM to be printed in Hansard, the record of the proceedings of the House, thus satisfying convention and enabling my clerk to place it on the order paper for this, or an early date thereafter...”
Iain Macleod shook his head in undisguised exasperation.
“Oh, for goodness sake!” He muttered as he rose to his feet. “A point of order, Mr Speaker!”
Everybody agreed Iain Macleod had made a good fist of being Leader of the House of Commons in his two-year stint before the October War. He had brought great energy and a well-honed understanding of the ways and means of Parliament to the post; all in all he had got things done and pushed through the Government’s business. Edward Heath, the Chief Whip, and he had fought a constant uphill battle against the complacency engendered by so many years in power and the somewhat soporific effect of a huge Parliamentary majority. He deserved better than to be lectured by a well-meaning old buffer like Harry Hylton-Foster about what was, and was not the customary ‘normal procedure’ in the good old days before the World tried to blow itself up.
