If the EU had acted quickly in June, now it moved faster. It doubled the sanctions. The chicken-and-egg argument goes on to this day. Apologists for the government say the earlier sanctions forced Britain into the Transatlantic Trade Agreement – defence against the arrogant and overbearing states of Europe. The opposition claims the EU is protecting itself against a sinister US – UK alliance. Each side, in other words, maintains it’s acted only to defend itself against the other. Who will ever know the truth? Is there one big truth behind this whole sorry affair? Gott claims there is – that this had been planned in outline between Alan Petherbridge and the President of the USA in August 2015, and thereafter he and his advisors used every move, whether made by terrorist bombers or the EU, to take Britain in the direction agreed during that summer of 2015 at Camp David.
Meanwhile, whatever the reasons, we began to suffer. Shortages became dearth. After August, petrol rationing was imposed. Manufacturing jobs went. Shops closed. Tourism collapsed. Fuel cards were issued and slowly, as stocks depleted, electricity was also rationed. The price of everything shot up. Price rises and unemployment meant that people who would previously have thought it inconceivable were standing in Salvation Army queues for meals. Another card was issued, allowing people to buy staple foods at low prices. The very old said it reminded them of the war. My husband said people with roots in poorer countries on the whole fared better, because the experience of producing nutritious food from practically nothing was closer.
Capital haemorrhaged from the country, meaning more lost jobs. A once-prosperous country was living now with unemployment, shortages, lack of money, fuel rationing and electricity cuts. Many with roots abroad left for their countries of origin, or of their parents’ or grandparents’ origins. The population emigrated if they could. Half a million had gone or applied to go to Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The US made special arrangements for skilled British people to go to the States.
Because of the benefits of the Transatlantic Trade Agreement, and with an educated and docile workforce, the US began to buy in heavily to British firms, or even take them over completely. Gott’s firm Citycars was targeted, but he wouldn’t budge. Gott had predicted that if the American consortium bidding for Citycars had got hold of it, they would have moved the R and D staff they wanted to the States, then shut down the plant and relocated it in a country with cheaper labour costs.
Europeans were sorry for ordinary people in Britain. That September, Sam and I were staying with my father in Spain, while the Friths, just along the coast, tried to put William together again. ‘You ‘ave been sold,’ said someone, a Spaniard next to me at the bar. He was instantly contradicted by one of the expats, whose income had soared because of the level of business – buying, selling and takeovers – on the Stock Exchange. ‘Best thing possible,’ said this unrepentant exile in a European country. ‘Free trade – fellowship of the English-speaking world – get rid of all the rules and regulations.’ I knew it was a rummage sale and once it was over the ex-pat’s yield would drop but I wasn’t about to start a row in a hotel my father ran. I just said to the Spaniard that I thought the EU would kick us out. ‘Damn good thing, too,’ said the expat.
In September the European Parliament met, voted and declared that the price of restoring normal trade relations with Britain was for Britain to get out of the treaty with the US and subscribe, heavily, to the European Dream. Half of Britain’s armed services must be put under European control in the new European Defence Force. And Britain must join the euro. Petherbridge defied them. The two World Wars were invoked as usual. ‘We stood alone then,’ Petherbridge declared, ‘and we will do so again. We will never surrender.’
A lot of dollars were pumped into the system. Bought-up firms expanded and in blighted areas new branches of US firms – car factories, food processors, small engineering works – opened up. The British government was funding big new projects – the contracts and ownership went to US firms but the jobs to the Brits.
The Thames Gateway project, a new city planned to run east from London to the coast, much revised, cancelled, downsized, upsized, planned again and restarted, would now be built, once the Thames Estuary barrage was constructed. They would build 300,000 houses and bring in 40,000 jobs. New giant National Health clinics and mega-hospitals would bring more work. Shallow, localized, instant prosperity, which wouldn’t last, Gott predicted. Taxpayers’ money being sucked into US firms. But Gott was a wealthy man. He could afford to take the long view.
The grass roots of the Labour Party saw the new jobs – even the detested airbases were a source of employment – but still voted Carl Chatterton out in September and installed the anti-American Mark Moreno. He began a vigorous assault on the government. He questioned the legality of the new US bases. He challenged the sell-up of British firms. He was launching a bill proposing that Britain should comply with the EU’s demands. He even went to Edward Gott and proposed that if Gott would supply details about the sources of the funding for the last election, he would impeach Alan Petherbridge, the Prime Minister. Gott told him he would collaborate on this, but not now. It was, he said, too soon. ‘Soon,’ Moreno exploded. ‘If anything, it’s too late. When do you think soon will be over. How long? What more do you need, Gott?’
That winter was very hard. Public finances were so depleted that state benefits had to be cut by one third. Domestic use of electricity was rationed to keep factories, offices and hospitals open. No aspect of everyday life was unaffected. You have to imagine households where one partner is unemployed, that have electricity only four hours a day, so that laundry, bathing and cooking have to be squeezed into that time, that have only basic foodstuffs and where all forms of entertainment relying on electricity have gone by 8 p.m. Cars could only be used when absolutely essential.
People were bemused at first as they struggled to cope with life starved of electricity, petrol and, very often, money. They had no real feelings about joining a US-headed trade agreement any more than they had ever been enthusiastic about joining Europe. But forced to choose, this time they picked Europe. The siege had demonstrated the extent to which Britain and the Continent of Europe were now interdependent. And it certainly looked like the quickest way to get their old lives back – paint the house, drive the children to school, find a job, warm up the house.
Public order was hard to maintain. Strong measures were taken – there were the stop-and-searches involving police violence (the Auxiliaries became more out of control.) There were summary arrests, and unaccountable disappearances.
The Scots and Welsh demanded in their Parliaments that Britain should get out of the Transatlantic Trade Agreement and start negotiations with the EU. There was an attack on the base at Holy Loch and it was defended, with the help of a police force committed to public order. A man was shot. There was no apology. The US base on the East Kilbride estate outside Glasgow was stormed by young men – another was killed. Again, there was no apology. There were attacks on US servicemen and US personnel were obliged to stay on their bases, or at least go out in large groups. It was plain that Petherbridge had lost any control over his masters, if he had ever had any – if he had ever expected to have any.
But he intended to keep control over his own country and put in force the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004, which gave the government almost dictatorial powers. By autumn, Petherbridge was certainly the most unpopular man in the country. The public ached to topple him – but the only way of doing so, short of revolution, would come with the next general election, three years away.
Twelve
That summer, Gott was very depressed. He’d been outmanoeuvred by Petherbridge. The land for military camps had been secretly bought, there was a huge US military presence in the country, and the bases he’d risked so much to keep out of US hands were now, effectively, American fortresses. He abandoned altogether any effort to put together an alliance to get the matter of continued US control of the airbases discussed in Parliament. It was to
o late, he said; it was a fait accompli; possession was nine tenths of the law; he had lost; Petherbridge and Washington had won. He took it all as a personal failure, assuming too much blame for not preventing moves which had been well planned by many powerful men and women. When Julia Baskerville tried to tell him this, he said, ‘If I go back to all that, then I, or Joshua Crane, or somebody else is going to have a nasty accident.’
He said, ‘The Emperor Diocletian abdicated and went back to where he had been born, a slave, to farm. Several years later his co-Emperor asked him to return and resume power. He’d retired to the country and he replied, “If you could see my cabbages, you would not ask me that.” I’m with Diocletian.’
In actual fact, Gott grew no cabbages. He was just depressed. Although he’d never been a drinker, he drank more, worked less and often spent all day at his flat in pyjamas. After some months of this, Jeremy was worried enough to ring Lady Margot, who produced a sensible doctor and all Gott’s sons. Whether it was the doctor or the concerted attack on him by his children, Gott had to yield and, sulking, get back to work. We thought the constant visits from his son Robin’s wife and her children, who had never been checked or reproved in any way, had done the trick. The message was, pull yourself together or Celia, with little Harry and Martha, will come round every week and tear the flat to pieces.
By September Gott was more or less back on his feet again. In fact, he had no financial reasons for gloom. His nightmare was becoming real but he had taken precautions months earlier to protect himself. However, being right is no pleasure when what you’re right about is something so terribly wrong.
With work on the new Thames Estuary barrage only just begun, the Thames flooded in September, putting 250 metres of central London beside it under water. Sewers broke, power lines became useless. The City of London was plunged into darkness for three days and the Stock Exchange had to close. The flooding of the fifty square miles was a disaster.
Parliament itself was under a metre of water on the ground floor. Sewage pipes had burst, the floor of the House was full of stinking water in which unmentionable things floated. Nicely symbolic, said Joshua Crane, who had been nominated by Petherbridge to be part of the inspection team, though you didn’t appreciate the symbolism when you were standing in your Wellingtons in cold, dirty water in which turds and used condoms floated – and saw, over by the Speaker’s Chair, the swirl of water which had to be the wake of a swimming rat.
The Houses of Commons and Lords had to meet somewhere else. There was no chance the great and good would go north, to York, for example. They relocated to the New Crystal Palace in South London. Each morning, a convoy of private cars, official vehicles, police vehicles and outriders swept through the drab streets of South London and up to the new Xanadu at Crystal Palace, watched apathetically by people on the pavements.
It was outside Lambeth Public Library that, Joshua Crane said, he saw the start of the Point and Laugh Campaign. He saw, he claims, a small child in his mother’s arms, watching the convoy. The child pointed and laughed at the spectacle. The mother, mimicking the child, pointed and laughed as well. Beside her, a man copied her and the child, though perhaps less innocently. And soon a crowd of about twenty citizens, all standing watching their legislators sweeping through their streets, began pointing and laughing. Joshua was in a car with his friend Douglas Clare, a man from the Ministry of Education due to appear at a Select Committee and Tobias Kerr, right hand man to one of Alan Petherbridge’s right hand men. The need to get to Crystal Palace sometimes made for strange travelling companions. He said Kerr was disconcerted by the pointing and laughing. So were many others in the convoy, which probably explains why pointing and laughing caught on – pointing and laughing at US patrols, pointing and laughing at the Mayor and at the man coming down the street to bang on doors and check the IDs of the people in each house. The public was ground down, civil liberties a joke, but you can’t arrest someone for pointing and laughing. Petherbridge put together a secret committee of lawyers to see if legislation could be introduced to do exactly that, but word got out that he was trying to make laws to stop people from pointing and laughing – so people laughed their unamused laughs even more.
At this stage Petherbridge was probably hated more by his own party than by the Opposition, the other parties in the House or the country at large. The Conservatives knew he had bought their own successful election. Gott was still refusing to provide the damning evidence but, as the facts mounted up – B53s flying missions at random over cities, troops in the streets, the ever-present American at House committee meetings, the Watchers in the public gallery of the House of Commons – Gott’s testimony was hardly necessary. The party was ashamed. Naturally, it had its pro-Americans, too. There are always those who make a profit in hard times. There are always those who will support the strongest side of the argument because they are afraid to do otherwise.
If conditions were hard, the system was awash with money for those who knew how to grab it. ‘Bribes have been taken and jobs handed out,’ said Gott to Joshua. He mentioned many names – this MP on the board of an oil company, that MP sucking up contracts in the Lebanon, a third who had just been offered a lucrative directorship of an American-owned company. ‘A lot of noses in the trough,’ he said. ‘Then there are the threats – exposure of that schoolboy affair with another boy, now a High Court judge; old Wigston is effectively a bigamist, after a ceremony on a beach in Thailand; Hamish Smith is on the verge of bankruptcy. And Franks can’t protest because the US base in his constituency is the only source of jobs and businesses there. Even the MPs who aren’t on the take and can’t be threatened are doubtful – they’ve looked into the future and believe it’s American, whether they like it or not. They have to ask themselves whether maybe America is the bulwark against chaos and terrorism.
‘So,’ said Gott, ‘Petherbridge is the capo de capi of the Tory Party now. Sinister. It’s only a matter of time before the mysterious deaths begin. Don’t look so sceptical, Joshua. Wait and see. Of course, the party won’t be supine for ever. There’ll be a leadership contest soon.’
In November a leadership campaign was mounted. Joshua Crane was urged to stand, and agreed to do so although Lord Gott advised him against it. He added up the numbers for Joshua, who refused to be persuaded.
In the end the respected Edmund Thorsen, who had lost the leadership campaign to Frederick Muldoon in 2012, decided to stand. It was obvious that he was the stronger candidate and that Joshua’s candidacy would only split the anti-Petherbridge vote. Joshua, disappointed, withdrew. ‘Best day’s work you ever did,’ Gott told him unsympathetically. ‘And in any case, what do you think Petherbridge would make of your present domestic arrangements? He’d crucify you before the vote.’ Joshua believed no one knew – how could they? He blustered. Gott cut him down. ‘We’re all under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Our phones are tapped and our mail is read. Don’t be stupid, Joshua.’
‘You may be prepared to sit down under this!’ Joshua had exclaimed. ‘I’m not.’ Thorsen was defeated by a narrow margin. The hardship went on.
Joshua had a secret. His secret was Julia – Julia’s secret was Joshua. Agreed, party barriers matter less in these times – the occupation has set the agenda, making alliances between former enemies, enemies of former friends. Nevertheless, there are still protocols; you may vote with MPs from other parties but it’s doubtful if it’s all right to sleep with them.
The semi-detached marriage between Julia and her surgeon husband in Houston had collapsed, just as Mr Zulfeikar Zulani, butcher of East London, had predicted to his own wife at home. Julia’s sister and her husband had taken their children away for a holiday in Florida in the New Year of 2016. They decided to change their flight to look in on Julia’s husband, Nathaniel, on their way home. They all had a pleasant dinner together, parted and all would have been well if the Desmond family’s flight had not been delayed. Or if they had stayed overnight at the hotel provided,
instead of electing to spend the night at Nat’s so that the children could see a little more of their uncle. Once there, signs of a hasty, not-quite-efficient-enough clear-up manifested themselves. In the middle of the night Julia’s sister awoke, nudged her husband awake and asked, ‘Do you think Nat’s having an affair?’ Her husband said, ‘Yes. Go back to sleep.’ Julia’s sister had found a tube of make-up at the back of a bathroom cupboard. Her husband had looked into the eyes of a man with something to hide. Both concluded that Julia’s husband had another woman.
They jointly agreed not to tell Julia. In February, shortly before the vote on the Ministry of Defence’s Lands Sale Bill, Julia’s sister broke the pact and told her. At first, Julia angrily derided any suggestion that her husband was unfaithful to her. Then, over successive nights, she pieced together the evidence collected over what had seemed to her to have been a very happy Christmas – the hang-ups on the phone, the lost scrunchy in a corner explained as belonging to the short-haired cleaning woman, the occasional faraway look in Nat’s eyes. And then events took place as they so often do. Many sleepless night later, she asked her husband over the phone if he was seeing another woman. He said he was not. In June, he rang and asked for a divorce.
This was on the same day that the EU had announced its early sanctions, also the day Westminster Unplugged was due to go out live on air. Because of the political crisis, the producer of the show had called an emergency meeting with the director, the presenter and the popular political duo, Joshua and Julia, at his house in Notting Hill. Julia arrived in dark glasses, which she did not take off during the meeting. She did her best to contribute, but everybody there could see something was wrong. Afterwards, Joshua grabbed her and made her come round the corner with him to a pub. No stranger to messy affairs of the heart and being in agreement with Zulfeikar Zulani, though he didn’t know it, about the prospects of the survival of a marriage between a young and good-looking doctor and a young and good-looking MP, over five thousand miles apart, he spared her by simply pushing a brandy into her hand and telling her what the problem was. ‘He’s leaving you,’ he stated. And Julia nodded.
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