by James Philip
Or at least he had been loyal up until now.
“Do you have command of the Air Force?” Nasser demanded.
“Yes, Mister President.”
“How soon can you bomb the counter-revolutionary traitors attacking the Presidential Palace?”
Several seconds ticked by very slowly before the other man responded.
“My pilots are not accomplished night fliers, Mister President. Precision cannot be guaranteed...”
“General Amer will provide you with map references which are to be suppressed. If you have to knock down whole districts to get these bastards, so be it!”
“Yes, sir!”
Chapter 3
Friday 5th June 1964
Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire
Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, and Defender of the Faith, had been informed within minutes of the deeply troubling – ‘troubling’ because one used the word ‘disastrous’ very advisedly these days – news from Parliament in the Great Hall of Kings College. Thereafter, she had asked the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Henry Tomlinson to briefly reiterate what he understood her constitutional position to be given that the governance of the United Kingdom, its overseas dependencies and territories was still, strictly speaking, being conducted under the remit of the pre-War Emergency Acts, and certain ‘piecemeal’ amendments hurriedly enacted in the months since. She had spoken to Sir Henry Tomlinson first because he was the greying éminence grise actually running the machinery of government which underpinned the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom. While the constitutional niceties had to be observed – at least in the letter – in the unfortunate circumstances of this brave new age this was no time to shilly-shally around the ‘facts on the ground’. Figuratively speaking, although the fires were presently being set all around ‘Rome’ she was not about to start fiddling!
Awaiting the arrival of the Prime Minister the Queen had been deep in conversation with her consort, Prince Philip and with the man who had been her Private Secretary since the beginning of her reign. Fifty-three year old Lieutenant Colonel Sir Michael Edward Adeane had been seriously wounded in the attack on Balmoral in December, the regicidal attack in which her husband had been critically injured and her three year old son Andrew, killed. Robbed of the support of both her husband and of her trusted Private Secretary in the weeks after that attack, looking back she hardly knew how she had carried on. Thankfully, Sir Michael had been restored to his duties and been at her side and by her shoulder since late March, and her consort, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh had since rejoined her at Woodstock more recently. Consequently, despite the ongoing physical ‘discomfort’ caused to her by the IRA’s ‘failed’ attempt on her life at RAF Brize Norton in April, she now felt herself able to withstand any shock. Even the shock of being reminded, in the most unambiguous fashion, that the House of Commons was self-evidently partly comprised of an over-large gang of idiots who seemed intent on stabbing the country, and its fighting men in the back in pursuit of their own selfish advancement.
Although of course, constitutionally speaking, it was not her proper place to say as much in public.
The discussion in the Library of the great old mansion gifted by a grateful nation to John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough in which Great Britain’s incomparable wartime leader, Winston Churchill had been born in 1874, was conducted in sober, considered tones other than when Prince Phillip – a man whose views on the conduct of international affairs had been hugely influenced by his early career in the wardrooms of naval vessels in his wife’s father’s Navy – made plain his fulminating frustration with the ‘bloody lefties’ and ‘faint hearts’ in Oxford in middlingly pungent terms.
Sir Michael Adeane rode out these effusions of angst with the practiced charm and dignity of a master diplomat as befitted a man who had, quite literally, been born into Imperial, and now Royal service. This was hardly to be wondered at given that he was the maternal grandson of Lord Stamfordham, Private Secretary to Queen Victoria from 1895 to that monarch’s death in 1901, at which time he had then become secretary to the Prince of Wales, Duke of York and Cornwall, and later to King George V. It had been Lord Stamfordham who had advised the King – the Queen’s grandfather - to change the family name from Saxe-Gotha-Coburg to Windsor during the First World War, and to decisively abjure the temptation to offer Tsar Nicholas II and his family sanctuary in England after the Russian Revolution. Stamfordham had died at the age of eighty-one in March 1931 while still in the service of George V.
Sir Michael had been educated at Eton and graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1934 before serving as aide-de-camp to two successive Governor Generals of Canada - Vere Brabazon Ponsonby, 9th Earl of Bessborough, and Lord Tweedmuir, a man better known to his avid readers as the author John Buchan – before returning home in 1936. Subsequent to his war service he had became Assistant Private Secretary to the Queen’s father, King George VI, before being promoted on that monarch’s death to his present post.
“I believe that Sir Henry is correct in his analysis of the essentials of the current situation, Ma’am,” the Queen’s Private Secretary remarked solemnly. “Clearly there is a constitutional ‘grey area’ between the arrangements pre-war, the practical implementation of the War Emergency Acts, particularly those amendments enacted de jure by the former Interim Emergency Administration of the United Kingdom under Mr Heath’s leadership, but I think that the salient facts of the matter are relatively straightforward.”
The Queen and her husband listened patiently.
In his role as her Private Secretary Sir Michael ran the Royal Household, responsible directly only to her person. He dealt on a day to day basis with government departments, and liaised constantly with the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Private Office – in pre-October War days separate departments but latterly indistinguishable other than that Sir Henry Tomlinson was, strictly speaking, the Head of the Home Civil Service and as Cabinet Secretary, theoretically separate from the Prime Minister’s ‘private’ office – and when appropriate, with foreign ambassadors and Commonwealth high commissioners. Sir Michael’s role was one of oiling the wheels of governance, of seamlessly enabling communication and intercourse between the upper echelons of the machinery of state; and the Queen was the constitutional, but non-executive head of that State.
Sir Michael discharged his duties with peerless grace and efficiency.
“Under the provisions of the various War Emergency Acts Parliament, specifically, the House of Commons sits in an advisory not an executive capacity. The question of whether the Prime Minister, and or the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom may, or may not, have subsequently made a decision inter alia, that the ‘Parliamentary system’ should be in some sense ‘fully restored’ does not alter the fact that under the said War Emergency Acts Parliament sits at the convenience of the ‘executive’ of our government ‘governing’ under the ‘Royal Seal’. Specifically, that is the ‘Great Seal of the Realm’. Therefore, under the powers invested in the Crown, and the executive, or Government entrusted by the Crown in Your Person, Ma’am, the situation is that while the Commons is perfectly entitled to express its confidence or otherwise in ‘Your Government’, its ‘expression’ is only that. Under the letter of the law the Prime Minister is free to disregard the will of Parliament. In fact given the current exigencies under which the nation and the Commonwealth labour, an expression of ‘no confidence’ in Her Majesty’s Government by members of the Commons, if not couched in the most emollient of terms, might reasonably in some circumstances be regarded as treasonous.”
Prince Phillip snorted.
“Personally, I’d lock up the whole crowd of them!”
Sir Michael Adeane smiled thinly.
“Quite, sir,” he concurred without actually agreeing or disagreeing with the Duke of Edinburgh’s proposition. “However, I believe that th
ere is a more important consideration. Sir Henry Tomlinson is correct, in my opinion, to caution that whatever action is taken in this matter we must be mindful that without the implicit active participation and whole-hearted support of the Chiefs of Staff, the United Kingdom is at this time ungovernable.”
“If David Luce was still alive we’d know exactly where we stood with the Chiefs!” Prince Phillip observed, sadly.
“What is your feeling on this matter, Sir Michael?” The Queen asked her private Secretary. Her voice was very quiet, a little distracted as if her thoughts were far away.
Her distraction had nothing to do with any wooliness of thinking; rather more to do with the nightmare prospect of a vacuum of power at the very nexus of the half-broken realm over which she reigned.
Neither the post-cataclysm United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, nor its more inclusive successor the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, could have been brought into being or made to function in any meaningful way without bending the unwritten British constitution – virtually to destruction - in hitherto untested ways; or without her explicit consent to the experiment. The post-October War governance of the United Kingdom had been a conspiracy between the political parties, the armed forces and the crown, a ramshackle three-legged construct liable to be undermined at any time. The Queen had had her doubts about the wisdom of reinstituting Parliament – a Parliament that the war had made intrinsically unrepresentative because it was so obviously replete with Members who spoke for now non-existent or wrecked, depopulated ‘rotten’ boroughs – and giving a premature national platform for malcontents and dissenters who wanted to refight old battles pertinent only to the affairs of a World which no longer existed.
“My understanding is that the Chiefs of Staff stand squarely behind you, Ma’am.” Sir Michael Adeane sighed. “Moreover, Sir Henry detects no sign that the Chiefs of Staff are remotely interested in taking upon themselves the heinous burden of national government at this time. While the Chiefs of Staff entertain a range of views concerning how best to ‘deal with’ the Americans, and around the resources available to and the prioritisation of military needs over those of the civilian population, broadly speaking it is Sir Henry’s judgement, and my own from conversations I have had with senior people close to the Chief of the Defence Staff that Mrs Thatcher’s administration retains the conditional backing of the Chiefs of Staff. Mrs Thatcher for all her relative youth and lack of experience in government retains the support of the Chiefs of Staff on two counts. One, she generally listens to what they say to her; and two, when she makes a decision she usually sticks to it. This said, Ma’am,” he went on, “the sad death of Mr Macleod, the man around whom a substantial part of the Conservative Party might, reasonably, have been expected to coalesce, somewhat muddies the political waters around the Prime Minister.”
Prince Philip rose slowly and very painfully to his feet to stand behind his wife.
“What you are saying is that now Mr Macleod is gone half-a-dozen of the other Tory bigwigs will start jockeying to undermine and eventually replace the lady?”
“Yes,” Sir Michael Adeane admitted sadly. “Very much in the undignified manner of sharks smelling blood in the water, I suspect.”
The monarch’s consort placed his hand gently on the Queen’s shoulder, and she half-raised her face to meet his stoic grimace. They were both still ‘crocked’; twin metaphors for the state of the nation. She was just out of plaster, limping like a steeplechaser with a strained fetlock, he was hobbled like a knight in armour trudging across a water-logged ploughed field.
Sir Henry Tomlinson cleared his throat respectfully.
“Of course,” he remarked gently, “much depends upon the Prime Minister. Nothing, even under pre-war arrangements obliges her to remove herself from the fray immediately.”
“Quite,” the Queen murmured.
In Oxford the factions in each political party and grouping would be gathering to rake through the runes of today’s Parliamentary debacle; fomenting plots and coups, manoeuvring for advantage, attempting to make pacts, and form transitory conspiratorial alliances. It was disgraceful but it had ever been thus.
“What will the Commonwealth make of this?” The Queen asked. While the question was voiced rhetorically it was anything but rhetorical. With Margaret Thatcher at the helm the United Kingdom’s allies and friends had known where they stood; beneath the RAF’s umbrella of V-Bombers, their sea lanes protected by the Royal Navy, their soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder with British Tommies who were not about to take a single backward step But with a new government? With the Angry Widow gone?
“Both the Australian and the New Zealand High Commissioners have requested audiences with you tomorrow morning, Ma’am,” Sir Michael Adeane informed his monarch.
At this point the Queen’s Private Secretary broke off.
A lady in waiting entered the room.
“The Prime Minister, Ma’am!” A young woman with an unaffectedly plummy voice – as befitted the second daughter of an Earl – declared, bowing her head before and after she had made her announcement.
Sir Michael Adeane stood up and Prince Philip, grasping his walking stick moved to his wife’s right so that he could offer her his free hand as she rose tentatively to her feet. They joked a lot about how they were two ‘old crocks’, like the country, battered and bruised but in absolutely no way bowed by the vicissitudes of the recent months.
Margaret Thatcher’s face was impassive.
For all that she looked very tired she was also younger than she had seemed the last time she had visited Blenheim Palace only a few days ago. Then she had had the weight of the world on her shoulders; she had been alone and harried from all sides and worried about her trip to Cape Cod to confront Jack Kennedy in his lair. This evening she was herself again. Her war paint was perfectly applied, not one hair was out of place on her painstakingly coiffured head, and her trousseau, a blue two piece no doubt acquired for her at Bloomingdales in New York by Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson, artfully complemented the steely blue in her eyes. A neat black handbag hung from the crook of her left elbow. Her shoes were half-heeled, fashionable but sensible, buffed to a fierce shine.
During the brief civilities of the formal welcome the Queen found herself reflecting that in the decade and more that she had been on the throne that she must have met dozens of movie stars, princesses and famous women, not one of whom had half the personal magnetism of sheer force of presence of the woman who had been her Prime Minister for the last six months.
It infuriated her that those hidebound Parliamentary buffoons and dimwits – the vast majority of whom were men of a certain class and education, regardless of their current political loyalties or creeds – had stabbed Margaret Thatcher in the back in the nation’s hour of greatest peril!
Chapter 4
Friday 5th June 1964
HMS Alliance, 8 miles west of Pointe de la Parata, Corsica
Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington would not have believed it if he had not seen it with his own eyes. After he had sunk the French destroyers Surcouf and Cassard, the latter with a heavyweight Mark VIII torpedo fired at two thousand yards from HMS Alliance’s stern tubes; absolutely nothing else had happened until it was getting dark and then, and only then had a procession of small boats – the largest some kind of trawler with an Oerlikon cannon mounted on its stern – apologetically straggled out and begun belatedly looking for survivors with searchlights blazing. By then most of the men in the water would have been long dead.
Hanging around the scene of the crime had been a calculated risk but nothing he had learned about the French squadron based at Ajaccio in the last few days had given him any reason to think it posed a significant threat to Alliance, or for that matter, any other British submarine operating in these waters. And besides, his torpedo tubes were reloaded and he was hoping that if he loitered in the vicinity of the Gulf of Ajaccio, sooner or later other big ships bottled up in harbo
ur would attempt to escape, or fresh targets would arrive from elsewhere.
Alliance had her snorkel – ‘snork’ in submariner’s parlance – up and was running dead slow on her diesels recharging her batteries just in case more ‘trade’ obligingly turned up in the area.
Raising the snork this close to shore would have been inviting trouble off a Royal Navy base in time of war, and definitely not the sort of thing one would have contemplated if one thought there were any Soviet submarines, or surface units anywhere within a twenty mile radius of one’s position. However, this close inshore, given the vagaries of sonar and the water column hereabouts in the Western Mediterranean unless somebody actually spotted the snorkel by chance – unlikely because it was a dark, cloudy night and the sinking of the two destroyers had driven away every craft other than those comprising the motley flotilla of small boats pulling bodies out of the sea over ten miles away – Alliance was safe enough. More to the point Barrington was unwilling to voluntarily vacate such an excellent ‘ambush’ locale.
The submarine game was a waiting game and lately, he had discovered, much to his own surprise, that he was very, very good at playing it.
Every half-an-hour or so he raised the attack periscope for about twenty seconds; twenty seconds was amply sufficient time to complete a single quick sweep around the horizon. Either Barrington or his second-in-command, Lieutenant Michael Philpott would do the honours.
