by James Philip
“I’m sure our American allies will make it worth your while, Nicolae. They have much deeper pockets than we do and eventually they will remember that it is in their best interests to attempt to rule the World again.”
The one-legged man in the battered arm chair smiled saturninely.
“I will talk to them,” he decided. “But not in England. I will talk to them in America.”
“America?” Eleni queried urgently, her brow furrowing.
Dick White was astonished when Nicolae Ceaușescu looked to the woman and, almost paternally, nodded reassurance to her as if he really cared what she thought. What astonished him most was that he could not tell if Ceaușescu meant it or not. The notion that a man like him was actually capable of caring about another human being was almost...shocking.
“Yes, my dear,” he told Eleni gently. “We are going to America; America, the land of the free.”
Chapter 13
Monday 8th June 1964
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
“The Foreign Secretary won’t be joining us this evening,” James Callaghan announced. “He and the Prime Minister agreed that it would be wise for the implications of the Egyptian-UK Accord to be re-stated in Tel Aviv at the earliest opportunity.
“Tom’s in the air at the moment,” added Denis Healey, the beetle-browed forty-six year old Member of Parliament for Leeds East whose relatively abrupt reintroduction to the top table of British political life had come as something of a rude shock to his colleagues. This despite the fact it had been the worst kept secret in Oxford that Tom Harding-Grayson had brought him into the Foreign Office as his a senior policy advisor – with the full support of the Prime Minister - some weeks ago.
Born in Kent Healey’s family had moved to Keighley in the West Riding of Yorkshire when he was five, educated at Bradford Grammar School he had earned an exhibition – a bursary rather than a full scholarship – to Balliol College in 1936. In 1937 he had become a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It was at Oxford that he had met another grammar school boy, Edward Heath, whom he succeeded as President of the Balliol College Junior Common Room. The two men had become close personal friends in those days and during Healey’s long post-October War illnesses, notwithstanding the intolerable burden of his duties, Ted Heath had regularly written to Healey, extending an open-ended invitation to join his government ‘as soon as your health and constitution permit’.
Very few people who encountered Denis Healey ever made the mistake of underestimating his intellect, or his ambition. In the wilderness years following Labour’s defeat in 1951 he had been for many years one of the Party’s rising stars and few had doubted that some time during the decade of the nineteen-sixties he would have challenged for the leadership. Whether he would have fought his way past the late Harold Wilson or George Brown, or Roy Jenkins or Callaghan, the Party’s post-October War leader was uncertain, but every other contender would constantly have been looking back over his shoulder to see where he had positioned himself in any future leadership race.
After resigning his membership of the CPGB in 1940, Healey had enlisted as a gunner in the Royal Artillery before being commissioned in the Royal Engineers, with whom he saw wide and varied war service in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. In 1944 he was brigade landing officer for the British assault at Anzio. Declining a permanent commission at the rank of lieutenant colonel, Major Healey had demobbed in 1945 and plunged straight into political life. Ironically his espousal of left-wing views in the early part of his career had amplified his voice when it was raised in moderation during the left-right schisms of the long years out of power in the 1950s. Embedded in the fabric of Atlee’s and then Gaitskell’s leadership as a key foreign policy advisor, Secretary of the International Department of the Labour Party, a long-time councillor at the Royal Institute for International Affairs and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and a member of the Executive of the Fabian Society, Healey was a main mover behind the Königswinter Conferences initiated in 1950 to promote European post-World War II reconciliation. Among the surviving luminaries in the Party, everybody in the room knew that had he survived the October War fit and able to lead, that the Party might easily have rowed in behind Denis Healey rather than Jim Callaghan.
“What the Hell did we promise Nasser, Denis?” Demanded Barbara Castle the MP for Blackburn, and Secretary of State for Labour in the UAUK; her tone was usually vexed. “More to the point what other little pacts and arrangements have we made in the Middle East?”
This was the third gathering of the leadership of the Labour Party as the ramifications of last week’s ‘no confidence vote’ continued to reverberate around Oxford. Roy Jenkins, Barbara Castle, Christopher Mayhew and Anthony Crosland viewed each other over the rims of their tea cups; the Secretaries respectively for the Home Office, the Ministry of Labour and the Health Department not quite knowing what to make of the presence of Crosland, a former ally who had left the UAUK in protest that spring.
James Callaghan had no illusions that he had become the leader of his party by overwhelming popular acclaim or intellectual perspicacity. He had been the last fit, standing candidate from the pre-war hierarchy. Other more gifted survivors and men of greater ambition, like Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey or Anthony Crosland had been struck down by illness, or simply unable or unwilling to get to Cheltenham, the emergency seat of government in those terrible first days after the cataclysm.
Denis Healey shrugged, a little disappointed by the clumsiness of Barbara Castle’s questions. It was fascinating to be again in the same ‘coven’ with his old ‘friends’; and he welcomed the opportunity to study them afresh and to reassess their strengths and weaknesses.
Margaret Thatcher, presumably prompted by the men behind her personal throne – Airey Neave and Iain Macleod, whose recent sad demise would probably come to be seen as the final nail in the UAUK’s coffin – had allocated the major posts in her Cabinet between the Conservative and Labour Parties approximately in proportion to their respective shares of the popular vote in the last General Election, that of 1959.
The labour ‘contingent’ in the UAUK led by James Callaghan, had originally nominated the posts of the Home, Labour and Health departments in favour respectively of Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crosland and Christopher Mayhew.
Roy Harris Jenkins, the forty-three year old, bespectacled Member of Parliament for Birmingham Stechford, was the son of a Welsh miner who by dint of sheer intellectual acuity and determination had strolled effortlessly through his years at Balliol in the late thirties and early years of the 1945 war. In the very college halls where the rump Home Office now operated he had enjoyed many of the happiest days of his life. In his student years at Balliol he had formed numerous lifelong friendships, including ones with the late Edward Heath, Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland. At Balliol he had become Secretary and Librarian of the Oxford Union Society, and the Chairman of the Oxford University Socialist Club and embarked on his life in politics; albeit a life rudely interrupted subsequent to achieving a First Class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1941, by four years spent in the Royal Artillery.
Nobody doubted that Charles Anthony Raven Crosland, the forty-five year old MP for Grimsby, possessed one of the finest minds in British politics, or that he would eventually have risen high in his Party and in Government regardless of the intervention of the October War. His Ministry of Labour portfolio had included a brief to explore options for re-creating a new national education system. Unfortunately, he had resigned from the UAUK in March before making his mark. Much as he liked and respected Crosland, whom he also found at times, wholly infuriating, Denis Healey had interpreted his friend’s willingness to quit the fray the moment the going got really tough as the signature of the man. Eloquent and sometimes brilliant; Crosland was not a man gifted with the ability to actually get things done.
Forty-eight year old Christopher Paget Mayhew, the MP for the bombed out ‘rotten’ cons
tituency of Woolwich East, formerly the seat of his old friend and mentor Ernest Bevin was a pro-Arabist with liberal views that before the October War had sat uncomfortably within the Party. Healey had thought him an odd choice for a cabinet post in such troubled times.
The fifty-three year old MP for Blackburn, Barbara Ann Castle, who had stepped into Anthony Crosland’s dilettante shoes at the Ministry of Labour, was an entirely different kind of political animal to Jenkins, Crosland or Mayhew. Like Healey she was much more of a street fighter. She came from a family active in the Independent Labour party in the 1930s; her father, a tax inspector by profession had been the editor of Bradford’s socialist newspaper, the Bradford Pioneer, while her mother had run a soup kitchen for local miners. Barbara Castle’s activism had bloomed first in nearby St Hugh’s College, where she had earned a third-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Later she had written for Tribune, then as now a leading mouthpiece of the left in British politics whose editor, William Mellor - a married man some two decades her senior – she was said to have been having an affair with at the time of his death in 1942. When she married in 1944, she was the housing correspondent of the Daily Mirror, the populist broadsheet of moderate socialism and had for many years been an unapologetic socialist on the Bevanite wing of the post-war Labour Party, promoting the rapid decolonization of the Empire and vociferously opposing the South African Apartheid regime.
“We are on dangerous ground, Jim,” Roy Jenkins observed. The Home Secretary had arrived nearly twenty minutes late. Men – and women - were meeting in smoky rooms all over Oxford at this hour, most of them talking various flavours of treason as they came to terms with the fact that the majority of the surviving members of the pre-war House of Commons had suddenly been deemed irrelevant to the present political process.
It was the manner of the prorogation of the Commons that bothered the Home Secretary. Members of Parliament had been summarily dismissed; those who held reserve commissions in the armed forces had been ordered to report to their units, others had simply been given rail warrants to enable them to return to their homes. Those not fortunate enough to have a specific job in Oxford had been in effect, sacked.
It was all very well for the Prime Minister to declaim to the disbelieving chamber that ‘this House has freely passed legislation demanding that everybody should do their bit in return for their rations’ but nobody in the House had actually thought any of that ‘austerity, war economy guff’ applied to them, their families, retainers and close associates.
Christopher Mayhew, the Health Minister had offered his resignation to the Prime Minister twenty-four hours ago. Margaret Thatcher had bluntly informed him that ‘until such time as Mr Callaghan nominates an acceptable replacement you will remain in post’. He was still brooding on this exchange.
“Does it matter what we promised the Egyptians?” Denis Healey asked tersely. “Will anybody care in a month or a year or in ten years time? Look at all the things Churchill promised people during the forty-five war. He got thrown out by the people after VE-Day and Clem Atlee did his level best to start with a clean sheet. Whoever comes after us will do the same thing. That’s politics, comrades!”
“Notwithstanding that somewhat quaint view of historiography,” Roy Jenkins observed ruefully, for he was nothing if not the premier scholar in the room, “the question of the legitimacy of the Government and our right to be a part of it cannot be ducked. I’d hazard a guess that less than a third of the Party stands behind we five.”
Within hours of the prorogation of the House scores of its members had been brought straight back in from the cold, installed in government jobs magically created out of thin air. Many, like Denis Healey, found themselves officially installed in the ‘informal’ jobs they had already been doing for weeks or months in the chaos of Oxford’s ‘government enclave’. In times of trial the last thing one did was leave one’s friends, or one’s key enemies, to their own devices. Iain Macleod’s Conservative Party successor at the Ministry of Information had offered Michael Foot, the radical leftist leader of the putative Independent Labour Party a job, for example. Had Enoch Powell not been so ill – he had collapsed in the street as he left King’s College last Friday night - he would surely have been given some kind of oversight role in Army Intelligence, or asked to remain in Oxford to ‘review’ reports coming over Airey Neave’s desk in the Ministry for National Security.
Denis Healey decided to answer Barbara Castle’s original question.
“We promised the Egyptians a mutual defence pact,” he told the room. “However, the mutual defence elements of the pact were only to come into effect after hostilities in the Gulf had ended.”
Roy Jenkins frowned.
“What exactly did we tell the Israelis?”
Barbara Castle had no time for semantics.
“Well, whatever is going on in Cairo isn’t any kind of foreign policy coup!”
Jim Callaghan called the meeting to order.
“We’re not here to second guess Nasser and his generals,” he reminded his colleagues. “Frankly, what mandate I, we enjoyed in the immediate aftermath of the October War is long exhausted. If things go badly in the Persian Gulf or in the South Atlantic, as they may well do in the next few weeks, there will be calls by some on both the right and the left, for an indefinite suspension of politics as normal. Presently, I have the Prime Minister’s word that a General Election will be held within ninety days of the end of major hostilities in the Middle East, regardless of the ongoing situation in the South Atlantic. I believe that the Prime Minister is sincere in this commitment, albeit with the reservation that her own position in her Party is as precarious as is mine. In many ways she faces threats that I don’t because the pre-war Conservative Party still survives as a coherent political entity, unlike our own beloved Party. Be that as it may be, the question is simple. Do we stay in government with the Tories in the national interest? Or do we wash our hands of our responsibilities?”
Roy Jenkins found the framing of the two related questions inelegant. His was a mind with finely crafted, rounded edges keenly interested in all the possibilities of a given scenario; to reduce such great questions of state to a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘true’ or ‘false’ resolution was to misrepresent and to disrespect the complexity of the proposition.
Barbara Castle spoke first.
“Michael Foot and several of his friends came to my office this afternoon and gave me a pep talk about unilateralism and de-colonialism.”
Michael Foot and the feisty MP for Blackburn had been twin stars of the left-wing of the Labour Party in the 1950s. It was no secret that they had remained close since Castle’s admittance to the UAUK.
“Michael thinks we ought to ‘abandon Abadan’, he said it several times, I think because he just likes the sound of the words. Abandon Abadan, forget about the Middle East, he says. He thinks we ought to be sitting around a table talking like ‘adults’ with the Argentine. Oh, and he still thinks we should scrap all our nuclear weapons. He says we live in a country built on top of a giant coal field, that we don’t need Middle Eastern or American oil; that we should use coal to make synthetic oil – like the Germans in the forty-five war – and be independent!”
“It’s not a completely nonsensical view,” Denis Healey remarked contemptuously. “Not completely! What sort of progress would it be to go back to a Victorian industrial model based on coal?”
“We’re not here to rehash old arguments,” Jim Callaghan snapped. “I want to know how many of you are behind me. I propose to accept the Prime Minister’s terms for a continuance of the UAUK.”
The others fell silent.
“Tom Harding-Grayson has indicated that he will remain in the government whatever we decide this evening.”
Barbara Castle glanced to her male companions.
“We’re all behind you, Jim.”
Chapter 14
Wednesday 10th June 1964
Joint Allied Forw
ard Headquarters, Khorramshahr, Iran
Lieutenant General Richard ‘Michael’ Power Carver returned Major General Mirza Hasan Mostofi al-Mamaleki’s salute and shook his deputy’s hand. It was their first meeting since the new command arrangements had been authorised by Sir Richard Hull, the Chief of the Defence Staff back in Oxford. Around the two men the shell-damaged complex on the outskirts of Khorramshahr – mostly ruins above ground but an extensive warren of untouched deep bunkers below ground - was a hive of activity as British and Iranian officers methodically went about setting up the new headquarters.
Events had moved quickly after General Jafar Sharif-Zahedi – the Military Governor of Khuzestan Province, which covered the Khorramshahr-Abadan Sector – had mounted a clumsy, piecemeal assault on the eastern perimeter of al-Mamaleki’s Third Imperial Armoured Division’s sector.
Zahedi and members of his extended family had literally been in bed with the Pahlavi dynasty ever since it came to power in the 1920s. Zahedi, a man with little or no actual ‘soldiering’ experience had based himself and his entourage in the town of Bandr Mahshahr some thirty miles to the east, and was wholly preoccupied with the idea of ‘recovering the jewel of Abadan’ rather than defending his country’s western borders against the onrushing Red Army tide. It was Al-Mamaleki’s point blank refusal to collaborate in this adventure that had prompted the botched attack on his lines; easily repulsed by the 90-millimetres cannons of his American built M-48 Patton tanks, the 84 and 105-millimtre guns of his hull down British built Centurion Is and IIs, and the pre-positioned anti-tank platoons equipped with lethal L2 BAT (Battalion Anti-Tank) 120-millimetre recoilless rifles. In the days since, whole units formerly loyal to the Provisional Government had come across al-Mamaleki’s lines under white flags of truce to continue the fight under his banner.
