Right of Reply

by John Harris

  ‘Spencer,’ Moffat reminded him in his educated Scots voice, ‘the Chinese can’t do anything. They’re too involved in Korea, and what they’re doing there gives them no right to criticise anyone.’

  Moffat was a small man with a high forehead and a twisted back, which was the result of an injury at school. They liked in the House to call him ‘Crookback’, but he had the reputation for having an undevious and accurate mind that went as straight for the heart of any subject as an arrow from its bow.

  Carey studied him for a moment. ‘Put it another way,’ he suggested quietly. ‘What he’s proposing to do about Khanzi takes away any right we have to criticise the Chinese. And it’s sheer arrogance for him to assume that Scepwe’s government’s going to fall because we’re assembling an army just outside their borders.’

  Moffat shrugged. ‘The by-election at Rudkin and Hale’ll show what the country thinks,’ he said.

  ‘We should avoid making any political capital over it, though,’ Carey said sharply. ‘Nevertheless, I do feel the voters should realise what’s in the balance. It could easily escalate into another world war.’

  ‘Nobody’s said yet, of course, that we’re going to fight,’ Moffat reminded him gently.

  ‘No, but we are.’ Carey began to tick off points on his fingers. ‘Troops have been assembled and I know that currency overprinted “Occupation of Khanzi” has been issued.’

  Moffat looked up quickly. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. Never mind where I got my information, but I’m sure.’ Carey stuck up another finger. ‘Troops have been disembarking at Pepul for weeks. RAF jets have flown out, the trooper, Ascara, has been ordered home and naval vessels on routes away from Pepul have received orders to proceed towards it.’ He lifted another finger. ‘Senior British civil servants have stopped getting the usual classified documents as if they’ve been struck off the lists and Josh Cambridge has been sent on unexpected leave. So have Vasey Pole and Andrews. All Khanzian experts, Derek. Every one of them.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Moffat suddenly looked worried.

  ‘I had lunch with Vasey Pole,’ Carey pointed out. ‘He told me. You know these civil servants. He feels slighted.’ He lifted another finger. ‘NATO and friendly attachés have reported being left in the dark by the drying up of channels of information normally open to them, and two months ago British ambassadors of African countries flew home for consultations. Finally’ – he gestured once more – ‘Clifford flew out to Machingo last week. You know what Clifford is, Derek. He’s an expert on psychological warfare. It all adds up. And what makes it all so sad is that we probably can’t pull it off.’

  Moffat stared. ‘You mean Scepwe could beat us? Surely it would be all over before he could get moving.’

  Carey smiled. ‘Derek, this thing’s being organised in a peaceful atmosphere devoid of the urgency of war. And what’s worse, in a political arena. The stage management of a military operation, Derek, has to be first class. But, worst of all, he’s had the greatest difficulty in getting Hodgeforce together. We didn’t help.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All our demands for economy in the last few years.’ Carey frowned. ‘We ought to have known they’d cut what they thought they wouldn’t need.’

  ‘They didn’t need the Forces until now.’

  Carey nodded. ‘Until now, Derek,’ he agreed. ‘Reliance on nuclear weapons presupposes an empty battlefield. The threat of nuclear annihilation meant it was desirable to reduce battlefield densities, and that meant smaller armies.’

  ‘You’re talking like a soldier now. Or else you’re electioneering. Economies had to come.’

  Carey ignored the jibe, his face heavy. ‘Not in pay cuts,’ he said. ‘The teachers, the Civil Service and the police had unions to object, and they didn’t get their pay cut.’

  He put down his pencil and stared at his feet for a moment his hands in his pockets. He was a man with a burning sense of destiny and he could see lesser men holding the centre of the stage.

  ‘I’m very unhappy about the whole thing, Derek,’ he said slowly. ‘And I feel I ought to show how unhappy I am.’

  ‘What are your thoughts on coalition? There’ve been moves to encourage the idea. If things went against him, he might consider it.’

  ‘I couldn’t entertain it,’ Carey said. ‘I don’t trust him.’

  Moffat gestured with the file he was holding. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘What do you suggest? Questions have been going down all week. The Table Office are ringing a new one every minute.’ He paused as Carey stared at the floor, thinking, then went on eagerly. ‘There’s one from Gordon-Grey and that’s a good sign. I thought we might follow him up with a couple of our own. Make the first one fairly innocent and then hit them for six with a supplementary.’

  ‘They’ll do their best to prevent us bringing it up,’ Carey pointed out. ‘He’s already refused a debate on the grounds of security.’

  ‘He’s taking a hell of a risk, Spencer.’

  ‘He’s taking the biggest risk of his career,’ Carey agreed. ‘And we’ve got to protest against it, Derek.’

  ‘We’ve been a bit slow,’ Moffat said wryly. ‘The students have stolen our thunder.’

  ‘Well, let’s avoid that sort of nonsense,’ Carey said sharply. ‘Protest meetings are associated too much with all the oddities who come out over Easter.’

  ‘There’s still Gordon-Grey and a few on the other side of the House,’ Moffat said. ‘I’ve heard that Lord Edbury’s prepared to join them. Perhaps they only need a shove. There may be more than we think.’

  ‘How about a broadcast?’ Carey said unexpectedly.

  Moffat stared. ‘They’d never give us the time,’ he replied. ‘They’d never have given it to Attlee in September, 1939 – even if he’d wanted it.’

  ‘They might have given it him in July, 1939.’

  Moffat eyed his Party leader. ‘What have you got in mind, Spencer?’

  Carey gestured. ‘At times of crisis, everybody forgets Coronation Street and turns to Auntie BBC for the plain unvarnished truth straight from the horse’s mouth.’

  ‘We’d never get them with us.’

  ‘Wouldn’t we?’ Carey threw down his pencil. ‘Derek, we’re all rather apt to forget how independent Auntie can be, especially as every government that gets in starts setting about her if she doesn’t come to heel. But I’ve been going into this a little. There’s no specific instruction to the BBC in the Charter other than it has to be impartial in political matters. It’s their responsibility to distinguish what’s a Government broadcast of a non-political nature and what’s a broadcast containing within it an element of political controversy to which the Opposition has the right of reply.’

  Suddenly galvanised into enthusiasm, Carey got up from the chair and began to move about the room, gesturing as he talked. ‘The decision taken by the BBC at the time of the Suez crisis probably more than any other single decision, established in fact and in principle their complete independence,’ he went on. ‘We’d have to persuade them that that broadcast of his on Tuesday contained an element of political controversy, of course, and was not a Government offering.’

  Moffat looked at his leader, his eyes bright.

  ‘Can we persuade them?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you could set it out.’

  Moffat moved towards the door, caught by Carey’s enthusiasm. ‘I’ll get hold of the Chief Whip,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to do this quickly.’

  ‘We’ll have to let him know our intentions, of course.’

  ‘He’ll argue we have no right.’

  Carey tapped the desk. ‘I don’t think he’ll succeed,’ he said. ‘The situation’s an exact parallel of Suez, and Gaitskell spoke against that when the ships were actually under way. If they started shooting, of course, it’d become something else entirely because we’d be at war and the BBC couldn’t agree. But while we’re still at peace, we have a right to voice our mistrus
t and disagreement. Gaitskell established the precedent.’

  Moffat stared at him, then he smiled. ‘Didn’t do much good,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘They still went into Suez.’

  ‘Yes.’ Carey nodded heavily. ‘They still went in. But, at least, Gaitskell was able to say afterwards that he’d opposed it.’

  ‘It didn’t stop him losing the next election.’

  ‘No.’ Carey paused, his hands in his pockets, his eyes reflective. ‘He never expected the electorate to do that to him. Still – I’m going to see the Governors of the BBC, Derek, and then you and I are going to get together and write out what I’m going to say. So start thinking about it. It’s got to be good, even if we draft it a dozen times, and it’s got to mean exactly what we want – no more or less. No fireworks either. In politics we always tend to reduce everything to a good slogan and, this time, there must be no backlash.’

  He tossed a file across the desk. ‘Those are constituency reports,’ he pointed out. ‘And it seems to me he hasn’t got as many behind him as he thinks he has. And, whatever happens, Derek, we’ve got to register our protest.’

  ‘Suppose the fighting starts – while we’re under way, so to speak?’

  ‘Then we stand a chance of being branded as traitors. But that’s a risk we’ve got to take.’ Carey looked at Moffat and smiled. ‘Sometimes, in a man’s life, Derek, he’s got to take a chance of being ruined just for the sake of a principle. It’s never come my way before, but I think it’s come now.’

  Four

  The next day, while the conferences at Machingo were drawing to a close and while the politicians in England were manoeuvring for their next move, the troops from the base at Pepul went on board their transports for the practice shake-down that had been ordered by General Hodges before his departure for the capital. Rumour had it that it had been insisted on by senior naval and air force officers in charge of the arrangements who were troubled by all the things that seemed to persist in going wrong.

  The base at Pepul had filled too quickly with troops. Four companies of Guards had arrived, hacking down trees when they had been given a wooded strip to camp on, so that not one tent should be out of line; and a squadron of tanks, which had immediately been instructed not to move because of the damage they were doing to the frail roads round Pepul. Water was short, the firing ranges were full, a great deal of ammunition and stores had been misdirected to the Far East, and because of the increased traffic, the Malalan accident rate had gone up alarmingly.

  Hodgeforce had been gathered together with a great deal too much haste and too much barrel-scraping, and had then been allowed to wait too long without orders, so that the erosive effect of inaction was already beginning to show. Reservists had begun to demand to be sent home while the National Servicemen did not show the care their older comrades did. There had been a nasty accident on the airfield next door when one of the Kestrel bombers, which had arrived from England carrying the bombs they would have to use if it came to a shooting war, had disappeared into fragments, together with her crew and ground staff, because of an error during a practice bombing up. It was said to have been caused by insufficient training and was only one of a series of accidents which had started when one of the great transport petrol dumps had gone up, killing seven men and destroying a dozen tankers, and stripping trees and flattening all the native houses along the perimeter.

  While the sabre-rattling had continued in the capitals of the United Kingdom, Malala and Khanzi, therefore, and in an attempt to iron out a few of the snags that troubled the command, the people who were most concerned with the crisis – the men who in the event of fighting were to fire the shots and carry the loads – left their comfortless and overcrowded billets for a rehearsal.

  The movement was carried out with a fair amount of efficiency, but to Captain Richard White, of Number 5 Air Contact Team, attached with his men to the 17th/105th Assault Battalion, it stuck out a mile that all was far from well with Hodgeforce.

  A National Serviceman in the days of the first National Service Act, White had stayed on in the Army after the Act had been rescinded and had managed to work himself up to the rank of captain; and it was while he was secretly hoping he might even make major that, by a Government edict, the British Army had been cut by fifteen thousand men on the grounds of economy and White had been among those to go.

  He had, in fact, just been in the process of fixing himself up with a job he was sure he wouldn’t enjoy when the crisis had blown up and, before he knew where he was, like several hundred other Reservist officers, he had found himself reporting, as instructed in his papers, back to the depot he had just left.

  There he had learned that, to give Hodgeforce the weight of a little experience, every officer who had ever heard a shot fired in anger was being flown in from the few remaining British bases about the world – Hong Kong, Germany, the Pacific; and that the transport belonging to his unit – over-age lorries, obsolescent tanks and even amphibious vehicles that had been scraped off every beach in England – one even with a notice board still attached to the side: ‘Saucy Sue. Trips across the bay’ – was still in process of being made to work.

  The commander of the Air Contact Group had turned out to be completely in the dark about what was going on as he tried to expand his unit to three times its normal size. The wireless sets that White was expected to use turned out to be old-fashioned and heavy, and the fact that he himself, earlier in his service, had added modifications to the best of them and written an instructional pamphlet on its use, had rather knocked the bottom out of the harangue of the warrant officer who was explaining its advantage to him.

  Six weeks later, in a charter aircraft that had recently been carrying holidaymakers to Spain and still bore the route maps in the pockets, he had flown to Malala where he learned he had been attached to a training battalion recently out from England that was composed entirely of National Servicemen and was commanded by a colonel who, only a week before, had held a command in Hong Kong.

  From a point above where White was standing, Colonel Leggo watched the operation from his Landrover. He had flown up to Pepul the night before, jammed uncomfortably into the wireless operator’s seat of a V31 bomber; and he now waited alongside the sea wall in Victoria Street, staring down at the sun-bright water and the beaches where the mammies normally operated the market around the fruit boats that came down from the creeks towards Machingo.

  He was not alone. Since this beach where the troops now waited in patient lines was the only available strip of sand that fitted their purpose and was smack in front of Africa Town, the market quarter of Pepul, half the population had turned out to see the fun. Porters, screaming small boys in ragged shorts, and mammies in gaudy lappas and Mother Hubbards lined the wall with Leggo, watching what was going on and cheering and turning somersaults at every new hold-up.

  Below them, against a wide stretch of new concrete slipway, two or three landing craft had dropped their ramps, and beyond them, the resurrected destroyer, Banff, lay by the end of the mole, along which a thin stream of khaki-clad men were filing, loaded down like pack animals with their radios, weapons and personal equipment.

  It was quite clear already to Leggo that the slipway would have to be re-laid. It had been put down at Hodges’ insistence by a Malalan contractor named by President Braka and, while it had been done quickly, with the labourers chanting their rhythmic deep-throated tribal songs as they had swung their picks in unison, it was quite clear now that it had been done too hurriedly and that the concrete was of indifferent quality. Rumour had it that a fair proportion of the purchase price for it had found its way past the contractor to Alois Braka himself, and already the concrete was crumbling under the heavy vehicles so that Leggo shuddered to think what would happen when the Senator tanks appeared.

  He wrote a few words in his notebook, then took off his cap and ran his handkerchief round the leather band inside. It was already hot, with the breath-catching bite of an oven as th
e flaring rays of the sun glanced violently off the surrounding mountains. In spite of the early hour, Pepul harbour wore a jaded look, red with dust and drained of energy and, as the sun rose over the hills, the heat began to rebound from the smudged grey walls near the sea.

  The port rose, white and red and glaring green from the Spanish steps to Hastings Hill, from Saba Town to Africa Town, from the flat Mohammedan area beyond Passy past the worn stone statue of Queen Victoria that still survived after twenty years of independence, for no other reason than that no one seemed to be able to raise the money or the energy to remove it. Farther to the east and west among the tall, tufted palms and the thick-leaved banana plants were the unpainted houses that abutted, dry and sun-drenched, like heaps of kindling wood, on the town centre. Beyond them, the dwellings of the poor, of hammered tin or mud, clung to the water’s edge, their rusting roofs and their air of old junk making nonsense of all the boastful speeches of Alois Braka in Machingo.

  Leggo watched the men filing past him from the open space where the lorries had deposited them, their shirts drenched with sweat, their faces gaunt with exhaustion. There was an air about them of sullenness and dislike that worried him and he was just making a mental note to take the matter up with Hodges when he returned, when a shout behind him, startling in its familiarity, made him swing round in his seat in surprise.

  ‘Stuart Leggo! What in hell are you doing here?’

  Leggo’s head jerked round, startled by the feminine voice which, even after six years, he still knew as well as his own.

  Accompanied by an under-age interpreter in a pair of torn shorts through which his shining black bottom showed, the woman who spoke was standing in the doorway of the harbour police office and was staring at him as if he were a ghost. She was no longer a girl, but was still good-looking, in spite of the absence of any make-up and the fact that the heat had made her hair moist with perspiration.