The Royal Marine had smiled toothily at her.
‘Your wish is my command, Ma’am,’ he had acknowledged, his face a mask of taciturnity.
She had given up the unequal battle at that stage. Humbled that her faithful AWPs seemed to think nothing of dying for her; they could jolly well address her however they wished!
“Thank you, Corporal Sampson,” she murmured, dismissing her limping minder. “I shall be occupied in here for some time. I shall be very unhappy if I discover later that you have not taken this opportunity to rest your injured ankle in the meantime.”
“Yes, Ma’am!” The Marine replied respectfully as he briefly came to attention.
“Good. I’m glad we understand each other,” she declared, uncertain if either of them actually remotely understood each other, deciding that other than in their suicidal devotion to her she hardly understood her brave AWPs at all.
The man turned and marched painfully out of the room, his booted feet clumping loudly on the bare boards. The big oak doors shut at his back and the cast of characters confronted with the nation’s latest disaster waited for their beleaguered leader to kick off proceedings.
Margaret Thatcher was in no hurry; the best estimate was that the first Red Army tanks could not possible reach the northern shores of the Persian Gulf in less than thirty days. Anything could happen in that time. She looked around the Cabinet table which today, seemed sparsely occupied.
To her left was her deputy, fifty-one year old James Callaghan, the big, lugubrious man who behind the scenes was fighting a dogged rearguard action to hold the rump of the Labour and Co-operative Party together. The sitting member of Parliament for Cardiff South and Penarth, he was also Secretary of State for Wales. Ultimately, the fate of the UAUK was in his hands; for if his Party split away from what remained of the national government of ‘Unity’ there would probably have to be a General Election and nobody around the table knew what was likely to happen if the country went to the polls in the middle of a new war.
Beyond Callaghan sat the forty-eight year old MP for Abingdon, Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave, DSO, MC, the newly appointed Secretary of State for the Intelligence Services as the head of a new Ministry of National Security, a department created at Margaret Thatcher’s diktat to ‘rationalize, amalgamate and electrify’ the ‘complacent, incompetent, fragmented dog’s breakfast’ that comprised the United Kingdom ‘intelligence community’ in the wake of the ‘disastrous failures of MI5, MI6 and the other intelligence organs which have comprehensively undermined everything we have achieved since the war!’
Airey Neave had escaped from Colditz, joined MI6 and been the man who read the indictments to the leading surviving Nazis at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal. Following the October War he had been Margaret Thatcher’s number two at the Ministry of Supply, after Defence the most important department in the land, before stepping into her shoes on her elevation to the Premiership. He remained her closest, most implicitly trusted friend in government and he had been the obvious man to take on the poisoned chalice of the re-organised ‘Intelligence Brief’.
Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Cabinet Secretary sat to the Prime Minister’s right, and beyond him Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, until December the Permanent Secretary in the post-October War Foreign Office. With the death of his predecessor, Sir Alec Douglas Home in the regicidal attack on Balmoral, he had been co-opted into the Cabinet by the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath. Recognised as one of, if not the finest mind in Whitehall before the war and in the way of these things sidelined because of it, like Airey Neave he was one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest friends and confidantes.
Fifty year old Iain Norman Macleod, the Minister for Information — basically, the UAUK’s principal propagandist and apologist — also held the posts of Leader of the House of Commons, and Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party. In normal times he would have been Margaret Thatcher’s political bellwether and conscience; however, in the five turbulent months of her Prime Ministerial career to date he had been far too busy fighting fires and plugging the gaping holes below the waterline of the ship of state to worry about anything so ephemeral as the state of the Party in the country, or any of the normal minor politico-ideological or doctrinal schisms over which a man in his position would have endlessly obsessed prior to the cataclysm.
Across the table to the Prime Minister’s right sat the Secretary of State for Defence, forty-five year old William Stephen Ian Whitelaw the MP for Penrith and the Border. He was a man well thought of in the Party, possibly a future leader even though he had only been elected to Parliament in 1955. Margaret Thatcher was beginning to suspect her bossiness and impatience with the old-world courtesies and niceties of the pre-war age somewhat irritated ‘Willie’ and that clique of landowning, public school and Oxbridge educated old-school Tories to which he was intimately affiliated. Educated at Winchester and later Trinity College, Cambridge, Whitelaw had distinguished himself serving with the Scots Guards in World War II and at the time of the October War had been Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour. But for illness he would have joined Edward Heath’s post-war United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration and, alongside Iain Macleod and others been in pole position to step into his shoes…
The Prime Minister caught herself in mid-thought.
There would be time enough to worry about conspiracies and the shifting ground beneath her feet another day. The Chiefs of Staff of the three armed services flanked Willie Whitelaw.
To his right sat General — soon to be promoted Field Marshall — Sir Richard Amyatt Hull, Admiral Sir David Luce’s successor as Chief of the Defence Staff; the United Kingdom equivalent to the American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. The fifty-six year old veteran of the Italian campaign and the final battles in North West Europe of the Second World War had been the last Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), a post abolished in Edward Heath’s time. The professional head of the British Army was a no-nonsense, quietly bluff man upon whom the most senior military post in the kingdom had naturally devolved.
At Willie Whitelaw’s left elbow sat fifty-one year old Air Marshal Sir Christopher Hartley. Hartley had been promoted to his current post out of the blue when the former Chief of the Air Staff — Sir Charles Elworthy — was sent to Philadelphia in the capacity of the UAUK’s ‘Military Legate to President Kennedy’. Unlike Elworthy, Hartley was a larger than life, ‘can do’ man but no diplomat. Educated at Eton College, Balliol and King’s College Cambridge, he had taken part in zoological expeditions to Sarawak, Spitsbergen and Greenland before becoming a master at Eton in 1937, only joining the RAF Volunteer reserve in 1938; and thereafter enjoying a distinguished career flying night fighters during the Second World War. Prior to the October War he had been Air Officer Commanding 12 Group, Fighter Command. Even in middle age he remained a tall, strongly built man never happier than when he was out in the country, shooting or walking.
Hartley had hugely impressed Margaret Thatcher on their first encounter as being exactly the sort of let’s get on with it and do it sort of man she needed by her side in a crisis.
Although it was becoming clear that his predecessor, Sir Charles Elworthy’s role in America was becoming increasingly invidious, there were no plans to recall him to his former post. The UAUK’s High Commissioner to New Zealand, the Hon. Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce, who had been in post since 1959 was pencilled in to return to Oxford to assume a role on Tom Harding-Grayson’s personal staff; and the Foreign Secretary had suggested the High Commissioner’s post in Wellington might be a convivial recompense ‘for the iniquities Sir Charles has suffered at the hands of our transatlantic allies lately’. In any event bringing Elworthy — who had been born in Timaru, on New Zealand’s South Island — back to Oxford now that the Air Staff had ‘bedded in’ under new leadership was unthinkable in the current crisis.