Margaret Thatcher had been working through her papers since six o’clock that morning. Just because the country was at war there was no excuse to ignore the normal ‘documentary traffic’ which came through her private office. Nor was she about to excuse herself in any way from carrying out her duties on account of the ongoing pain from the injuries she had suffered a week ago at Brize Norton.
While she sat at her desk she had eased her left arm out of its clumsy sling, less inconvenienced by the nagging ache in her shoulder than she was by the constant, stabbing, jarring fingers of flame that periodically exploded from her lower spine. Her doctors said there was ‘nothing to worry about in the x-rays’ and that she had ‘just badly twisted a large group of muscles which were now protesting’. They had strapped her up in a makeshift corset that made her sit upright like a manikin. Her dislocated shoulder had been ‘popped’ back into place shortly after she and Her Majesty had been rescued from the wrecked Royal Rolls-Royce.
Margaret Thatcher had visited the Queen at Woodstock yesterday evening and found her monarch much cheered by the company of her consort Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh whom, after her Prime Minister’s intersession, the RAF had flown south from his hospital bed in Scotland despite the vociferous objections of his doctors. Although the Duke of Edinburgh was still wheelchair bound he was itching for the fight and every word that passed his lips threatened to prompt a smile from his temporarily incapacitated wife.
The events of a week ago hung like a grim pall over Oxford.
The Prime Minister relived the nightmare at RAF Brize Norton every time she shut her eyes.
When the speculatively launched Mark XM41 Redeye Block I shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile had detonated on impact with the starboard outer Pratt and Whitney JT4A turbojet, of the US Air Force Douglas DC-8 carrying the Acting Chief of Staff of the US Army and Commander-in-Chief designate of all Allied Forces in Europe and his staff; the Prime Ministerial bodyguard, and the men of the Royal ‘protection squad’ had acted as one to ‘guard’ their charges. Margaret Thatcher’s Royal Marines and the Queen’s protectors, drawn from the Black Watch, had carried the two women to, and not to put too fine a point on it ‘thrown’ them into the only available remotely safe place on the exposed tarmac expanse of RAF Brize Norton; the nearby Royal armoured Rolls-Royce. Everything had happened so fast neither woman actually recollected how or when their numerous injuries had subsequently occurred. Two members of the Black Watch and two Royal Marines had fallen on the two women to shield them with their bodies, the stricken jetliner had crashed literally yards away, and as the disintegrating aircraft had cart-wheeled past a giant ball of burning aviation fuel had briefly enveloped the vehicle. It later transpired that the Rolls-Royce had been struck by and violently tipped onto its roof by the impact of a detached section of the undercarriage of the downed DC-8.
General Harold Keith ‘Johnny’ Johnson — a survivor of the Bataan Death March and a hero of the Korean War — and everybody else onboard the US Air Force plane struck by the missile fired by two Irish Republican Army men had perished in the crash. As had seventeen men on the ground including thus far, eight Royal Marines of the ‘AWP’; members of the so-called ‘Angry Widow’s Praetorians’, the name the Royal Marines of Margaret Thatcher’s personal bodyguard had proudly adopted amongst themselves. Three of her faithful AWPs had died lingering deaths from horrific burns in the last two days, and the new commander of the detachment had reported to her earlier that morning that another man was ‘not long for this world’.
The shooting down of two aircraft; General Johnson’s DC-8 at RAF Brize Norton, and Flight 616, an RAF Comet at Cheltenham had come as sickening body blows to Margaret Thatcher and her government. On board Flight 616 returning from Malta had been the First Sea Lord, Sir David Luce, several senior staff officers, twenty-six seriously injured service personnel and civilians, their eight attendant nurses, and the Soviet code books and cipher equipment seized from the captured Turkish destroyer Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak after the Battle of Malta.
The IRA atrocities had been no less unnerving to the members of the United States Presidential delegation which had flown to England to discuss the delayed ratification of the new US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement — or more accurately, non-ratification — and to discuss the way forward in the Mediterranean.
What made the atrocities at Brize Norton and Cheltenham all the more soul destroying was that in the last week it had become apparent that contrary to the Prime Minister’s hopes and expectations, Jack Kennedy had decided to come to England not to embrace the transatlantic alliance but to finesse its public downgrading for his own domestic political reasons.
Margaret Thatcher had aware that certain members of the Kennedy Administration had never supported the US-UK Mutual Defence Treaty, and that others close to the President were getting ‘cold feet’ about it. However, when Jack Kennedy had offered to come to England to ‘iron out’ recent ‘local difficulties’ she had taken this as a token of good faith on his part. Likewise, the visit of General Johnson to set up a ‘skeleton headquarters staff’ in England ahead of the formal announcement that, in due course, he would take over as Commander-in-Chief of All Allied Forces in the Mediterranean. Presciently, several of her own ministers, notably Tom Harding-Grayson her Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins and Barbara Castle, her fiery Labour Minister had said aloud what many of her confidants took for granted; that ‘putting all the United Kingdom’s eggs in any kind of American basket is a mistake’.
Although she had been disappointed that the Kennedy Administration was reluctant to discuss matters ahead of the visit other than in terms of generalities, a week ago she had genuinely hoped for the best and secretly prepared herself for the worst. In hindsight the ‘worst’ had turned out to be unimaginably bad.
In less than an hour last Monday everything had changed. The atrocities at Brize Norton and Cheltenham, both perpetrated by terrorists using modern state of the art equipment sourced from US military arsenals, the body blow of the news from the Middle East and the confusion in the immediate aftermath of the downing of the two jets had briefly paralysed the machinery of government.
Special Air Mission 26000, the President’s aircraft, had landed away at RAF Conningsby; and the plane bringing members of the government of the Irish Republic to England had been instructed to turn around and had flown straight back to Ireland…
There was a quiet knock at the door.
“Come!”
Sir Henry Tomlinson, the greying, tired-eyed Head of the Home Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom — UAUK — entered the former Don’s rooms. As always he had a large hard back notebook under his arm.
“Cabinet has assembled, Prime Minister,” he informed her. “And awaits your convenience.”
“Thank you, Sir Henry.”
The older man — he was in his sixties and she still only thirty-eight — viewed his Prime Minister with a quiet, almost fatherly pride. Notwithstanding that the recent disasters had taken a heavy physical toll on her, or that not even her immaculate coiffure or marvellously presented matching blue top and skirt over a pure cream blouse could mask her near exhaustion she was undoubtedly in control, and magnificently unbowed.
The Cabinet Secretary held out a hand for his Prime Minister to steady herself. Margaret Thatcher might project an image of indestructibility; he knew that she was anything but. Less than a fortnight ago she had lost the man she loved — Admiral Sir Julian Christopher — and every day since it seemed some new disaster had befallen British arms or prestige, with each successive body blow further undermining her grip on the premiership and the nation’s place in a World that was ever more horribly dangerous.