The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, the one surviving grandee from Harold Macmillan’s pre-October War government and very much the elder statesman and the keeper of the flame of what was left of the old Conservative and Unionist Party, chuckled almost but not quite under his breath.
“I think that Margaret was the first among us to embrace the fact that the time for half-measures was over, Alison,” he observed dryly. “The reality of the matter is, as you know, that the United Kingdom is bankrupt and has been since the war. Our overseas treasure, meagre as it was in October 1962, is exhausted and practically everything in the country is now mortgaged to Wall Street. The pound sterling is worthless outside the Commonwealth, much of our gold and precious metal reserves are buried in vaults beneath the rubble of London, we have no banking system and our civil and military economy is sustained solely by the fiction that ‘notes’ issued by the UAUK are actually worth something. In effect we have replaced a money economy with a rights economy in which work carried out, or services supplied to the state and humanitarian rights, such as the right of our citizens to be fed, have been converted into tokens exchangeable for vital commodities; food, fuel, medicines if they exist and so forth. Self-evidently, this is not any kind of long-term basis for running a viable economy or a sustainable financial system. As Margaret has remarked many times, this ‘Soviet’, or ‘command’ economy is intrinsically ‘un-British’ and sooner or later will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.”
The Prime Minister nodded, her face wearing a slightly vexed look.
“Whatever happens in the Middle East or in the South Atlantic,” she declared, rather more trenchantly than she intended because the proximity of Alison Munro always made her oddly competitive. “It is imperative that we put the country on a sounder economic footing. The United States may not want to get involved in somebody else’s ‘foreign wars’ but that does not mean it wants to stop trading with and attempting to harvest the wealth of other nations. We may not have much economic influence in the World anymore,” she held up a hand knowing that Peter Thorneycroft was going to remind her of the links with the Commonwealth and other long-standing mutual obligations around the globe, “in comparison with our former glory,” she qualified, “but we have immense power, of the moral, political and in the final analysis military, with which to frustrate American economic ambitions. Moreover, if the worst happens, we reserve to ourselves the right to come to a separate accommodation with the new Soviet regime.”
Tom Harding-Grayson, who had been silent for some minutes, was suddenly in the spotlight. He returned his colleagues’ looks with sphinx like inscrutability. Back in the late 1950s his brilliant career in the Foreign and Colonial Office had faltered and then imploded because he had advocated — in a passable impersonation of King Canute attempting to turn back the incoming tide — a more pragmatic reconfiguration of the transatlantic relationship; essentially, one more closely aligned to a more Euro-centric accommodation with willing like-minded Commonwealth allies. His career in ruins, drinking heavily, his marriage on the rocks he had become a pariah in Whitehall for proposing a ‘special relationship’ with the United States that was not predicated by the transient political moods of American Presidents and British Prime Ministers, but upon the firmer ground of what was actually in each country’s long-term national interests. In other words, a relationship that recognised the military realities of the World but which also recognised that US global hegemony ought to come at a price; that British acquiescence should never be a given and that no British government would never again blindly follow where the American behemoth went. Before the October War such talk had been apostasy, heresy in the corridors of power in London and he had suffered the Whitehall equivalent of the fate of all heretics down the ages.
Even now after all that had happened in the last nineteen months the Foreign Secretary was a little bit surprised that finally, in the wake of the cataclysm, a British government of which he was a senior member was actually about to take the first step towards establishing a ‘new special relationship’ with the World’s last remaining superpower.
Between twelve and fifteen million Britons had died in America’s war of survival with the Soviet Union in late October 1962; now Margaret Thatcher was travelling to meet Jack Kennedy at Hyannis Port to demand the first down payment on the debt the United States owed its oldest ally.
Chapter 48
This sort of thing might have happened once or twice in the old days just after the revolution, or been mimicked in the preliminaries which often preceded Stalin’s ‘show trials’ but Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian was under no illusion that not just his career, but his life rested in the hands of the lynch mob assembled in the inappropriately names ‘Hall of the People’.
The ‘Hall’ was a former Red Army canteen, somewhat smartened up, serendipitously located conveniently adjacent to a deep fallout shelter on a heavily camouflaged military base abutting the eastern suburbs of Chelyabinsk. It was one of three regular venues for the monthly — or in times of emergency such as this, weekly conclaves — of the Politburo. Until the last couple of months the collective leadership had employed the full Politburo as nothing more than a rubber stamp on the decisions it had already taken and put into effect. The ongoing, worsening delays and travails of Operation Nakazyvat had changed all that!
One of the most ominous changes was that Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin, the ambitious Stalinist First Director of the KGB had used the gathering crisis to strengthen his own personal power base in the Party at home in exactly the same way that his embittered acolyte, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was insinuating himself into every aspect of the military campaign in Iran and Iraq.
“Operation Nakazyvat.” Shelepin reminded Babadzhanian, “envisaged that Basra would be in our hands three days ago and that at this time our troops would be moving forward to seize the Faw Peninsula and into advanced positions from which to assault Abadan Island.”
No man rose to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union who did not understand that to betray weakness in situations such as these was fatal. Moreover, Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s predominant emotion at this moment when his career and his life was balanced in the hands of the cold-eyed men sitting behind a half-circle of polished desks, was not one of fear but of anger. Anger that they understood nothing, anger that they had weakened his forces by deploying KGB battalions behind his fighting troops allegedly to encourage the others to fight harder, and angry because one of, if not his biggest headache, was the collapse of his Army Group’s logistical organisation in Russia. Reinforcements, vital parts, and ammunition were not reaching ‘the front’. All along the elongated, horribly stretched lines of communication back through northern Iraq, Iran and Soviet Azerbaijan the cronies of many of the men sitting in judgement of him this very day, were siphoning off his supplies to sell on the black market in the Motherland to feather their own nests!
Babadzhanian, who had been compelled to stand before the Politburo like a naughty schoolboy turned to face Shelepin.
“I have no need of non-combatant KGB supernumeraries in my Army, Comrade First Director,” he said coolly. “Had the men currently inhibiting my operations in Iraq been deployed in Iran and at home safeguarding my supply lines and cracking down on theft and corruption at home, my tanks would have been in Basra by now.”