“This wouldn’t be another one of Tom’s cynical outbursts?”
“Perhaps. But closely argued, as always.”
“Test it on me, Henry,” the Prime Minister invited.
“For all their promises of beneficence,” the head of the Civil Service drawled, “we all know the Americans aren’t about to foot the bill for paying for one hundredth of the cost or rebuilding one great European city. Let alone the reconstruction of any small part of any European competitor industry. What little charity we can expect from our wartime Ally will be in the form of parsimonious food handouts and miscellaneous uncoordinated donations, scraps from the table of the victors, basically. Even if JFK was some kind of latter day Father Christmas, which he isn’t, he wouldn’t have a snowflake’s chance in Hell of getting a major foreign aid program through Congress. Tom Grayson says the prevailing mood in Washington is that if we’d flushed our V-Bombers and Thor’s sooner Buffalo, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago and Seattle wouldn’t have got hit at all. The Americans are not our friends, Prime Minister.”
The Right Honourable Edward Richard George Heath, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration was as silent and unmoving as a block of granite for a long time.
Sir Henry Tomlinson waited in silence.
Presently, the man in the chair by the window stirred.
“Does Tom think Kennedy will win if he runs for a second term next year?”
“Tom says he’ll run,” the other man said. “As to whether he’ll win?”
“If he runs he’ll win,” the Prime Minister decided. “He’ll blame us for everything if he has to. But he’ll win, Henry.”
The Cabinet Secretary said nothing.
“They blow up the world and then they talk about putting a man on the Moon,” Edward Heath shook his head. For a moment his profile was silhouetted against the light, his overly prominent straight nose jutting towards the Chiltern Hills. Then he returned his full attention to Henry Tomlinson. “They’ve stolen too much from us already. No more. No more.”
“Is that wise, Prime Minister?”
“Somebody has to demonstrate to them the limits of their power.”
“But even so…”
“I didn’t accept the heavy burden of the premiership from Her Majesty to see my country — what remains of it — subsumed into some latter day new Roman Empire. There will be no Pax Americana while I am Prime Minister. Not here, in these islands, or in any of those territories and dominions for which we remain responsible.”
Unlike the majority of the Prime Minister’s closest political allies Henry Tomlinson had seen this moment coming. Edward Heath wasn’t really a political politician — if that wasn’t an oxymoron he didn’t know what was — he was a far too moral man and in many ways, a stranger in his own Party.
“I’ll meet with the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff on Wednesday. I will put my case before my colleagues,” Edward Heath pursed his lips, collected his thoughts, “at the next scheduled meeting of the full Cabinet on Thursday next week. And then we shall proceed.”
Henry Tomlinson weighed the moment carefully.
“You have my complete support, Prime Minister.”
“You may well be joining me in exile then, Henry!”
The Cabinet Secretary raised an eyebrow. As had been foreseen in the spring food and fuel stocks were running low; without American grain and Middle Eastern oil people would starve and freeze in England in the coming months. American grain had been slow arriving, and thus far in pitifully small parcels. Since the US Congress had stopped all oil exportation from the Americas, oil had to come all the way around Africa and pass through the Atlantic — the playground of the United States Navy — to reach the United Kingdom. The great American consumer and the voracious maw of continental industry came first, second and last in Washington.
Viewed from across the Atlantic the White House complacently assumed it was only a matter of time before Edward Heath got used to the idea he was supposed to be acting like an obedient little client. This hardly seemed like a propitious moment to be tweaking the tiger’s tail.
“We’ve been loyal and obedient allies thus far, Prime Minister,” he observed. “Precious little good has it done us.”
Edward Heath nodded.
“Operation Manna proceeds as before?”
“Yes, Prime Minister. The Americans shadow and occasionally pester our ships but otherwise, all proceeds as planned.”
Edward Heath turned away from his most trusted advisor and gazed out across Cheltenham Race Course to where an airstrip long enough to safely operate long-range bombers and transports had been scoured from the landscape. As he watched a Comet jetliner swooped in to land.
“Why have they made no attempt to inhibit Operation Manna?” He asked softly.
Henry Tomlinson couldn’t answer the question.
“Tom Grayson says it is because they don’t believe the evidence of their eyes,” he offered apologetically. “He thinks they’ve taken their eye of the ball because we’ve failed to concentrate our ‘naval assets’ to protect the five main convoys. Besides, they’ve mothballed so many of their ships since the war they’re not presently really in a position to do much more than ‘demonstrate’ in the North Atlantic.”
The Prime Minister guffawed at this.
He’d never liked the notion of dispersing the Royal Navy’s ‘assets’ although he’d understood the case for ‘committing to holding what we have and supporting our surviving friends’. Moreover, there was the small matter of the crippled industrial infrastructure of the British Isles, the total loss of Chatham Dockyard and the post-war reduction in the capacity of every other naval facility in home waters. The Navy’s thin grey wall of fighting ships needed dockyards and dry docks to keep them at sea and if those docks were at Gibraltar, Malta, Sydney, Auckland and Simonstown then that was where a proportion of the Fleet would have to be stationed.
If he’d learned anything in the last year it was that the sustenance of the Home Islands was not a thing he trusted to anybody else’s good will. The Admirals were right, no matter how he hated splitting up much of the fleet into penny packets, the trade routes with the Commonwealth had to be policed.
Operation Manna.
But for Operation Manna his Party, the Armed Services, and the people would have had every right to have demanded his head by now. For the last year he’d been presiding over an ongoing humanitarian and governmental crisis that beggared his imagination. He felt physically sick when he was so foolish as to contemplate the enormity of the disaster that had befallen not just his country, but much of what he’d loved in the old world. He’d had to fight off the old guard in his own Party — who for reasons best known to themselves — had tried hard to reduce the scale and scope of Operation Manna. He’d been ridiculed by the idiots who’d been seduced by Washington’s promises of succour in the immediate aftermath of the October War. Men whom he’d regarded as close personal friends and unshakable political confederates had conspired and plotted to undermine him, openly questioning his claim to the premiership when — with the assistance of his former political enemies — he’d gambled everything on the success of the most ambitious and wide-reaching incarnation of Operation Manna. Now, for the first time in the last year he saw a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel.