“Quite. No sooner had the gun smoke in the Oval Office cleared than the Tories packed the aforementioned bomb bombshell off to see the Queen and her Majesty, in her wisdom, let her form a new government. We no longer serve the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, as of the first day of this year of our Lord nineteen sixty-four we serve the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom. Oh, when she’s not around they call our new leader the ‘Angry Widow’.”
Peter Christopher chuckled, throwing his Commanding Officer a quizzical look.
“Because she says she’s got ‘a right to be angry about what’s happened’!”
“She’s got a point, sir.”
“Oh, absolutely. More important to us, the new Government has adopted what the top brass are calling the ‘Christopher Doctrine’.”
“The what?”
“While he was masterminding Operation Manna and confounding our cousins in the lost colonies,” David Penberthy grinned broadly, “your father, he whom we must all obey, and all that, the C-in-C of all forces in the Med, prepared a paper for the First Sea Lord on the subject of how the Home Country and the Commonwealth ought to proceed in the changed circumstances of the post-October War World. Broadly speaking, he was advocating closer ties with any former colony that would entertain the same, and an unapologetically aggressive forward defence policy in all areas of vital national interest and above all, the maintaining of the sanctity of what we used to call, in the good old days, the trade routes of the Empire. Basically, what we have we hold and we befriend who we may. Back in Blighty the blond bombshell it seems, has fully embraced the ‘Christopher Doctrine’. Before she went off to Washington to put the Yanks right on one or two things she was travelling up and down the country preaching hope, and promising a return to a land flowing with wine and honey if everybody rolled up their sleeves. Among her numerous ‘policy initiatives’ is a large scale Government sponsored emigration scheme to send families out to sunnier climes. The civilian contingent coming out to Malta on the Sylvania is the first beneficiary of the scheme.”
“Margaret Thatcher?” Peter Christopher mused aloud. “I think she was at Balmoral Castle with my father when those bastards tried to murder the Royal Family.” Try as he might the name Margaret Thatcher meant nothing to him. Blond bombshell? No, that couldn’t be right. Even in this thoroughly messed up, topsy turvey post-cataclysm universe the Queen of England would never, in a million years invite a ‘blond bombshell’ to form a Government!
Chapter 7
“I hesitate to show you this, Margaret,” Iain Macleod apologised, struggling to keep a straight face. Their car was driving through stands of tall conifers on a cold, misty Deeside morning. Every now and then they glimpsed fields, and grey hills through gaps in the forest. Ahead and behind the Prime Ministerial convoy Ferret armoured cars and trucks filled with heavily armed men of the Coldstream Guards rumbled through the idyllic Scottish landscape.
Margaret Thatcher glanced at the front page of the Daily Mail.
‘Boadicea Rides Again!” She murmured in disgust.
In this particular incarnation a cartoon character clearly and unambiguously representing her was standing in a chariot. She held the reins in one hand while with her free arm she was wielding a large handbag, smiting the nation’s foes. The bodies of the smitten were flying in all directions.
“I wish you’d have a word with some of these editors, Iain!” She complained.
The bespectacled man sitting in the front passenger seat of the aging Bentley twisted around and attempted to meet her eye.
“While the editors are on our side I’d be inclined to, er, take it on the chin, Prime Minister.”
Margaret Thatcher viewed the forty-one year old newly appointed Home Secretary with measured exasperation. Roy Harris Jenkins might be the son of a Welsh coal miner but of all of James Callaghan’s Labour Party nominations for high office in the Unity Administration, he was undoubtedly the most urbane and perspicacious. He might look like a country bank manager or solicitor but he had a mind which instantly grasped complexity and was not, like so many of the men who aspired to be members of her Administration, reluctant to confront the real dilemmas facing the nation. However, she could already appreciate why Roy Jenkins was not universally admired or liked within his own Party. There was something earnest and academic about him that didn’t fit well with the necessities of political life. His thoughtfulness and introspection could too easily be interpreted for indecision, or for not knowing his own mind. His was a temperament perhaps better suited to academia.
He had been invited to join the UKIEA last spring; ill-health and a subsequent brush with the cholera epidemic which had swept through the English Midlands last summer had kept him on the sidelines until now. The sitting Member of Parliament for Birmingham Stechford, he had been one of the few politicians with the guts to debate, face to face, with Enoch Powell the immediate post-war constitutional settlement and the legal underpinnings of the new Unity Administration. This had recommended Roy Jenkins to her newly formed inner circle of advisors; and when Jim Callaghan, the leader of his Party and the Deputy Prime Minister, had put his name forward for the Home Office, a department within the gift of her coalition partners, the Angry Widow had readily acceded.
The major posts in the Unity Administration had been split between the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Parties approximately in proportion to their respective shares of the popular vote at the last General Election in 1959, or would have been had the leader of the Liberal Party — which had received just under six percent of the vote — accepted the offer of the post of Secretary of State for Scotland.
“I don’t care to be portrayed as some latter day warrior queen, Mr Jenkins,” Margaret Thatcher retorted mildly.
“Well, so long as Mr Macleod is obsessed with creating a cult of personality around you, Prime Minister,” the Home Secretary said, threatening to smile before he turned his head away, “I suspect the denizens of Manchester’s Fleet Street will continue in this vein.”
Edward Heath’s regime had facilitated the re-incarnation of the major daily newspapers in Manchester; the faltering first steps in a half-hearted ‘normalisation of everyday life’ campaign. The campaign to restore a vibrant national press had been beginning to bear fruits by the time the first Operation Manna convoys reached home waters but shortages of newsprint and ongoing problems with the nation’s surviving transportation infrastructure had hamstrung everybody’s best intentions. One of Iain Macleod’s priorities was the full restoration not only of a free press but a nationwide restoration of radio and television services. This latter was going to require the removal of the existing Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation; he was a worthy, liberal-minded man — whose good intentions were invariably vocally and loquaciously expressed — who frankly, clearly lacked the ability to organise a beer tasting session in a brewery.
For reasons of security the Queen greeted her visitors inside the reception hall of Birkhall, the early eighteenth house built by the Farquharson family and acquired by Prince Albert in 1849 as part of the Balmoral estate, ostensibly for the use of his eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales.
The first time she had been introduced to Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, and Defender of the Faith, Margaret Thatcher had been a little surprised by how small she was; she had since learned that Her Monarch’s apparent lack of physical stature was more than compensated for by her steely resolve and her unquenchable sense of duty.