Peter Thorneycroft, her recently re-appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer had told her that about an hour ago. Chancellor of the Exchequer, that almost made it sound like her Government had something like a pre-war Treasury rather than stacks of hurriedly printed, virtually valueless paper currency and a mile high pile of ‘I owe yous’ that it was never going to repay in a million years. The post of Chancellor might still be a non sequitur but one day, hopefully soon, it might mean something again. Sometimes that was the beauty of giving a thing a proper name.
“You’ll be glad to hear that Lady Patricia has laid on tea and light refreshments,” the Cabinet Secretary declared.
Lady Patricia, the wife of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Thomas ‘Tom’ Harding-Grayson, had accompanied the ‘peace mission’ to Washington DC and had made herself indispensible to Margaret Thatcher as a non-political feminine confidante, dresser, and general pressure release valve. She’d also proved diplomatically adroit at keeping all the people the Prime Minister didn’t need to see at arm’s length.
“That’s most considerate of her,” the Prime Minister declared, picking up her handbag and following her Cabinet Secretary out into the long cold first floor corridor of the draughty old mansion that now accommodated what passed for the seat of Government of their sorely abused land.
Before the war the Cabinet had comprised twenty-one ministers. Edward Heath had attempted to mimic this; Margaret Thatcher had resolved that a Cabinet of no more than twelve members including the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, currently the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce, was sufficient in the present circumstances. Of the eleven other members of her Cabinet, the Foreign Secretary was a political appointment with no Party affiliation, and of the other ten members six were drawn from the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and four from the Labour and Co-operative Party.
The Prime Minister headed the Conservatives who included in their number the Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir Basil Brooke, who had elected not to attend this Cabinet conclave due to the fluidity of events in Ulster. In this case ‘fluidity’ was a euphemism for the near civil war that was tying down over twenty thousand British troops badly needed in the Mediterranean. Northern Ireland was a canker that was going to have to wait for another time; likewise the disgraceful behaviour of the Government of the Republic in Dublin in at best tacitly, and at worst, deliberately inflaming the sectarian tensions at play in the north.
The other Conservative Party ministers around the oval table were: William Whitelaw, the forty-five year old Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border, at Defence; Peter Thorneycroft reinstated in the post he had held for several years in the 1950s at the Treasury; Airey Neave at Supply, which now also oversaw Transportation; Iain Macleod at the Ministry of Information; and holding down the Scottish Office, the one largely intact pre-war ministry, John Scott Maclay, the fifty-eight year old MP for Renfrewshire.
The labour ‘faction’ was led by James Callaghan, the leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party, who was Margaret Thatcher’s deputy. Unlike in Edward Heath’s Administration, if anything happened to her he would automatically become the next Prime Minister and would remain so as long as he retained sufficient support in the country and Her Majesty’s confidence. He also held the portfolio of Secretary of State for Wales. To balance the ‘unity’ of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, the posts of the Home, Labour and Health departments had been assigned to Labour Party nominees; respectively Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crossland and Christopher Mayhew.
Charles Anthony Raven Crosland, the forty-five year old MP for Grimsby, was one of the finest minds in British politics, and would have risen high in his Party and in Government regardless of the intervention of the October War. His Ministry of Labour portfolio included a brief to explore options for re-creating a new national education system. Schools were currently the responsibility of the Emergency District Administrations, while at present the surviving Universities were left to their own devices, other than where their funding was directly related to Government defence research, development or other priority projects.
Forty-eight year old Christopher Paget Mayhew, who had been MP for Woolwich East, the seat of his old friend and mentor Ernest Bevin was a pro-Arabist with liberal views that before the October War had sat uncomfortably within his own Party. Margaret Thatcher had hesitated before rubber-stamping his appointment to the Health Ministry, but James Callaghan had offered no obvious or better qualified candidate, so she’d accepted Mayhew, albeit on probation.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the Prime Minister chimed as she entered the room to a squealing of chair legs on the wooden floor. It irritated her that she was the only woman in Cabinet. Women had suffered as many of the vicissitudes of the recent war and its dreadful aftermath, in fact, by any logically applied standard women and children had suffered the most; and yet they were barely represented in the higher echelons of the UAUK. She would have nominated a woman from her own Party if one had been available with any of the necessary qualifications — necessary qualifications, that was a nonsense, she was a grocer’s daughter from Grantham with degrees in chemistry and law and was learning by trial and error as she went along — and Jim Callaghan had been oddly reluctant to promote the cases of women in the Labour movement. The name of Barbara Castle — the fifty-three year old left-wing Member of Parliament for Blackburn — had been mooted briefly; but not forwarded as a cabinet nominee. So many things to do and no time whatsoever to spare. “Does everybody have a copy of the agenda?”
“Yes, Prime Minister…”
“Good.” Margaret Thatcher looked directly across the table to the impassive uniformed figure of Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord and Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff. “Sir, David. Would you please brief us on the latest military and intelligence developments?”
“There is currently no significant threat in home waters or in home air space, Prime Minister,” the suave, coolly professional Admiral reported. “No United States Navy surface unit is presently within one thousand nautical miles of our shores. However, American assets have been made available to C-in-C Mediterranean under the terms of the recently concluded Washington agreement. Ideally, satellite over flights of the Adriatic, the Aegean and Asia Minor might have gone a long way to addressing the intelligence deficit in the Eastern Mediterranean. Regrettably, I have been informed that no such reconnaissance facility is operational at this time. Notwithstanding, Central Intelligence Agency U-2 spy planes operating out of Aviano in Northern Italy and from RAF Akrotiri have flown missions over the Aegean, the approaches to the Bosphorus and over the Black Sea as far north as Sevastopol. Photographs from those sorties are presently being analysed by CIA analysts in theatre. First reports indicate more traffic in the Bosphorus and along the southern Black Sea coast than we anticipated. A number of vessels, possibly warships are anchored in the vicinity of Istanbul. There are also indications of large fires and troop movements around that city. Since we have no eyes on the ground in that part of the World we are somewhat disadvantaged. C-in-C Mediterranean has requested Special Forces troops — either or both Royal Marine Special Boat Squadron and Special Air Service Regiment parties — be inserted into the region to provide a better feel for what is going on. I have explained that this will not be possible owing to the ongoing internal home security commitments of the SAS and SBS. C-in-C Mediterranean is aware of the increased demands on the available deployable Special Forces units subsequent to the attack on Balmoral. Understandably, Admiral Christopher’s primary concern is for the security of our position on Cyprus. Currently, the forces deployed on Cyprus are at the end of a long supply chain, and are too weak to sustain action overlong against a determined and more numerous enemy. Which brings me to the ongoing redeployment of all available military assets to the Mediterranean.”