It smacked of exactly the cult of personality which so energized her Right Honourable Friend, the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West. That, and she strongly suspected, the fact that she was a mere woman.
The Royal Marines unceremoniously carried Iain Macleod inside the lobby of the Town Hall, clearing a path through the throng of aimless sightseers, local dignitaries and assorted anonymous MPs who’d decided tonight would be a good time to make a belated appearance in the town which had been the United Kingdom’s seat of government for the last year.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!” Margaret Thatcher commanded. “She turned to view her Minister of Information. He looked a little bedraggled and he had mud on his hands. She handed him a handkerchief and placed a sisterly hand on his arm. “Are you sure you are all right, Iain?”
“Yes, yes,” he muttered, wiping his hands and trying to shrug some of the creases out of his jacket.
“Perhaps, you should sit down for a little while?”
“I shall be fine in a moment,” the man insisted. “Besides, if you think I’m going to let you go out there and face that, that,” he spluttered with the indignation of a man who feels himself to have been betrayed by an old friend, “that man alone,” he forced out eventually, “you have another thing coming, Margaret. And that’s final!”
Margaret Thatcher thought she was going to cry.
The instant quickly came and went.
She smiled and Iain Norman Macleod, the man who’d once been her fiercest critic in the former United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, briefly felt as if all the ills of the World were as nothing.
The youthful Captain in command of the AWP detachment went ahead into the body of the Hall where an audience of well over a thousand souls hung over the first floor balconies and shifted impatiently in the packed seats below the stage. The crowd stilled as the Marines surveyed the ground around them before waving for the Prime Minister to be ushered through the doors at the rear of the chamber.
Most of the audience jumped up and started clapping and cheering but a significant minority stayed seated, their silence like an accusation. A block of about a dozen teenagers dressed in black ostentatiously turned their back on the Prime Minister’s party as it passed. As she and Ian Macleod climbed up the steps onto the stage the cheering reached a spontaneous crescendo and six Commandos moved into position in the narrow gap between the first row of seats and the front of the stage, eyeing the nearest members of the audience with stony stares.
The Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West was sitting patiently, emulating a marble statue in one of the two chairs placed on the right hand side of the stage. Next to him, perspiring in the television lights, sat his second, the MP for West Flintshire.
Eton educated fifty-seven year old Evelyn Nigel Chetwode Birch, had emerged from the Second War with an Order of the British Empire — an OBE — and the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He had been elected to Parliament in 1945 despite the Labour landslide, and progressed effortlessly up the greasy pole of political life until, in league with the man sitting beside him on the stage, he had joined Peter Thorneycroft, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer in resigning in protest from Harold MacMillan’s Cabinet in 1958. Before that he had held the posts of Minister of Works, Secretary of State for Air and finally, Economic Secretary to the Treasury but all that had ended once he’d fallen out with the Prime Minister and a large part of the Tory Party hierarchy. Like most politicians who feel themselves undervalued and publicly spurned by his leaders, he had scores to settle.
It was unclear whether the understandably nervous invigilator provided by the BBC was cognisant of the bitter undertow of the emotions in play that evening.
The Prime Minister went to him and extended her hand in greeting.
If anybody had told Barry Lankester when he joined the BBC in 1955 as a studio manager that one day he would be refereeing a public fight between two politicians — who in this day and age literally had the power of life and death over everybody in the land — in front of a probably small television audience and a radio one of countless millions, he’d have laughed. Hysterically, actually. But then if somebody had told him the World would blow itself to pieces over a few rockets on an island in the Caribbean he’d probably have laughed even louder.
It was a funny old World.
He honestly hadn’t realised that the Prime Minister was so young; only a few years older than him. Meeting the lady in person, face to face, for the first time he was struck by how fresh, young — that was the word that kept repeating in his head — vivacious and, this was the really shocking thing, pretty she was. It wasn’t the manufactured beauty of a movie star; it was real and unlike a movie star, whom one could only worship from afar, this woman looked one in the eye and you knew, you just knew, she was listening closely to every word you said to her.
Barry Lankester would later realise that he’d been bewitched by Margaret Thatcher that night in Cheltenham and that afterwards, nothing had ever been quite the same again.
“I gather that as a child you were in Coventry in 1940 during the terrible blitz,” Margaret Thatcher said to him. “Mister Heath once spoke to me about the emotions Benjamin Britten War Requiem stirred in him. I believe you were lucky enough to introduce the piece at the Coventry Festival in the summer before the recent war?”
The BBC man was stunned.
How on earth did she know that?
“Now,” the Angry Widow counselled the younger man, “you mustn’t worry yourself if Mr Powell and I start knocking lumps out of each other. That, after all, is what normal politics is all about.”
The title of the ‘debate’ was: ‘That the Country has no faith in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’.
There were three lecterns in a line at the front of the stage.
Each was topped with several microphones of various types and vintages.
The ‘proposer’ of the motion, the Honourable Member for Wolverhampton South West would speak first. Once he had laid the bare bones of his case before the people of Cheltenham and the supporters he had brought south from the Midlands; Margaret Thatcher would ‘defend’ the UAUK. Thereafter, both parties had agreed — informally — that the debate would proceed by cut and thrust, not overlong or repetitive diatribes.
Iain Macleod was hardly alone in thinking that the thirty-eight year old widowed mother of two teenage children had made a potentially catastrophic error of judgement in accepting Enoch Powell’s challenge.
Enoch Powell possessed the most brilliant, albeit erratic, not to say febrile, intellect in the Party. He had led a life dedicated to scholarship, to ascetic and esoteric learning. The man was multi-lingual, a latter-day polymath whose command of the English language was bettered only by the feral acuity of his mental processes.
Margaret Thatcher’s only defence against overwhelming odds seemed to be in the unsuspected talismanic charisma she had found from within herself after Edward Heath’s tragic assassination in Washington. Somehow she had tapped into a latent mood in the country and ridden that wave in recent weeks. However, she was not a particularly accomplished public speaker and in a heated discussion she often turned dogmatic and hectoring. Unlike her opponent she had no particular talent for deflecting verbal barbs with irony or with a well-timed aside. All the strengths which worked in her favour out on the stomp in the country were as likely, fault lines in the hot-house atmosphere of the old Town Hall. Worse, if she fell on her face in this arena there was nothing her devoted AWP could do to rescue her.