“So Red Dawn really exists?”
“Yes. That is our best analysis of the available intelligence.”
Paul Boffa was reeling and yet from somewhere, he knew not whence, he found the gumption to ask the one question that he had to ask.
“Is Malta in danger, Sir Julian?”
The older man nodded.
“Yes,” he said again, “if Malta falls to Krasnaya Zarya then the whole Mediterranean basin from the Levant to the Straits of Gibraltar will most likely be plunged into a new dark age.”
Chapter 29
“The Lady says to us,” the tall, gaunt, scarred man with a patch over his empty left eye socket called, his voice keening to the high vaulted beams fifty feet above his head, ‘that we should trust her; that she knows what she is doing and that she is, at heart, a democrat of the old school. Yet she is of that coterie of place men and women that only a few short weeks ago, very nearly carried this great nation to the brink of a new thermonuclear denouement with the United States of America! How could that war have ended other than with our total and utter immolation, our extinction as an island race, and the final obliteration of what remains of our ancient and proud heritage?”
Margaret Thatcher listened with apparent equanimity as she gazed seraphically into the body of the main hall. Although it looked and had the feel of a building fifty years older, Cheltenham Town Hall had been completed as recently as 1903. Back then it had been a part of the redevelopment and expansion of the spa town, built on one side of Imperial Square — in peaceful times a green garden area for the citizenry to enjoy when at leisure — at a princely cost of some forty-five thousand pounds. The main hall was the jewel in the architectural crown of the building, designed to hold a thousand people, its Corinthian columns and balustraded first floor gallery gave it a regal, old World authenticity. On alcoves either side of the stage there were plaster statues of King Edward VII and King George V dressed in their coronation robes. The Town Hall was a marvellous relic from the England that had been swept away by the October War.
“What price the sanctity of our Parliamentary tradition?” Demanded the one-eyed man. “When it can be so effortlessly suborned by the Machiavellian machinations of the Government’s propaganda machine? Josef Goebbels reincarnated could not wish for a better tool with which to sculpt the cult of personality surrounding the person of our new leader!”
Iain Macleod was spitting, almost but not quite, under his breath.
“Some of us actually fought the Nazis,” he hissed in Margaret Thatcher’s ear, “unlike others who hid behind the staff tabs on their shoulders for the whole bloody war!”
Enoch Powell must have caught at least a part of his old friend’s outburst. He hesitated, half-turned before picking up the threads of his thoughts.
“What profit is there going cap in hand to our American friends when clearly those friends have already reneged upon the terms of ‘the treaty’ so recently signed with such fanfare in Washington? And by what right did the Lady’s government sign that treaty in the first place?”
A small section of the crowd was braying: “Here! Here!” Each and every time their spokesman paused to draw breath. Other voices, male and female were responding: “Shame! Better peace than war!”
“And that, my friends,” the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West declared, beginning to wind up his ‘brief’ opening remarks, which had already dragged into a twenty-five minute long harangue, a monologue underwritten with bitterness and anger, a spear of righteous anger seeking but never actually finding a target in which to embed itself. “That is the real question. Through cruel mischance we have reached a point in which we no longer have a legitimate Government. The Unity Administration is a skimpy fig leaf for the Lady’s petty tyranny. The Unity Administration is a charade, a constitutional nonsense with which the coven of conspirators locked in smoke-filled rooms in that old house next to the new airport has shamelessly bamboozled the Queen, in her time of grief and trial, into rubber stamping to the eternal ignominy of what was once the mother of Parliaments!”
Margaret Thatcher hoped Enoch Powell would sit down before he fell down; her opponent looked dreadful and he had been dripping with perspiration for several minutes.
The man’s arguments were at once cogent and oddly, banal. It was as if he wasn’t living in the same World that she had been for the last year.
She was only a little surprised by how few people stood to applaud Enoch Powell when eventually he stepped back from his lectern. As she’d warned Iain Macleod she would, she got up and politely clapped her adversary back to his chair. Then she walked to her lectern, carefully placed her hand bag on the floor by one side and looked into the blinding lights. Taking a moment to shield her eyes she peered into the throng.
“Oh, dear,” she smiled, “I had no idea that I’d upset Mr Powell so,” she spread her arms, momentarily, “so much.”
The mood in the hall was instantly less tense, oppressive.
“I was reminded on the way to this meeting,” she continued, desperately trying not to laugh at her own jokes, “that Mr Norman Wisdom, during his time in the Signal Corps, once appeared on this stage. I believe it was in 1943 and Rex Harrison was also on the bill. It was after the show that Rex went backstage and tried to persuade Mr Wisdom to turn professional. So, what with one thing and another, Mr Powell and I are treading in illustrious footsteps!”
Enoch Powell and his on stage supporter, former Treasury Minister Nigel Birch scoffed loudly and tossed their heads back with an ill-considered contempt that ran exactly counter to the mood pervading the thoughts of nine out of ten people in the hall.
“This Lady,” the Angry Widow declaimed, “has no pretensions of dictatorship and none of my colleagues is Josef Goebbels’s analogue. I am disappointed that a man of honour would even consider voicing such a slur in such a public and reckless manner.”
Enoch Powell and his second made as if to rise to their feet.
“No!” Margaret Thatcher cried angrily. “We’ve had to listen to your bile and your recriminations, now you can jolly well hear me out!” She focused on the Hall. “People keep telling me about the good old days. I understand as much as anybody why people naturally yearn for a return to ‘normality’. Before the war I was blissfully happy in my marriage and my chosen career, my children had a loving and devoted father, our little family had so much to look forward to. All that was stolen from me. But, we cannot turn back the clock. I am sorry but we are never going back to the way we once were. The challenge before us is to survive and to build a better World for our children and our grandchildren. If it transpires that we are the lost generation whose dreams and hopes had to be sacrificed for the future of our children, is that not a just and proper price to pay for their futures?”