Iain Macleod visibly flinched. His own long, pre-October War, friendship with the Party’s most gifted and most dangerous loose cannon had taught him that the man was an utterly unpredictable mixture of good and bad; he could be the most perspicacious man in England one moment, dazzled by hubris the next, wedded to a profound universal moral truth one day, and blind to what was staring him in the face half-an-hour later. His career in Government was at once distinguished, brilliant — a word much overused in politics but entirely justified in describing many of Enoch Powell’s insights and initiatives — and yet horribly fallible. Just when his ascent to the highest echelons of Government seemed most inevitable he’d stumble, unable to connect with, well, reality. He had been an able Financial Secretary to the Treasury under Peter Thorneycroft’s Chancellorship in the late 1950s, and the Health Minister in the years leading up to the October War. At the Treasury he’d become a fervent believer in the new theories of ‘monetarism’, and an archetypal old school opponent of using public money to prop up ailing businesses or to boost consumer spending, resigning in protest with Peter Thorneycroft when Harold MacMillan had over-ruled the Treasury team.
Later, at the Ministry of Health, Powell had tried to address the inhumanity of the systemic neglect of Victorian psychiatric institutions — asylums — and made what became known as his ‘Water Tower’ speech: ‘There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside-the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day.’ He had wanted to tear down the whole diabolical system and replace it with something that was genuinely humane. However, set against great morale crusades such as the battle to reform the insane houses of the nation’s past; there was an odd, pedantic callousness, a disregard for the personal, a lack of empathy for the problems of real people. For example, he was profoundly unsympathetic to the victims of the Thalidomide scandal — babies who had been born with deformities to mothers who had taken the drug in pregnancy — and refused point blank to meet any of the children who had been born with birth defects. ‘Anyone who took so much as an aspirin put himself at risk,’ he was reported to have said, as if the principle of caveat emptor should, or had ever applied to the products of the pharmaceutical industry. Burying his head in the sand he had refused to authorise a public inquiry, and — incredibly — decided not to issue a warning to prevent the consumption of any leftover Thalidomide pills remaining in people’s medicine cabinets, although such a warning had already been issued personally by the President of the United States to the American people.
Iain Macleod mourned the dreadful suffering his old friend had lived through since the night of the October War; he mourned also the stellar career and remarkable life that he feared was imploding before his eyes. Worse, in the next few minutes he was very much afraid that Enoch Powell was going to light the touch paper of a British insurrection of the kind that had just rocked Washington DC. The poor, deluded man honestly and truly, knew not what he was doing.
“I say to you all here in this hall that,” Enoch Powell’s voice quivered with rage, “that woman has usurped the constitution in a way no usurper has usurped the rightful governance of these Islands since Henry Tudor ousted Richard at Bosworth Field. Except,” he added with an excoriating flourish, “at least Henry Tudor had the courage to take his prize by battle. He had no skirts to hide behind!”
“I think I’ve heard enough of this balderdash,” Airey Neave said loudly in the moment before the demigod’s true believers began to bay for blood.
Iain Macleod nodded and as he staggered to his feet — his two decade old war wounds, from which he had never fully recovered, had stiffened while he sat listening to the other speakers — the ministers’ bodyguards quickly stepped close.
“See!” The man on the stage cried in triumph. “See how they run now that their little game has been exposed! Like rats falling over each other in their haste to get off a sinking ship.”
Airey Neave didn’t look back.
Elsewhere in the hall other people were standing; some gesticulating, brandishing clenched fists, others simply trying to get out. Something flew through the air. The veteran of Colditz didn’t blink, didn’t attempt to duck. Somewhere behind him on the apron of the stage glass shattered.
At the moment the Prime Minister was fighting to safeguard the life of the nation in Washington, men who had the bare-face gall to dare to call themselves Tory diehards were queuing up to stab her in the back as soon as she got back. If only for once, just once, the Party could find the gumption to march in step with the rest of the country!
Was that really too much to ask?
Chapter 4
Sir Thomas ‘Tom’ Harding-Grayson and his wife, Patricia, were waiting in the first floor lobby with Lord Franks, the recently appointed United Kingdom Ambassador, and the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce, when Margaret Thatcher made her regal appearance.
Blair House still reeked of fresh paint and in places the recently repaired damage to the internal fabric of the building stood out like a sore thumb. However, despite its proximity to the White House and the fact that vicious fighting had washed around it during the Battle of Washington, the building itself — the original early nineteenth century town house and three adjoining properties — had survived more or less intact. Emergency restoration and repairs had been begun within days of the fighting ending while several rings of new defences were prepared. Blair House was now the temporary Washington residence of the President of the United States of America and no expense or effort had been spared in getting it ready to accommodate its new occupant and his guests.
The Foreign Secretary’s wife — a slim, elegant, greying woman in her fifties — stepped forward and examined her unlikely friend. She nodded with approval. She’d quietly, and very privately mentioned to the Prime Minister that ‘Sunday best middle-class housewife really won’t do any more’ before the mission left for Washington, and had been astonished when the younger woman had asked if she would ‘look into my trousseau for me’, because ‘honestly, I don’t seem to have time for anything these days!’. Thus the former novelist and wife of the obscure civil servant who had been catapulted unexpectedly into the international limelight six weeks ago, found herself in the role of the Angry Widow’s fashion counsellor. Secretly, Pat Harding-Grayson suspected that Margaret Thatcher had had an ulterior motive in asking her advice; how else was she to reserve a few minutes each day in her diary when she would be free to talk to another woman, about something other than matters of absolute life and death? Pat, who had never been an overly maternal person had even found herself spending time with and enjoying the company of her friend’s twins, Carol and Mark.