‘In the current emergency I see the job of Home Secretary to be more that of an Interior Minister along the lines of the American or the traditional Western European model, Mr Jenkins,’ she had declared. ‘You will be the man who ties together and ensures that all the other home ministries talk to each other. I know that Mr Heath was driven to despair sometimes by the fact that often the left and right hands of government seemed not to know what the other was doing!’
He had hesitated before accepting a post in Margaret Thatcher’s Unity Administration of the United Kingdom; not so much because he knew little or nothing of the lady or her likely policies in government, but because in the year since the recent war he had been near death more than once and wondered how his impaired constitution would stand up to the rigors of eighteen hour working days, and the intolerable mental and spiritual stresses and strains of life at the heart of Government. He had never actually previously held high office and like any reasonable man, he had seriously wondered if he was physically and mentally up to the challenge.
‘Mr Heath thought very highly of you, Mr Jenkins,’ the lady had assured him in that brisk, no nonsense way that so endeared her to her countless doting admirers throughout the country. ‘That is quite sufficient for me!’
The Cabinet posts in the Unity Administration had been split between the Conservative and Labour Parties and the Liberals 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 in 1959 — accepted the offer of the post of Secretary of State for Scotland. Roy Jenkins’s own party, Labour, had since split into several bitterly warring factions; and the fault lines between parts of the Prime Minister’s own party had, to a lesser extent begun to widen alarmingly but the UAUK retained a solid cross-bench majority in the newly reconvened House of Commons and had seemed in recent weeks to be finally coming to grips with things.
Later that day Roy Jenkins had been looking forward to bringing together Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Gregson-Phelps, the Royal Engineer officer nominated as the Greater London Survey Officer, representatives of survivor groups who had already re-colonised areas of the bomb-ravaged capital and the newly constituted Home Office Reconstruction Planning Executive in what he hoped would be a weekend-long ‘meeting of minds’. The Home Secretary was a convinced believer in the principle that if only right-minded men and women could be brought together and persuaded to talk with each other, there was nothing that could not be achieved.
The previous evening he and his wife Jennifer had dined with Miriam Prior, the red-headed, combative and very, very shrewd former primary school teacher from Islington around whom, with ‘King Harold’ — Harold Strettle a former London Underground worker — a band of several thousand survivors had coalesced in the bomb-ravaged capital. King Harold’s loosely articulated transient fiefdom perambulated between the northern and western suburbs and the heart of the wrecked city; from the north bank of the River Thames at Westminster all the way out to Windsor and Eton twenty-five miles to the west and Watford over twenty miles north west. Fascinatingly, Miriam Prior had intimated that on previous encounters with ‘the forces of reaction’, that is, the Government and the Armed Forces, she and King Harold had made a point of ‘consistently understating’ the numbers of people who had already moved back into the margins of the ruined metropolis.
Colonel Gregson-Phelps, the most senior of the team of ‘survey officers’ reporting back to Roy Jenkins had promised to update him on the latest ‘refugee debriefings’ of the increasingly large number of people making the perilous journey across the English Channel from Northern France, and in some cases from Holland and Belgium. While it was known that in the low countries and parts of Denmark, Belgium and northern France disparate ad hoc regional communes, collectives and military protectorates ‘seemed to have been set up’ very little had been known about the real situation on the ground until recently. Likewise, it had not been appreciated until about six weeks ago that there was an established functioning governing regime in Southern France.
Apparently based in the Auvergne around Clermont this administration’s writ might reach half-way north to Paris and all the way from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. However, other than that the ‘South France Government’ was secretive, possibly socialist or Marxist and almost certainly militaristic, little was known of it. For example, it was not known if this regime controlled seaworthy former vessels of the French Navy, or airworthy military or civilian aircraft, whether it had contacts with the junta in power on Corsica, or contacts with Franco’s Spain or the Tuscan League Fascists of the Italian Peninsula. Jeremiads worried whether Southern France had become a ‘safe haven’ for Red Dawn sympathisers, or might one day have ambitions of its own in the Mediterranean, or aspirations to command the Bay of Biscay. Wiser heads counselled that lack of contact was not evidence, of itself, of ill-will or hostility and that the only wise course of action was to wait and see.
Tom Harding-Grayson’s skeleton ‘French Section’ at the Foreign Office had flagged the uncommunicativeness of the putative ‘South France Enclave’ as problematic but not necessarily worrying; although privately, the Foreign Secretary was not so sanguine. In this troubled age sane men looked for friends wherever they might be found and silence was if not dangerous, then almost always troubling.
The last thing Her Majesty’s Government needed right now was a new armed neutral, or worse, a potential new enemy threatening its Atlantic flank and menacing the western Mediterranean. Roy Jenkins was keenly interested to learn what news Colonel Gregson-Phelps had gleaned since their last meeting a fortnight ago.
It vexed him more than somewhat that MI5 had stayed aloof from involving itself in the business of investigating or in any way ‘vetting’ the refugees coming ashore in increasing numbers on the southern shores of England. Not that MI6 had been any better. What was going on in France was as big a mystery to the Secret Intelligence Service as it was the Security Service! MI5 claimed its focus was on the ‘Irish Problem’; MI6 had lost all its continental networks in the October war and was a shadow of its former glory. Both organisations claimed chronic shortages of ‘qualified staff’ and that erratically shifting Government policy had made it impossible to rebuild ‘on a firm footing for the future’.
‘The attached letter, bearing the signatures of the four suspended directors, is obviously injurious to the interests of home and overseas security and represents a prima facie case which must be prosecuted against the men involved…’
Roy Jenkins groaned out aloud.
In the last six months the United Kingdom had very nearly blundered into a disastrous war with the United States of America because of faulty, misleading and in critical areas, non-existent intelligence. Aircraft from Spanish bases had been able to launch devastating attacks on British ships without warning. Malta had been attacked in December without warning. The whole sorry saga of Red Dawn — Krasnaya Zarya — had fallen upon British Arms in the Mediterranean and over-run Anatolia, Turkey, Crete, the Aegean and parts of the Greece and the Balkans before anybody in England had had any real inkling of what was going on. There had been no warning of Red Dawn’s use of nuclear weapons against Royal Navy targets. There had been no warning of Red Dawn’s nuclear strikes against targets in south-eastern Europe, Egypt and on Malta. Self-evidently, the Government Communications headquarters (GCHQ) had comprehensively failed the nation.