White flags or not!
A small signal lamp had been dragged up to the top of the conning tower — or as it was called in these modern times, the ‘fin’ — had been heightened and extended during the boat’s last refit. Now it soared over twenty-six feet above the waterline, giving the boat a slightly out of proportion look from some angles and suggesting that the Alliance was actually a very much larger vessel than she seemed at first sight.
An Aldis lamp was winking urgently from the destroyer’s bridge.
“S-U-R-R-E-N-D-E-R!”
Oh, well. That seems fairly straightforward.
Hopefully, the destroyer’s captain spoke passable English.
“Signal ALL CREW TO ASSEMBLE ON DECK!”
The small lamp clicked and clattered by his side.
Barrington waited, wondering how he could be so calm. He had spent most of the last fifteen years working as a solicitor’s clerk in a sleepy West Country law firm in Bath; trying very hard to forget the spills and thrills and the unmitigated unpleasantness of those desperate missions out of Malta in 1941 and 1942. Every night in harbour the boats would disembark all but a skeleton crew and submerge in Lazaretto or Sliema Creek. To this day he remained undecided whether skulking in a bomb shelter on Manoel Island or inside the fetid submerged pressure hull of a submarine had been worse; at least when the boat was at sea it would sometimes run on the surface at night and the blowers would keep the stench down.
“She’s acknowledged, sir!”
Barrington raised his binoculars to his eyes.
Men were pouring onto the destroyer’s deck. In fact they were in such a hurry to comply with his order that men were literally falling over each other in the rush.
Bloody Hell! The former solicitor’s clerk from Bath said to himself. I’ve just captured a destroyer!
Chapter 15
Roy Jenkins brow was deeply furrowed when he welcomed his visitor and escorted him to his chair. The other man was tall, erect, hurtfully stiff and resembled nothing so much as a shadow of his former self. Yet notwithstanding his physical decline and the terrible scars of the injuries he had suffered on the night of the October War, defiance and battle glinted still in his one good eye.
“Do you know what is going on in the Mediterranean, Home Secretary?” John Enoch Powell, the fifty-one year old Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West inquired in that instantly recognisable nasal, imperious way that had become his hallmark down the years.
“No,” the anonymous, bespectacled, balding Home Secretary confessed as he settled in a chair opposite his guest. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary were dealing with whatever was going on in the Mediterranean. His brief was the administration of justice and civil society in the home country and until he was called to Cabinet to be briefed on developments overseas he was getting on with his job. Such were the demands and the prerequisites of and for ongoing good government. He met the piercing one-eyed stare of the man who was probably the fiercest constitutional opponent in Parliament, indeed, in the whole country of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom. Today, that did not matter because he had no intention of discussing politics with his Prime Minister’s bête noire. Today he wanted — under ‘Privy Council’ terms of confidentiality — to pick the former Tory minister’s brains. “I need your advice, Mr Powell.”
The other man’s half-paralysed face twitched with what might have been contempt or surprise; it was impossible to guess which.
Roy Jenkins, a prominent and rising member of the Labour Party in opposition, had had very little time for Enoch Powell, Conservative Cabinet member and high flier in Tory governments in the 1950s. Powell was also that little bit older than the miner’s son from Wales, and the fact that Jenkins and Ted Heath had been on good terms had made impossible any great meeting of minds in those pre-war years. The Home Secretary had regarded Powell as a remarkable freak of nature, in a former age he would have been recognised for the near genius polymath he was but in the twentieth century, such men were too often mavericks who invariably fell out of favour with their natural friends in politics. And so it had been for Enoch Powell; the advent of Margaret Thatcher had simply accelerated his inevitable divorce from the Conservative Party.
“It is a rare thing for a member of Mrs Thatcher’s coterie to ask my advice, Mr Jenkins.”
The Home Secretary smiled sheepishly. Opposite him sat a poet who had studied at A.E. Houseman’s elbow, become a University Don in his mid-twenties, was only one of two men who had enlisted as a private soldier in the British Army at the beginning of World War Two and emerged at the end of it as Brigadier, a man who spoke countless languages, a man who had learned to speak Urdu specifically because he planned to be Viceroy of India one day. In the decade before the October War he had been a junior Housing Minister, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Minister of Health and but for the war he would have stood for the leadership of his Party when Harold MacMillan finally retired to his beloved grouse moors.
“I am hardly a member of Margaret’s ‘coterie’, Mr Powell.”
“As you wish. Privy Council terms?”
Roy Jenkins nodded thoughtfully. Individuals appointed to Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council occupied, by accepting the ‘honour’ of the appointment, a unique and sometimes invidious position within ‘the establishment’ of the British state. At one level the Privy Council was what it had always been throughout history, a body sworn to loyally and faithfully advise the Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. However, to be in a position to wisely advise the Sovereign nominated Privy Councillors needed to be well-briefed about many, if not all the great secrets of the realm. Therefore, on a second level, because of their duty of confidentiality, a small number of Privy Councillors involuntarily became in effect, the guardians of the nation’s conscience.
Enoch Powell almost smiled.
It seemed that doors formerly barred and locked shut were to be selectively opened for the UAUK’s most trenchant Parliamentary critic to look within. It would have been funny had not he been a man to whom his word was not just his bond, but life itself. Wild horses would not drag anything he learned in this room from his lips even though they tore his mutilated body to shreds.
“You were in intelligence during the war?” Roy Jenkins asked. “The forty-five war, I mean?”
“Yes. Military intelligence. In the United Kingdom, the Middle East and later in India and Burma. The longer the war went on the more unpopular I made myself. In war lazy thinking is especially dangerous because it kills people. Lack of intellectual rigor killed far too many of our people in that war.”
“I’m sure you are right. Can I ask you what you know of Bletchley Park, a fellow called Turing and another man called Welchman?”
“Ah,” the MP for Wolverhampton South West sighed because now he understood everything. “I see. You’ve had a run in with those idiots at Cheltenham!”
“Yes and no,” Roy Jenkins conceded, a little put aback. “It would be more correct to say that several senior members of GCHQ have had a run in with MI5.”
“Have you talked to Tom Harding-Grayson or Sir Henry Tomlinson about this?”
“Er, no.” With the apparent crisis in the Mediterranean demanding the Foreign Secretary’s full attention, and presumably, that of Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service too, he had had no opportunity to beard either man’s attention since the GCHQ Security File had crossed his desk that morning.