Around the table brave men blanched, uncertain as to how the woman, much younger by many years than any other member of the assembled War Cabinet, was going to react.
Walter Brenckmann had tried and failed to persuade Margaret Thatcher to take the rapidly developing public relations fiasco over reports that Sir David Luce had been appointed — independently by the UAUK — Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean seriously. She was convinced that it was a ‘storm in a teacup’ and that the British Ambassador, Lord Franks would ‘sort it out’.
“Who pray do you recommend,” the Prime Minister inquired, “that I recommend to the President of the United States of America to fill that august position, Sir David?”
The First Sea Lord visibly winced at the dismissive tone of the woman who until thirty-six hours ago every man around the table had honestly believed was the saviour of their nation.
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, since December the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland coughed.
“If I might say a few words please, Margaret?”
All eyes turned to the brilliant man who had been Sir Alec Douglas Home’s — his predecessor’s — post-October War Permanent Secretary and the real power behind the throne at the Foreign office during the year after the war. Attempting to rebuild a foreign policy after so many of the countries previously friendly to the United Kingdom’s interests had been destroyed by its closest ally, and in a World in which every single old certainty had been extinguished overnight was a profoundly messy business. It was a testament to his talents that relations with the Commonwealth had been buttressed so swiftly and effectively in the months after the war as to allow the putting together of the Operation Manna convoys. Those convoys, masterminded by Julian Christopher and diplomatically facilitated by his sure hand, had saved the nation from starvation, wrack and ruin in recent months. Arguably, the relationship he had already built in the last three months with Dean Rusk’s successor at the American Department of State, J. William Fulbright, had done as much to cement the growing US-British rapprochement as had Margaret Thatcher’s ability to ‘connect’ — publicly at least — with President Kennedy.
The Prime Minister resumed her seat at the table.
“Carry on please, Tom.”
The man made an effort to sit up straight in his chair and to shrug off the terrible cloying weariness which fogged his mind. Alcohol, melancholy and a predisposition to tell his political masters the truth — as he saw it — had relegated him to an obscure sinecure within his department in the two years before the October War. The alcohol and the melancholy had also caused his wife, Pat to divorce him in despair. His decline had torpedoed a meteoric career which might one day have concluded in his winning the job currently filled by his oldest surviving friend in Christendom, Henry Tomlinson.
“The time has come,” he prefaced, whimsically self-deprecating, “the Walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax.” He quirked a tired grimace in memory of a time when he still remembered how to laugh. He wondered what Lewis Carroll would have made of the age in which they now lived? “And of cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot; and whether pigs have wings.”
Margaret Thatcher was suddenly less angry, her steely blue eyes less accusative, less cobalt hard.
“Tom, are you quite yourself?”
“No, Margaret,” he replied gently. “I am not and forgive me for saying this, neither are you,” he continued before she could slap him down for his impertinence, “and at a time like this it is very important that you know that your friends are on your side.”
The silence was threatening.
Presently, Margaret Thatcher pursed her lips, squared her shoulders and with the briefest of sniffs, fixed her friend in her sights.
“The thoughts of the Walrus and the Carpenter aside, Foreign Secretary,” she said with the severity of a disappointed schoolmistress, “what other thoughts would you care to share with us this morning?”
Tom Harding-Grayson sucked his teeth as he collected his ideas.
“Yesterday, I was preoccupied with the fate of South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands and the Falkland Islands thousands of miles away in the South Atlantic. I am still perturbed on account of those distant, windswept rocks and their few tens and hundreds of people. But somehow, the annexation of those places rather palls into insignificance in comparison with the national humiliation and tragedy which has befallen us in the Central Mediterranean. This said my greatest fear is that in retrospect we may look back on events in the South Atlantic and the Mediterranean as singular disasters in a global train of irreversible setbacks the seeds of which may already be in motion.”
The First Sea Lord stirred.
“My staff is worried about the reports coming out of Tehran,” Sir David Luce remarked neutrally. “And then there are the reports of troop concentrations in the Caucasus.”
“Surely,” Airey Neave offered, “Operation Grantham has got off to a good start? Our troops went ashore practically unopposed on Cyprus, I understood?”
Sir David Luce nodded but held his peace, returning the floor to the Foreign Secretary.
“Before Christmas,” Tom Harding-Grayson reminded his colleagues, “we very nearly went to war with the USA and Italy, and we did actually go to war with Spain almost entirely on account of various parties hearing one thing and understanding another. Then later we were achingly slow to recognise the threat posed by Red Dawn in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and Turkey. Frankly, we still don’t know the half of what the old Soviet regime was up to creating a monster like Krasnaya Zarya. Now we have had to throw everything we’ve got at Cyprus to regain at least one secure base of operations in the Eastern Mediterranean; on the grounds that it is an essential prerequisite of a future Anglo-American campaign to restore civilisation and decency to Crete, the Aegean and the eastern littoral of Anatolia. In itself, that is a task which might be the work of a generation, assuming we ever take it on in the first place.” His rheumy grey eyes tracked around the faces of his friends and colleagues.
The ticking of a clock on the wall behind him sounded unnaturally loud.
“So, to recap. Yesterday,” Tom Harding-Grayson continued reflectively, “I was worried about the South Atlantic, and now in the wake of the disaster which has befallen us at Malta, I am suddenly worried about what might be going on in the mountains of the trans-Caucasus and elsewhere. And ever since I heard the first news of the Battle of Malta I have been asking myself where the next blow will fall?”
James Callaghan stirred.
“And have you come to any conclusions, Tom?”
“Yes and no,” the Foreign Secretary prevaricated. “But I keep asking myself what we could do now — if we could actually do anything at all, that is — if we were faced tomorrow by a re-run of the Abadan Crisis of a decade ago?”
Chapter 31
Duminku, or as the British knew him ‘Dom’ — a diminutive of his Anglicized name Dominic — Mintoff involuntarily broke stride as he was ushered out of the ramshackle temporary office of the Acting Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces on Malta. His waiting bodyguards — hulking men most of whom had deserted him at the height of the bombardment the previous day, a fact he was unlikely to forget in a hurry — very nearly fell over each other as their leader halted.