Margaret Thatcher tidied her papers, and reached for her handbag.
Today’s handbag was an elegantly practical Navy blue model bearing the internal label of a fashionable Knightsbridge ladies’ couturier, a present from an admirer that had arrived with a covering letter from the husband of its former owner who had asserted: ‘my late wife would have cheered every step you take…’
Before the war the Cabinet had comprised twenty-one ministers, a formula that Edward Heath had adopted in his United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration in the immediate aftermath of the October War. However, Margaret Thatcher had decided that a model based more closely on the latter day streamlined configuration of that Cabinet was more appropriate to the needs of the country and to promote good governance. Her Cabinet comprised twelve members, including the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, currently the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce. Of the eleven other members of her Cabinet, the Foreign Secretary was a political appointment with no Party affiliation — notwithstanding his avowedly centre-leftist inclinations — and of the remainder six were drawn from the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and four from the Labour and Co-operative Party.
The Prime Minister headed the Conservatives who included in their number the Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir Basil Brooke — a nephew of Lord Alanbrooke, Churchill’s Second World War Chief of the Imperial General Staff — who was attending full Cabinet for the first time today having previously been reluctant to leave his headquarters at Stormont Castle due to the fluidity of ongoing events in Ulster. In this case ‘fluidity’ was a convenient euphemism for the near civil war that was tying down the equivalent of five brigades of infantry; over twenty-three thousand trained and equipped men whose presence in the Mediterranean would have enabled the C-in-C in Malta to have mounted a successful defence of the island of Cyprus. Northern Ireland was a canker that was going to have to wait for another time; likewise the disgraceful behaviour of the Government of the Irish Republic in Dublin in stoking sectarian tension in the north.
The other Conservative Party ministers around the oval table were: William Whitelaw, at Defence; Peter Thorneycroft, the member of Parliament for Monmouth and the most senior pre-war surviving Tory grandee from MacMillan’s last administration reinstated as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a post he had held in the 1950s; Airey Neave at Supply, which now also oversaw Transportation; Iain Macleod, the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party at the Ministry of Information; and holding down the Scottish Office, the one largely intact pre-war ministry, John Scott Maclay, the fifty-eight year old MP for Renfrewshire.
The ‘opposition faction’ was led by James Callaghan, the Leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party, who was formally acknowledged as Margaret Thatcher’s deputy. There had been no mandatory order of succession in Edward Heath’s Administration, but if anything untoward happened to her — for example, in the event she got shot by a madman at a public meeting which had very nearly happened at Cheltenham Town Hall not so long ago — Jim Callaghan would automatically become the next Prime Minister and would remain in post so as long as he retained sufficient support in the country and Her Majesty’s confidence. Jim Callaghan also held the portfolio of Secretary of State for Wales. To balance the ‘unity’ of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, the posts of the Home, the Labour and the Health departments had been assigned to Labour Party nominees; respectively Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crosland and Christopher Mayhew.
Charles Anthony Raven Crosland, the forty-five year old MP for Grimsby, was one of the finest minds in British politics and sooner or later would have become a candidate for the leadership of his Party regardless of the intervention of the October War. His Labour Ministry portfolio included a brief to explore options for re-creating a functioning national education system. At present the surviving Universities were being left to their own devices, other than where their funding was directly related to Government defence research, development or other priority projects; while the school system was currently administered by the eleven Emergency Regional Administrations. Margaret Thatcher had decreed that one day the old, fragmented system would be in unified. It was Anthony Crosland’s job to identify practical options and to report back to Cabinet by the summer.
Christopher Paget Mayhew, the forty-eight year old MP for Woolwich East, the former seat of his old friend and mentor Ernest Bevin was a pro-Arabist with openly big ‘L’ liberal views that had sat uneasily in his own Party before the October War. Margaret Thatcher had hesitated before rubber-stamping his appointment to the Health Ministry but James Callaghan had offered no obvious or better qualified candidate, so she had accepted Mayhew.
This morning three Privy Counsellors had been invited to ‘observe Cabinet’. This was not a gimmick but a genuine attempt to reflect the composition of the surviving electorate and a broader variety of views and opinions across the country. While the Cabinet operated at approximately half its pre-war size, this seemed to be a sensible compromise given that shortly it was planned to reconvene Parliament and once that happened, Margaret Thatcher had no intention of allowing her Cabinet to operate in a vacuum. To this end she had personally invited Enoch Powell, the most prominent Conservative MP not in government to attend this inaugural Cabinet in Oxford, and two high profile female Labour and Co-operative Party members.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the Prime Minister called as she swept into the oak panelled Tudor Hall of Corpus Christi College to an unmelodic accompaniment of scrapping chair legs, “and ladies,” she remembered. She stopped to shake hands with Enoch Powell, at his most stiffly, severely punctilious, and then, somewhat mechanically, with the two women who had been invited to ‘observe’ proceedings alongside the MP for Wolverhampton South West.
The Honourable Member for Blackburn was the elder and the feistier of the two women ‘observers’. Fifty-three year old Barbara Ann Castle had joined the Labour Party while still in her teens. She came from a family active in the Independent Labour party in the 1930s; her father a tax inspector by profession becoming at one point the editor of Bradford’s socialist newspaper, the Bradford Pioneer, while her mother had run a soup kitchen for local miners. That had been in the era when the Labour Party was in schism — after Ramsey MacDonald had split the faithful by forming a National Government with the Tories and the Liberals — the hard school in which most successful British post Hitler’s-war socialist politicians had cut their teeth. Barbara Castle’s activism had bloomed first in nearby St Hugh’s College, where she had earned a third-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In London before the Second War she sat on St Pancras Borough Council and wrote for Tribune, then as now a leading mouthpiece of the left in British politics whose editor, William Mellor — a married man some two decades her senior — she was said to have been having an affair with at the time of his death in 1942. When she married in 1944, she was the housing correspondent of the Daily Mirror, the populist broadsheet of moderate socialism. Margaret Thatcher’s briefing was that Mrs Castle had been nothing if not true to her leftist principles down the years, ploughing a singular path for a woman in politics as an unapologetic socialist on the Bevanite wing of the post-war Labour Party, who had promoted the accelerated decolonization of the Empire and vociferously opposed the South African Apartheid regime. Before the October War the Prime Minister and her left-wing counterpart had had little time for each other and the feeling had been entirely mutual.