Margaret Thatcher had been chilled but not overly surprised when the details of the Members’ Register had been correlated against the death and casualty rates among the general population. Death, it seemed, was intrinsically democratic; its geographic and demographic signature roughly matching the fates of the Members of Parliament in the 1959 House of Commons.
At the time of the cataclysm the population of the United Kingdom was around fifty-three million people, some seven to eight million of whom lived in the Greater London area, over four million in Scotland, a little under two million in Wales, and some one-and-a-half-millions in Northern Ireland. The weight of the Soviet strike had fallen exclusively on the forty-five million people living in England, disproportionately impacting the capital where between five and six million people had died in the first twenty-four hours after the attack. However, if London, the East Coast and both the urban and rural North-West had been hit hardest, the subsequent breakdown of basic services and the inability of the surviving health services to in any way deal with the enormity of the disaster, had made cholera and typhus, influenza, measles and poliomyelitis prolific killers of the old and the young, the infirm and the injured alike, scourging every corner of the United Kingdom with similar cruelty. Malnutrition, lack of heating fuels, the breakdown of the electricity grid and damage to or the destruction of as many as a third of all the homes in the country had probably doubled the death toll of the actual Soviet retaliatory strike. Between thirteen and fourteen million people had perished in England since the October War; only the young, the vigorous and the fit had survived. Tragically, the latest statistics showed that infant and post-natal mortality rates were still running at somewhere around nine times the rates calculated for 1961. The parlous state of the nation was best illustrated by the fact the most optimistic of the recent estimates for population decline produced by the Home Office’s statisticians; projected a fall of only two to three percent in the overall population in the coming year. The man factors offsetting a drastically reduced birth rate included an influx of survivors from the continent into the south coast ports, and a lower than expected ‘die off’ in the last two winter months. This latter was wholly attributable to the success of Operation Manna. The arrival of the great convoys had reversed planned cuts in the standard food ration and dramatically eased the fuel situation at exactly the same time that the previous year’s intensive winter planning ensured that a large number of lightly damaged houses and buildings had had their roofs repaired and windows boarded over. The provision of dry, heated, sheltered places in which the majority of the surviving population could see out the winter was probably saving tens of thousands of lives every week.
Set against this qualified good news there was overwhelming evidence that a contributory factor in the projected ongoing population decline was the — understandable and entirely rational — unwillingness of women of child-bearing age to risk conceiving a child. Who could blame any woman for not wanting to bring a baby into this cold, hostile, radioactively poisoned new World?
Margaret Thatcher’s anger threatened to choke her every time she stopped to contemplate the folly of the men — and it was the men — who had sleep walked into the cataclysm of October 1962.
Looking around the Great Hall, the Prime Minister saw relatively few of the old, grey men of that generation which had dominated the higher echelons of British political life before the war.
The sleep walkers’ time had come and gone.
“The House will come to order!” The Speaker demanded.
The groundswell of conversation subsided to a mutter.
Several MPs coughed, practically everybody had rattling chests.
Across the Great Hall sitting a little apart on the crowded front bench Enoch Powell eyed his quarry with hungry intent. His faction had coalesced around him. Not all his supporters were back-woodsmen or traditionalists who viewed Margaret Thatcher as a usurper. Several of the Powellites had been passed over for ministerial posts in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, others had refused to serve in junior positions that they regarded as being beneath their dignity. Others had been alienated by Edward Heath’s belated attempts to purge the dead wood he had inherited from Harold MacMillan’s administration. A small number of the Honourable Member for Wolverhampton South West’s most devoted followers actually believed — or had at least, honestly convinced themselves — that they were obediently acting in accordance with the wishes of their constituents.
It would have surprised her opponents to discover that Margaret Thatcher had not, in truth, worried overmuch about the numbers game. Iain Macleod, still the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party, guessed that as many as forty percent of the Tory MPs in the Hall would back her; either because she was, whatever they thought, their leader or because of their visceral detestation for Enoch Powell and the pseudo-Leninist wing of the Labour Party.
By far the largest anti-UAUK clump of MPs straggled about the tall, spindly tousled-haired former journalist, Michael Foot. While he was unlikely to acquire new converts to his cause this afternoon, Foot’s eloquence and the fervour of his ‘party within a party’ as Jim Callaghan put it, might well give wavering moderates cause for thought on both sides of the political spectrum.
Iain Macleod thought the House was split three ways, with the Government guaranteed perhaps as many as one hundred and forty to fifty votes, including as many as sixty from Margaret Thatcher’s own Party, and about ninety from the Labour side of the Unity Administration. Michael Foot could depend on thirty or forty true believers, Enoch Powell sixty to seventy exclusively Tory votes. Inevitably, with so many undecided, undeclared and frankly, bewildered MPs’ votes to be played for, the debate was likely to be ferocious.
The Speaker was making a meal — a veritable dog’s breakfast — of restating the protocol of Parliamentary business appropriate to a debate consequent upon the emergency recall of the Commons.
Margaret Thatcher tried not to scowl too obviously.
“This is not an emergency recall of the House!” She hissed to Iain Macleod. “What on earth is the old fool up to?”
“None of the previous senior clerks to the House survived the war, Margaret,” her Party Chairman reminded her lowly. “We had to recruit clerks locally. They know all about administering College meetings and the modes of service in chapel, but…”