Having spoken to the First Sea Lord about the remarkable man in whom Sir David Luce had personally entrusted the command of the Navy’s most modern and most dangerous warship, he did not actually need to hear what Captain Simon Collingwood, RN, had said to the US Secretary of State because he could guess exactly what he had probably said.
Fulbright told him anyway.
“He said he owed it to the memory and to the friends and the families of his fellow submariners who died on the Scorpion to make public what really happened that day.”
“The Prime Minister won’t consider it,” Tom Harding-Grayson told the other man. “Nor will Her Majesty. Her Majesty has taken a particular interest in Captain Collingwood’s career.”
The two men thought their thoughts as the big car purred down the narrow, uneven roads towards Oxford, paced ahead and behind by Ferret armoured cars and trucks carrying the Secretary of State’s personal close bodyguard. Overhead, an RAF Westland Wessex helicopter thrummed low, quartering the countryside ahead of the convoy with machine gunners ready at both port and starboard open doors.
“Funny old business in Bucharest, don’t you think?” The Englishman asked presently.
“It is a ‘funny old business’,” Fulbright agreed, noncommittally. “When will you know the result of this ‘no confidence’ vote in your Parliament, Tom?”
“The vote will be a ten o’clock tonight.”
“I was surprised when you said you’d come out to the airport? I thought you’d want to be there?”
“I’m not a Member of the House of Commons. Margaret’s given me my marching orders; I am to stand in the next General Election or if there is a suitable by-election in the meantime. I warned her I’d be standing as a Labour candidate most likely but she did not bat an eyelid.” He sobered a little. “I’m not at all sure what we will do if the vote goes against us tonight. There will probably have to be an election of some kind although the state the country is in at the moment I don’t know how practical that would be.”
The Foreign Secretary checked his watch.
“Would you care to visit our new Parliament? They’ll be getting under way about now?”
Spaces had been reserved for the two men in the Great Hall of Corpus Christi College. They entered just as Iain Macleod was settling back onto the pew below the Speaker’s low raised stage and a scrawny man with tousled fair hair and a disjointed, disorganised air slowly rose to his feet several rows back on the opposite side of the hall.
Fulbright did an inadvertent double take at the eccentric figure around whom so many uniformly grey, sour-faced and dourly dressed people had clustered with such undisguised malicious anticipation. He was a little surprised by the pleading, almost sorrowful voice that after several moments waiting for quiet, projected itself effortlessly into the corners of the ancient auditorium.
“Mr. Speaker,” Michael Mackintosh Foot, the fifty year old Member of Parliament for Ebbw Vale began, “I beg to move, that this House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government.”
The American Secretary of State was struck by the inherently gladiatorial nature of the debate, face to face, the challenge hurled down like a gauntlet at one’s opponent’s feet; for all its gentility this substitute chamber was more bear pit than debating club.
The man at Fulbright’s side observed the slowly unfolding drama with mixed and somewhat perturbed emotions. He had known Michael Foot for many years. Not that closely, admittedly, because they moved in different social circles, but as acquaintances who sometimes talked in corridors, and occasionally at literary and journalistic events which they had coincidentally both been attending. The Foreign Secretary’s wife, Pat, had made a name for herself as a novelist in the early fifties, her material going out of fashion a little when she began to introduce politics to her writing. Pat had always been more publicly open about her left of centre leanings, not an option open to him as a career civil servant in the Foreign Office. In any event, he had enjoyed friendly relations with Michael Foot, a profoundly decent, kind and well-intentioned man who was always happiest operating on the left wing of his Party, and was, to boot, a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
“In this debate I do not plan to rehash the mistakes that were made by ‘Supermac’,” Harold MacMillan’s nickname, spoken in a fashion dripping with sarcasm, stirred a rumble of discontent on the rows behind Margaret Thatcher’s front bench. “What profit is there dwelling on the mistake’s of ‘Supermac’s’ motley collection of Tory time-servers, placemen and relations? The dead cannot speak and the broken and the disposed have no voice in our National Government!”
If Michael Foot had stepped across the aisle and slapped his Party Leader James Callaghan in the face with a wet fish — a large flounder — he could not have signalled a more fundamental personal breach, or made certain a more final and irrevocable fracturing of the Labour and Co-operative Party of the United Kingdom.
“Oh, my goodness,” Tom Grayson-Harding muttered.
“What is it?” Fulbright asked lowly, the keenest of political animals sensing that he was missing something important.
“I’ve just realised what Margaret is up to, Bill.” As he spoke an unconsciously impish smile played on Tom Harding-Grayson’s pale lips. He suddenly found himself considering what part his old friend Henry Tomlinson might have played in the setting of this particular trap; and then took himself to task for thinking his old friend capable of such Machiavellian logic. No, this was the Angry Widow’s doing. Either she was the most naturally gifted and cunning strategic political thinker of her generation; or she had inadvertently stumbled onto a magic formula with which to change the rules of the game.
Michael Foot had just hurled the most dreadful insult any member of the Labour Party could throw in the face of his leader; he had accused him of betraying his roots and siding with the enemies of the working classes. He had accused him of aping Ramsey MacDonald, who had joined the Conservatives and the Liberals in the National Government of the 1930s. MacDonald had torn the Labour Party asunder, split it down the middle and the scars remained, red raw and livid. Whatever happened today a significant part of the Labour Party would go its own way, fatally undermining James Callaghan’s leadership. Callaghan must have known this was the most likely outcome of any attempt to validate the Unity Administration’s ongoing mandate but if he had baulked at the prospect, he could have resigned from the Government at any time in the last few weeks and probably, still retained the leadership of his Party. That he had elected to await the outcome of the confidence vote suggested that he too had identified a once in a generation opportunity to decisively break and remake the landscape of British politics.
In the same way James Callaghan had written off the left wing of his own party, Margaret Thatcher had realised that little could be achieved while she, and the nation, were weighed down by the rump of ‘Supermac’s’ faithful old guard. The back woodsmen from the shires, the little Englanders, the men who dreamed of no more for the country than its restoration to some idyllic rural stasis that had never actually existed other than in the poems of A.E. Houseman, and who saw everything in terms of class and one’s rightful station, had no role in any of the futures envisaged by the grocer’s daughter from Grantham. The class which had sleepwalked into the Third World War had had their day and if they chose, en masse, to march out of the Conservative Party and enlist in the ranks of the Powellites, well, she would be the last person in England to shed a tear. Margaret Thatcher was a small ‘c’ conservative who had been tolerated and condescended to by the grandees of her Party before the war, one of a handful of token women in what, under Harold MacMillan, had been a middlingly indolent and very complacent privileged Gentleman’s club populated by and large by the ‘right sort of chaps’ who belonged to the ‘right sort of clubs’.