It was one thing for Margaret Thatcher to talk about breaking the mould of British politics and remaking it in a shape more suited to ‘the age in which we live’; but she should not have done it before they had worked out what they were going to put in its place!
“Look,” he explained flatly, “let’s get one thing straight, Margaret.”
“I’m all ears, Jim.”
“I will have no part in forming some kind of National party. I am a socialist. You are not. Sooner or later, if and when we return to ‘politics as normal’ we will be on completely opposite sides of the political divide.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “So far as I am concerned ‘politics as normal’ resumed over a week ago. The Government has a mandate to govern in the short term that it never had before. A real democratic mandate, Jim. In a year’s time when we go to the British people; that will be the time to worry about party politics and the verdict of history. By then we shall have made a start to the reconstruction and hopefully we will have crushed Red Dawn forever.” As always, she was a woman in a hurry. “I think Anthony Crossland acted hastily,” she went on. “However, he has made up his mind and that’s that. Who did you have in mind to replace him? The Ministry of Labour remains in your Party’s gift for the lifetime of this Parliament.”
“Barbara Castle,” Jim Callaghan retorted, half-expecting an immediate rebuke.
“Oh,” the Prime Minister murmured. “I thought she was one of Michael Foot’s closest comrades?”
“Philosophically, yes. But not necessarily in terms of practical politics, Margaret.”
“Of course.” Margaret Thatcher sometimes wished she could think more like a professional politician, less intuitively, less literally. That was precisely why she needed men like Iain Macleod, Airey Neave and perversely, Jim Callaghan around her. She needed people who did not automatically agree with everything she said, and in some cases, were vehemently, ideologically against her. “How will she work with the other members of the Cabinet?”
“That remains to be seen, Prime Minister.”
Margaret Thatcher thought for a moment.
“Very well. If you would arrange to informally offer Mrs Castle an invitation to join the Government while I am in Malta please. If she is agreeable please ask Sir Henry Tomlinson to draft an appropriate letter and we will both sign it when I get back.”
The twins were already waiting at RAF Brize Norton.
The two freshly scrubbed and presented ten year olds were sitting with Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson, the wife of the Foreign Secretary, in the VIP Lounge — nothing very grand, a moderately well-heated room in a Nissen hut behind the hangars guarded by a cohort of the Prime Minister’s personal Royal Marine bodyguard — with excited, expectant eyes. Margaret Thatcher hugged her children with unrestrained maternal abandon in a way she would never have done in public before the October War. Presently, she looked up and met the eye of her friend. Pat, ‘Patricia’ was a name she had only remembered when her husband had been knighted, was sixteen years the Prime Minister’s senior and worldly in ways Margaret Thatcher was not and probably never would be. Pat had become the twins’ nanny and tutor, and in their mother’s long absences, their de facto guardian.
Pat Harding-Grayson had travelled with the Prime Minister to the United States in January when she had engineered the Trans-Atlantic rapprochement; she had been Margaret Thatcher’s quiet, reassuring female counsellor during those fraught days, as well as her trusted couturier and style advisor. Subsequently, Pat had become so involved looking after the twins that she had been unable to travel abroad again. However, for this particular overseas foray there had never been any prospect of her staying at home.
The Prime Minister’s personal protection detail — the hand-picked Royal Marines proudly called themselves the AWP, the Angry Widow’s Praetorians — formed a machine-gun toting honour guard as the two women and the twins bade farewell to the Deputy Prime Minister and boarded the awaiting Comet 4 at the nearby hardstand. A second detail of Royal Marine Commandos had already travelled to Malta to ‘secure’ the ground ahead of their ‘principal’s arrival’. The Royal Air Force had wanted to lay on a special flight for the Prime Minister; she had insisted that her small party — Pat, the twins, herself and two secretaries, one military and one from the Cabinet Secretary’s Office — would fly to and return from Malta on scheduled flights. Aviation fuel was still relatively scarce and the RAF’s fleet of transport aircraft was hard-pressed enough without having to accommodate ‘freeloading politicians’. Besides, all the papers would report that she had travelled ‘tourist class’ and appearances mattered. She was not one of those Tories who thought it was her class’s right to rule, or who believed she was automatically entitled to every imaginable available perk and privilege. She was determined to be a part of a new classless, one nation Conservative Party. If she stood for anything; it was for change.
What had happened in the Great Hall of Corpus Christi College a little more than a week ago had convinced her that the shackles of the past were far from unbreakable. The Powellites and the socialists had persuaded only ninety-eight members of Parliament to join their unlikely alliance. Another twenty-one MPs had abstained. The other two hundred and sixty-eight Members of the reconvened House of Commons had voted down the ‘no-confidence’ motion.
After Michael Foot had cavilled scornfully for over an hour Enoch Powell had got to his feet and delivered a withering, positively excoriating — somewhat theological — critique of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s legitimacy, competence and ‘societal morality and high-handed, arrogant usurpation of the fundamental tenets of a constitution born in a field at Runnymede’. The Prime Minister had not been alone in trying and failing to work out what all that had meant in the Queen’s English. The only thing that had not gone to plan was that most of the Ulster Unionists had voted against the Government or abstained because she had not yet declared war on the Republic of Ireland. Thus far, Sir Basil Brooke, the Leader of the Unionists had not resigned from the Cabinet but he was living on borrowed time. If he could not deliver his Party or do anything to quieten the situation — even with half the British Army currently committed to the six counties — in the province then by what right did he remain in the Government?
If Margaret Thatcher had learned — perhaps, re-learned was a more accurate description — anything in her short tenure as Prime Minister it was that sooner or later it was pointless compromising with people who simply would not, or could not meet one half-way. The Ulster Unionists had sided with the Conservative Party for a generation while remaining a distinct sect within the body of Tory politics; now she realised, not without a little sadness, that their singularly undiluted sectarian interests would be almost impossible to accommodate in, or reconcile with practically any future she foresaw for the United Kingdom. However, this was an open sore upon the body politic of the British Isles that she would leave unpicked today. Today she was off on an adventure with her children and her best friend, and awaiting her in Malta was the man she planned to marry.
Assuming, that was, he still wanted to marry her.
It was a mistake to take things for granted these days.