In a moment the newcomer was on his feet, brushing himself down and shaking Captain David Penberthy’s hand.
Chapter 7
It had been a very long day and nobody around the Cabinet table had slept in the last twenty-four hours. The leading members of the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration waited patiently, welcoming the respite, while the technicians in RAF blue uniforms set up the projector and loaded the first spool of film.
The Right Honourable Edward Richard George Heath, for most of the last year the acknowledged, if not ever formally constitutionally appointed let alone anointed Prime Minister, spent the idle minutes writing slow, deliberate notes in the small pocket journal he’d kept, sporadically, over the last few terrible months. Up until the October War he’d been a man who’d methodically, perhaps obsessively documented his life. Famously, he was reputed to have never parted company with any correspondence he’d received and habitually kept copies — even of personal letters — of everything he wrote. This old habit had lapsed after the cataclysm. His records, the precious correspondence which had catalogued and validated his life had been destroyed and for a while, he’d felt a little bereft, as if the foundation of his life, his very personality, had been somehow eroded. A man with a lesser sense of mission, lacking in his almost religious — although he’d always been a very secular sort of Christian — sense of duty would have been weighed down forever by that loss of self, the sudden absence of the physical evidence of the life he had lived up until then.
Aware that the RAF technicians were tidying up and preparing to leave the room the Prime Minister collected his thoughts as he eyed the other players around his Cabinet table.
To his left sat his nominal deputy, the Right Honourable Leonard James Callaghan, the forty-one year old Member of Parliament for the constituency of Cardiff South East, and the Leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party of the United Kingdom. Jim Callaghan also held the post of Minister of Defence in the UKIEA. A big, lugubrious man his slowness of speech and apparently unhurried mannerisms veiled a keen intellect which was as equally attuned to the strategic as the tactical side of politics.
Beyond James Callaghan sat the new Home Secretary, thirty-eight year old Margaret Hilda Thatcher. The Prime Minister’s relations with the woman many people called ‘the Angry Widow’ — although always out of her hearing — had been distantly cordial for many years before the war but they were not, and probably never would be true friends or confidantes. Nobody had been more surprised than he when belatedly, he’d realised that he had no greater allies in the fight to save the nation that Margaret Thatcher and Jim Callaghan, the erstwhile leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition.
It was a funny old World…
To Edward Heath’s right hand sat the constantly fulminating figure of fifty year old Iain Norman Macleod, the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, whom he’d recently brought into his inner War Cabinet as Minister of Information. This latter title was a euphemism for a role that specifically combined overseeing both a political warfare function and the duties of the Government’s official, albeit non-political, propagandist. It was the Prime Minister’s most fervent hope that his old but somewhat estranged ‘One Nation Conservative’ friend would henceforth, be too busy confounding their mutual foes to sponsor further conspiracies within the Conservative Party. Iain Macleod was a man who was constantly in motion. Partly, this was because he’d never fully recovered from wounds received in the 1945 war, mostly it was because no other man in Government had such a brilliant, or such a restless mind.
Beyond Iain Macleod, George Edward ‘Peter’ Thorneycroft, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and now the Conservative Party’s man at the Ministry of Defence viewed proceedings with his normal inscrutability. The fifty-four year old Tory Grandee was well liked in the ranks of what little survived of the pre-war party, and with the tragic death of Alec Douglas-Home, the Foreign Secretary in the treacherous attack on Balmoral Castle, he was the senior surviving member of Harold ‘Supermac’ MacMillan’s old guard. Peter Thorneycroft wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t entertained ambitions — perhaps, the expectation — that he would step in poor Alec’s shoes. However, if he was discommoded by the promotion of a career civil servant, Tom Harding-Grayson, formerly Alec Douglas-Home’s Permanent Secretary to the post, he’d kept his disappointment to himself.
Tom Harding-Grayson, his mind uncluttered with political baggage, had been the logical choice to succeed Sir Alec Douglas-Home. This was not a time for politics; this was a time for hard-headed pragmatism and who better to inject that into the highest councils in the land than the man who’d been shunned and sidelined as a Jeremiad in the years before exactly what he’d predicted might happen had indeed, happened. No man in Whitehall had seen so clearly, or discussed the dangers so eloquently, as Tom Harding-Grayson. The catastrophic developments of recent days and hours only served to reinforce the Prime Minister’s conviction that he’d done the right thing in leaving Peter Thorneycroft where he was and bringing in Tom Harding-Grayson.
At the head of the table sat Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Head of the Home Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary, and the greying éminence grise of the UKIEA. Had it not been for the October War, Henry Tomlinson would have found himself overlooked — sidelined like Tom Harding-Grayson — for the job he now discharged with such effortless aplomb. Like his Prime Minister, Henry Tomlinson had spent the last ten minutes writing in his notebook. Unlike his Prime Minister, he hadn’t looked up once in those minutes.
The chair directly opposite Edward Heath was empty, The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John ‘David’ Luce having absented himself briefly to acquire any new intelligence received by his staff since the commencement of the War Cabinet meeting some ninety minutes ago. The Chiefs of the Air Staff, and the Army, were at their respective war stations, the former in a bunker in Oxfordshire, the latter deep beneath the nearby Chiltern Hills.
There was a quiet knocking at the closed double doors to the room.
The sprawling mock Tudor mansion which accommodated the UKIEA had belonged to a Fleet Street press baron before the war. Built as recently as the late 1890s it was a building that spoke of Victorian imperial bluster and basically, the profoundly flawed cultural tastes that any student of art history would naturally associate with a less than half-baked mind. Externally the Tudor fascia was more mock Gothic than authentic Elizabethan, within the structure the rooms were heavily wood-panelled and the walls were still hung with portraits and landscapes bought by a man with an undiscriminating eye and a purse far larger than his limited capacity to understand anything about real art.
A female secretary timorously entered the room and handed the Prime Minister a folder note addressed to ‘M. Thatcher’. He passed it to his Home Secretary unread.
She frowned at the note for a moment. It was from Airey Neave.
“Airey thinks we ought to talk to a man called Walter Brenckmann?” She announced, looking up. Clearly, the name meant nothing to her and she was a little baffled.
Tom Harding-Grayson cleared his throat.
“Captain Brenckmann was briefly the US Naval Attaché to the Court of Balmoral, Margaret.” Even before his elevation to the War Cabinet, their mutual travails at Balmoral Castle during the attempted regicide had ensured that Tom Harding-Grayson and Margaret Thatcher would always thereafter be on ‘Tom’ and ‘Margaret’ terms. “He’s a good sort. Not at all like most of the people in Ambassador Westheimer’s inner circle. I fear that when he tried to open his colleagues’ eyes to the dangers of the path they were on,” he shrugged, “the poor fellow was treated like a leper. What pray is Mr Neave up to?”