Now António de Oliveira Salazar was walking the tight rope again with an intellectual finesse honed in his three decades in power. Not for him the suffocating apparatus of the Police State, nor great set piece public demonstrations. He was neither demigod nor rabble-rouser, more a chess player from the template of a former age. In a funny sort of way he’d have been more at home, happier playing the game of imperial musical chairs with the movers and shakers of a Europe two World Wars removed from the apocalypse of the October War.
Sir Richard Templar had tried to explain the manner of man with whom he was dealing to his principals in Cheltenham; often he’d wondered if they really understood that Salazar was, and had always been, a man with whom they could and should be doing business. The trouble was that Salazar’s political creed, superficially at least, was as incompatible as it was distasteful to Sir Richard’s masters in England even in the radically altered perspective of the new post-cataclysm era. The people back in England saw what they always saw; exactly what they wanted to see. Black was black and white was white, there were no shades in between but that was not the World in which António de Oliveira Salazar lived. Salazar’s regime was vehemently anti-communist and anti-socialist, it loathed many of the freedom’s most Englishmen had taken as their birthrights for innumerable generations, and viewed the liberal philosophies of most pre-war Western European governments with hostility and deeply-ingrained suspicion. However, there was a dichotomy at the heart of the Portuguese ‘totalitarian’ state that took the edge off its dedicated nationalist, controlling proclivities.
Salazar frequently spoke of a doctrine of lusotropicalism; the conviction that Portuguese imperialism was in some way uniquely ‘better’ than that of other European nations. The theory held that having been conquered and civilized by successive waves of invaders — Celts, Romans, Visigoths, the Moors and by various Christian peoples in more modern times, including the British — the Portuguese were somehow innately more humane, friendlier and better qualified to rule benignly in its overseas colonies; the two largest of which were Angola and Mozambique. This belief was supported by the fact that Portugal was the oldest of the European colonial powers; several of its territories having been continuously administered by Lisbon for over four hundred years. Notwithstanding that Sir Richard Templar thought that lusotropicalism and the pluricontinentalism it inevitably implied was largely pie in the sky wishful thinking, he retained a sneaking admiration for the way in which the Salazar regime had succeeded in using such ideas to expunge the guilt and the moral burden of Empire. For the Portuguese there was no such thing as ‘the white man’s burden’ because overseas Portuguese territories were as much Portuguese as Portugal itself, and unlike the British, the Portuguese had never stopped believing that they had a civilising mission in the world.
António de Oliveira Salazar, the academic literally dragged from his professorial chair to save the nation from the travails which in the 1930s had torn next door Spain apart, was the rock upon which modern Portugal had been built. He was an intellectual who lived a blamelessly simple life spurning the privileges of his position. When, publicly, he was compelled to surround himself with the finery of Europe’s oldest, albeit somewhat impoverished, Imperial polity he did so reluctantly for he hated the limelight and mistrusted the dangerous populism which had dragged half the world into the 1945 war.
The Prime Minister of Portugal rose to his feet to come around his desk to greet the British Ambassador as he was ushered into his grand but drab office. The first sections of the Palácio de São Bento — the Portuguese Parliament — had been built by the Benedictines in 1598. Over the centuries the building had grown and matured into a classical monument to the glory of the Portuguese Imperium. The current official home of the Portuguese Prime Minister was a nineteenth century mansion in the grounds of the Palácio de São Bento. Barring a short interregnum in the early 1950s Salazar had abjured from filling the essentially ceremonial role of the President of the Republic, in much the same way he had consistently abjured from collecting titles and spurious honours in the style of the other dictators of his era. He was too focused on the here and the now, the immediate and the long-term future of his people to trouble himself with baubles. All of this was reflected in the strange, cluttered ordinariness of his office. Even after three decades as virtual dictator of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar remained at heart the professorial university academic he’d been in a former life.
The Prime Minister waved his visitor to take a seat in one of the two dusty chairs in front of his desk.
“I asked you to come to the Palácio de São Bento so that I might personally assure you that Portugal will render all possible assistance to your stricken ships.” He spoke in the clipped, relaxed yet very precise Portuguese that the British Ambassador had, at first, found a little hard to decipher. Even now he had to listen very closely and worried that he might miss some vital nuance. However, this morning there were no subtle nuances to be detected for the dictator of Portugal was a great pains to make his meanings crystal clear. “Two Portuguese Naval vessels have been dispatched to assist your vessels and to ensure that there will be unambiguous communications with the port authorities in Oporto. I have appointed a junior minister, Hector Benes, to liaise directly with you and the municipality of Oporto on my behalf. He has full powers to do whatever needs to be done.”
Sir Richard Templar waited for the caveat, to discover what quid pro quo was to be demanded. Salazar was risking war with his neighbour, Spain; a war that Portugal could not fight alone or hope to survive, let alone win. Moreover, it was a war that in his opinion she did not need to risk, or ever wanted to fight in any conceivable circumstances.
“Thank you, sir,” the British Ambassador said, half rising to his feet and bowing his head.
António de Oliveira Salazar viewed his guest, his lined face and rheumy, wise eyes questing and betraying an underlying…anger.
“You are not alone, Sir Richard,” he said softly, “in having entertained scorpions in the nest. If the CIA,” he paused, disliking the imprecision of that catch all acronym, “if cadres within the American Central Intelligence Agency are willing to conspire with disaffected elements of your armed forces to attempt to assassinate Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and her family; who among us is safe?”
“Forgive me, sir. I have no specific intelligence regarding the involvement of outside agents in that dreadful business in Scotland.”
The Portuguese Prime Minister smiled sadly.
“Later today five members of the staff of the Embassy of the United States of America will be expelled from my country for activities incompatible with their diplomatic status, Sir Richard. Portugal is not in a position to send our trans-Atlantic friends such a powerful message as the United Kingdom, but we too, have a right to show our,” he hesitated, “offence to be treated thus by a country that claims to be a friend of Portugal.”