The British Ambassador realised that the interview was at an end.
He lingered.
“This will antagonise the Spanish, sir?”
The Prime Minister of Portugal spread his hands for a moment.
“I fear so,” he granted, “although I suspect that the bully Francisco Franco Bahamonde will cower in his bunker a while longer before he begins to worry about who is to blame for his latest folly. By then things will have resolved themselves. Either there will be new disasters, or the World might have begun to rediscover its senses.”
A dapper naval officer with dark, impatient eyes was awaiting Sir Richard Templar in the corridor when he left the Prime Minister’s office.
“I am Commander Hector de Oliveira Benes of the Armada Portuguesa, Ambassador.” He nodded his head respectfully. The naval officer’s English was pure Oxbridge, bell clear. “I also serve as the Prime Minister’s personal factor in matters pertaining to Navy affairs. I am at your service, sir.”
Sir Richard Templar shook the younger man’s hand.
It was all the seasoned diplomat could do to not to laugh out a loud with relief. It might be too late to save the two crippled, storm-ravaged destroyers desperately trying to reach the sanctuary of Oporto but whatever happened next his country had just found a new friend in the World. The support of former colonies half a world away was comforting, warming but immediately, of only passing utility. To have a surviving, intact European nation make an unconditional gesture that proclaimed itself an ally of the United Kingdom was pure manna from heaven. The uniform bleakness of the vista had lightened a little and every glimpse of hope was a thing to be embraced like a prodigal returning to the fold.
The diplomat took the bull by the horns.
“Are you authorised to communicate directly with your Royal Navy counterparts, Commander?” He asked casually as the two men fell into step.
“Yes, sir. The entire resources of the Portuguese armed forces stand ready to assist in this operation.”
Chapter 13
Margaret Thatcher’s thoughts were preoccupied ordering her decidedly ambivalent impressions of the rather too secret meeting she had just left in the Foreign Secretary’s office. In one way she’d been grateful that she’d been able to leave that ‘conference’ early on the thoroughly authentic grounds that she had a prior engagement with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence, James Callaghan. She tried and failed to stifle a yawn as she bustled down the corridor in the direction of the Edward Heath’s rooms. She’d heard tall stories about Winston Churchill’s war room and the chaotic, impulsive way the great man had worked — and very nearly driven every single one of his friends and detractors alike quite literally, up the wall — in the darkest hours of the Second World War. She was only now realising how dissonant and exactly how disorientating the dreadful pressures of conflict and international crisis must have been, for every Government unfortunate to have suffered them down the ages. Those pressures bounced off her but the weariness was cumulative and she hadn’t yet found a way to counteract its insidious, mind-slowing effects.
“I hope I’m not too late, Prime Minister,” she apologised with a tired smile as she was ushered into Edward Heath’s private drawing room. The room was as spartanly furnished as practically every other room in the mansion, and no warmer. James Callaghan rose to his feet, nodding acknowledgment. The only other person in the room was Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Head of the Home Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet, with whom she exchanged a thoughtful look. The meeting in Tom Harding-Grayson’s office with the former US Naval Attaché, Captain Walter Brenckmann, bore the fingerprints of a pincer-movement engineered by Henry Tomlinson and his oldest and firmest friend in the Civil Service, the new Foreign Secretary. “I allowed myself to be traduced into accepting a meeting with Tom Harding-Grayson at short notice and I fear it over ran somewhat. I do apologise.”
The Prime Minister indicated for her to take a chair; his relaxed manner was that of a man who believed himself among friends with whom he had no need to stand on ceremony.
“Presumably, Tom Harding-Grayson gave you the good news about the Portuguese?” He checked, perfunctorily.
“Yes, they’ve offered our damaged ships safe harbour,” the Angry Widow confirmed, purring with the same relief she’d purred when the Foreign Secretary had shown her the telegram from the Embassy in Lisbon. “I’d expected demands for guarantees that we’d defend them against their neighbour?”
“Perhaps, Salazar isn’t the same kind of old fascist as Franco after all,” James Callaghan observed, lugubriously from the creaking depths of the arm chair into which he had gratefully re-arranged his large frame. A grey pall of approaching exhaustion lay across the three men and the woman in the room.
“I wanted to have this talk,” Edward Heath explained, seeking his words with infinite care, “because the process I initiated last week to confront the threats to the security of our Mediterranean protectorates and trade routes, and to respond to the provocations of our former American allies, cannot and should not deflect us from simultaneously addressing the other great issues facing us.”
“We could be a war with the USA in hours or days, Prime Minister,” James Callaghan observed. There was only the mildest taint of censure in the voice of the leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party. “As a Government, and as a people, we are stretched pretty thin at the moment.”
Edward Heath accepted this; electing to pose another question.
“Even in the middle of the Second World War Rab Butler was planning the reform of the post-war education system, and William Beverage was preparing the blueprint for an economy in which full employment was a given and in which all our citizens would be able to rely on the safety net of the welfare state if through ill health or personal misfortune they fell on hard times.”
“True,’ James Callaghan agreed. “But we’re in no position to contemplate either, Prime Minister.”
Margaret Thatcher hadn’t known what the meeting was to discuss, simply that the Prime Minister wished to sound her out about ‘certain matters’. She opened her mouth to speak, but then shut it. She waved for the two men to carry on while she thought her thoughts.
“You are right, Jim,” Edward Heath conceded. “But that’s not the point, is it?”
The other man snorted mildly.
“Crisis or not I had the First Sea Lord bending my ear this afternoon about the ‘1964 Naval Construction Program’. He wants to re-commence all existing projects and to re-commission practically every ship in the Reserve Fleet. He even wants to recover and refit the hulks of two or three old cruisers that were on the 1962 Disposal List!”
Now Margaret Thatcher found her voice.
“The Royal Air Force and the Army will have similar plans?”
“Oh, yes,” the Minister of Defence confirmed glumly.
“Can we afford such programs?”
“No,” Edward Heath interjected. “We are bankrupt as a nation.” He shrugged with a spasm of his broad shoulders. “But I don’t have to tell you that. Even if we had a functioning money economy, which we don’t, having had to operate on a command basis under virtual martial law for the last year would have destroyed it.”
They had been so busy just surviving; so busy keeping the worst ravages of starvation and disease at bay it was hardly surprising that virtually all other responsibilities of a modern government had been shamefully neglected. Practical governance in the last year had been delivered by ten Regional Commissioners who reported to the Home Secretary. The Commissioners were mainly Army officers who managed local teams drawn from former County and District Councils; they were responsible for the distribution of resources — food and fuel — within their fiefdoms, for the provision of medical services and for the repair and maintenance of public utilities. In many areas of the country barter had replaced the cash economy. Nobody trusted paper money and as the majority of the things vital to sustain life and to stave off the worst misery of everyday existence were provided free — if and when those staples were available — normal economic activity had been replaced with a Soviet-style command model. As an emergency exigency this system had, to a fashion, worked. People were getting fed just enough in enough areas of the country to stave off famine, the National Health Service was beginning to function again after its collapse in the aftermath of the October War, and transportation links, electricity, gas and telephone links were being gradually restored up to the limits of habitation adjacent to the zones of destruction. In the spring a program of rebuilding and driving new roads through those zones was scheduled, mainly to reconnect communities up and down the East Coast and establish a route across the downs to channel port of Dover. Greater London remained beyond the ambitions of such limited programs; there simply were not the means to tackle the wasteland of rubble. The priority had been to keep the Navy at sea, to preserve the much reduced fighting power of the Army and the Royal Air Force, and to support as best as possible, the technical and industrial infrastructure required to keep the advanced electronic systems and weapons of the armed forces. The UKIEA had, in fact, been operating on a war footing ever since the October War and sooner or later, the country would reach breaking point. It was anyone’s guess how much longer those who survived ‘could take it’.