Given what the country had been through it astonished the three men and the woman in the Prime Minister’s Room that night that there hadn’t been a major insurrection. However, if they’d been lucky thus far that was no guarantee that the road ahead would be anything other than extremely rocky. Bizarrely, the prospect of a stupid, futile, needless war with the United States of America was just one more insurmountable problem. Lately, they’d all become used to confronting the impossible and somehow fighting to live another day. That the UKIEA had served its people so well was largely the work of its leader, Edward Heath. The Prime Minister had earned the right to muse out aloud the state of the World and the United Kingdom’s future in it, even at such a time of dire crisis.
“We have very little idea of the true situation in the bombed areas of Central Europe,” Edward Heath reminded his colleagues. “We have only the White House’s damage assessment vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and its partners. Frankly, we are blind in the World beyond our Mediterranean bases. Goodness, we have found it practically impossible to talk to, let alone help or understand the plight of our putative French allies just across the Channel.” The Premier’s exasperation threatened to get the better of him, and sensing it, he hesitated. “We know that Italy survived the cataclysm more or less untouched and that before the US Fifth Fleet abandoned its base at Naples it off-loaded a number of aircraft and other supporting military ‘assets’. In retrospect we might now reasonably suspect that those ‘assets’ were not insignificant and that they have been used to prop up the fascistic regimes that carved up Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica in the aftermath of the October War.”
James Callaghan objected, albeit gently.
“We suspected as much, Prime Minister,” he mollified. “However, we’ve hardly been in any position to do anything about any of that.”
“True.” Edward Heath was not deflected. “We know that Greece is in the hands of some kind of military junta; and we know that the Greeks are stirring up trouble in Cyprus. We know that there have been clashes between Turkish naval forces and the Greeks in the Aegean. We know that sooner or later the Arabs will fall upon Israel like wolves upon the fold…”
“There is nothing we can do about that, Prime Minister,” the Minister of Defence said flatly. “Any of it.”
“I disagree,” the Angry Widow declared. “There is a great deal we can do about a great number of things, but,” she looked to each of the men in the room, “but only when we have ‘healed ourselves’ sufficiently. Sometimes, we worry too much about what we ‘can’t do’ and forget about the things we ‘can do’. For all we know the Americans might be planning to bomb us back to the Stone Age, as that self-important oaf Lemay proudly claims to have ‘bombed the Ruskies’ last year. Well, we shall see. Personally, I don’t think we have much control over that and our best defence, probably our only defence, is to show not one chink of moral weakness. Prime Minister,” she fixed Edward Heath with a steely blue-eyed stare that would have made a lesser man flinch, “I share one hundred percent your vision of a return to business as normal.” She sighed. “As soon as possible.”
The Prime Minister nodded ponderously.
“A few days ago I alienated much of my own Party, who now view me as a dictator of the ilk of Franco or Salazar,” he wryly reminded his newly appointed Home Secretary.
“Last week you placed the country on a proper war footing to deal with the provocations of the Americans, the fallout from the attack on Balmoral and the critical situation developing in the Mediterranean, Prime Minister,” the Angry Widow rejoined, every cobweb of weariness blown asunder. “If we survive the next few days and weeks there will be ample time to make the case to the British people that you did the right thing. The only thing that the British people will never forgive us for doing; is failing to stand up against former ‘friends’ who would see their children starve, and new enemies who would exploit our current, apparent weakness to destroy what remains of our power and influence in the World.”
“Nevertheless,” Edward Heath replied, “I believe that we must be talking about the future to our people now. It may be that there will never be a ‘right time’ to begin the national debate about reconstruction and restitution. It is our responsibility to ensure that the legacy we leave those who come after us is one of hope, not despair.”
Margaret Thatcher heard the fatalism underlying the Prime Minister’s statement of political faith; as if Ted Heath had already understood that he’d never see the better times of which he so clearly dreamed. In that moment it was as if he knew another fate awaited him and he was resigned to it. His calm was the calm of a man who was at peace with himself and because of it, he was fearless in ways he could never have been at any time in his previous life. Before the October War she’d regarded her present Party leader as a starchy, old-fashioned sort of man a little too hidebound by tradition and by a rigid sense of the right and wrong way of getting things done. He’d seemed such a perfect pillar of the old hierarchy, utterly at home in the rather fuddy-duddy Conservative Party she’d had to fight so hard to be accepted within, precisely because it was populated with men exactly like him. She’d been wrong about Ted Heath; he wasn’t a throwback to that halcyon, mythical English past for which most Conservative voters yearned, he was a man with a much deeper vision for his people. He might have been born for this moment in history. Perhaps, he sensed it and knew that like a moth drawn to the light his destiny was to emerge brilliantly from his chrysalis, open his wings and fly towards his destiny in the certain knowledge that it would consume him in the blink of an eye. Whatever fate awaited him he was reconciled to it and uncomplaining because he knew his duty, and he’d rather die than be seen to have failed to have done that duty.