Joanne Brenckmann stared at her friend.
“I don’t…”
She knew that she represented one of many back channels by which the UAUK kept in touch with the Administration in Philadelphia. There were too many things it was hard, if not impossible for the British to say directly to her husband, the Ambassador. There were so many nonsensical protocols designed to frustrate direct talking; and too many things which had to be deniable at a later date.
“When Margaret wins tomorrow’s vote of confidence she wants President Kennedy to invite her to Philadelphia.”
“Okay,” Joanne whispered, thinking she understood.
“Everybody’s had a chance to think things through,” Pat went on, keen to break this as gently as possibly to her friend. “However, although the Prime Minister still feels desperately let down by the President she’s come to the conclusion that if we are going to be the ones left holding the, er, baby, then it is only right and proper that there should be an appropriate quid pro quo.”
Chapter 32
When Margaret Thatcher rose to speak it was to a long and sustained chorus of jeers from across the other side of the hall and a stony silence from the majority of the notional friends at her back. She waited for stillness, for the bear pit to quieten about her. While she waited she looked around at her surroundings struck by the sensation that she had never really seen this place as it was, or for what it had become before now.
Although the reinstitution of Parliament in Oxford had been her decision; the details of that edict and its physical implementation had been handled by others. The immediate post-October War capital of the United Kingdom had been established at Cheltenham almost by accident, the city having survived the war untouched, GCHQ being located within it and it having previously been identified as a possible ‘governmental centre’ in at least one existing war plan. However, Cheltenham had never been a viable long-term capital, not when Oxford, Birmingham, Manchester and historic cities like Winchester or Bristol had survived equally undamaged. But in November 1962 nobody had thought farther ahead than day to day survival; the decision to move to Oxford had come about because symbolically, she had decided that ‘just surviving’ was not good enough.
The British people deserved better than that.
The layout of the old chamber of the House of Commons in the now wrecked shell of the Palace of Westminster had owed its configuration to that of an earlier chamber, St Stephen’s Chapel, destroyed by fire in 1834. The construction of St Stephen’s Chapel within the old Palace of Westminster had been completed around the year 1297 during the reign of Edward I. It was only after Westminster ceased to be a royal palace that Henry VIII’s son Edward VI had passed the Abolition of Chantries Act in 1547, making the chapel available for the Commons. Thus, St Stephen’s Chapel had become the debating chamber of the House of Commons for nearly three centuries until its destruction by fire in 1834.
The mother of Parliaments was nothing if not faithful — some said ‘the prisoner’ — of its traditions and what it saw as its ancient prerogatives. In the rebuilt Victorian Palace of Westminster the layout of the chamber of the Commons had been religiously copied from that of St Stephen’s Chapel; the Speaker’s chair was placed upon the altar steps as if still in a church, where a lectern had once stood the Table of the House was positioned, and as they had from time immemorial the Members of the House sat facing each other in medieval fashion in opposing choir stalls. True to that tradition in recent weeks carpenters and joiners had been industriously re-creating those uncomfortable, tiered pews, intent on partially recreating the old bear pit in the image of its former glory.
Furniture requisitioned, borrowed and ‘found’ around the College had been returned and today the chamber smelled of freshly sawn wood, varnish and resin. The Prime Minister had been informed that the Chamber theoretically ‘comfortably sat’ some three hundred and eighty Members, preserving a standing area for ‘gentlemen of the press’.
Oddly, although the Great Hall of Christ Church College was probably not that much bigger than the previous home of the Commons it seemed, to the Prime Minister, significantly less claustrophobic.
Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for approximately six tumultuous and mostly disastrous months. Her attempts to rebuild the ‘special relationship’ with the United States had been doomed from the start, little or no progress had been made in beginning the great work of national reconstruction, she had split her own party, fragmented the political system of the country and presided over one military disaster after another. Back in the darkest days of the Second World War Churchill might have survived the Norwegian fiasco, the Fall of France, the supposed ‘miracle’ of Dunkirk, and later the fall of Singapore and a catalogue of disasters in the Western Desert at the hands of Rommel; but he had had years of experience in the highest government posts and his disasters had happened over a period of many years. Her disasters had all happened inside six months and each new setback had come hard on the heels of the last. Yes, the Royal Navy had held on in the Mediterranean. Yes, Cyprus had been re-taken but the trouble was that these were isolated bright spots in a universally gloomy canvas painted by one humiliation after another. But for the suicidal bravery of the crews of two outgunned British warships Malta might have fallen; the outrages at Brize Norton and Cheltenham which had signalled the breakdown of Anglo-US relations closely followed by the Kennedy Administration’s mendacious decision to respect the letter, rather than the spirit of the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty that she had signed in January, had been the last straw.
The British people craved peace.
Her people wanted to rebuild, to properly grieve for and to come to terms with what had been lost.
Instead, all she had given her people was war and more war.
War without end…
Margaret Thatcher cleared her throat.
Although not a single hair was out of place on her head every time she looked in the mirror she saw the premature age lines in her face, the weariness in her blue eyes, and she seriously wondered how long she could go on…alone. The death of Julian Christopher still cut her to her soul. Had he been at her side these last few terrible weeks she could have faced anything. No matter how she bluffed and brazened her way through the intolerable obstacles placed daily in her path, she knew that her strength was, slowly, surely failing.
“There are those who say that after all we have been through,” she declaimed, empowered and energised by the one thing which had never let her down, her anger. “There are those who say we should retreat back into our island home. There are those who are tired, tired of the battle to live day by day; tired of going to bed each night hungry, and sick to their hearts that their children are growing up in the World that we have made for them.”
The Prime Minister had expected heckling, to be shouted down.
However, unhappy muttering aside her most vociferous public detractors on the other side of the chamber seemed unnaturally subdued. It was as if they too recognised at last that the country was at the crossroads.
“Today I have no intention of mounting a defence of my leadership of our country,” Margaret Thatcher said. “Today, I propose to share with the House my view of the situation that we find ourselves in. I plan to speak plainly. This is not a time for eloquent extemporizations about what, in the best of all Worlds, we would do next or even, dare I say it, of what we might or ought to have done in times past. Today, we must address the reality of our situation.”