Dislocated to Success (6 page)

Our session, which lasted a couple of hours, did not lead to anything concrete. We simply introduced ourselves and stated what treaties we felt we were bound by. Fleury was amused that so many provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht had lasted until 1980, and that we wanted trade, primarily in foodstuffs, and that we were willing to make all sorts of interesting items available. He did, of course, ask the question about our military; I just smiled and pointed out that 250 years’ progress which included horseless carriages, aircraft and men on the moon obviously meant significant progress in military science. He smiled very thinly at that; I was not one to try and force the issue, although some people did need it explaining that we possessed an immense amount of unstoppable force. He had an excellent poker face, only looking very surprised when I said we were 55 million in population. The one thing that surprised us was when he asked for a trip in the Land Rover, so we drove him around Versailles as the light faded to his delight. He did ask us if we needed to stay, but we demonstrated the lights on the vehicle. It was no surprise that he became one of the first users of a motorised vehicle outside of the UK, although due to his age he did mainly use a chauffeur except when driving around Versailles.

My return to the UK was the next morning, and I took a list of items that were required in addition to make the new Embassy function properly. I also took some notes on what should be supplied to embassies, including a suggestion of an increased number of “guards”. Quite large crowds had gathered outside of the embassy at a couple of points, and we had not considered the possibilities of the mob. I will admit, I looked forward to my 24 hours’ quarantine on return as a chance for some peace and quiet; sadly, I had forgotten that the telephone would not be in quarantine as well - the calls were fairly constant, as were the red boxes.

In fact, I didn’t really understand the amount of trouble we were actually having. It was that second weekend that the clampdown started, after the problems with the Hungarians trying to leave the UK without permission and with a number of other groups who had become restless; the fact that the entire staff of the Vietnamese embassy had done a bunk - and only turned up in the East End about 18 months later - got some people rather rattled. With the clarity of hindsight, we can imagine the reception some of those people would have got - in many cases we may have been imprisoning them to save their lives. However, I believe there was a bit of an overreaction; of course, Plod did find an awful lot of documents, and some people were very helpful about who had been passing information to whom and which governments had been behind it.

All this rolled up into a jolly useful pretext for a nice Red Scare, which was terribly useful to keep attention away from rationing - and from the government running around in excited little circles and not actually getting anywhere on some issues. To be fair, they were guilty men and they deserved some form of punishment; but it was, in my opinion, a little over the top, especially the camp in the Hebrides run by that dreadful woman. Although it must be said that we hit all sides; Ray Mawby
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got his collar felt, and we found out that some of our former allies had been spying on us - we dealt with that just as harshly as we did the Warsaw Pact. A couple of cases were hushed up a bit - one because they were very minor royalty and they had been selling nothing more than tittle tattle to the West Germans, the other because the silly old queen tried to do himself in and did himself considerable permanent damage. Of course, the latter case eventually leaked out; some of his former comrades turned on him in public when they were finally let out, which caused a bit of a stir. But really, prosecuting someone in a wheelchair who is fed by a tube is silly - he wasn’t going anywhere.

Chapter 7

There was a great debate on what should be the first item of government business; it was clear that we would need to pass a very large number of bills in an unprecedentedly short time. We were functioning on various statutory instruments and orders in council that were being pushed to their utmost limits, and Quintin and Havers
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constantly warned that the courts may not be friendly. It was very difficult because we had still to find out what was needed against an increasing pressure to regularise matters. For my part, I had to promise the House adequate discussion within a limited time frame on a wide range of subjects, never mind having to send them to the House of Lords.

We agreed, amongst some squealing from Members, for five full days sitting until the summer recess, a shortened Easter recess, a much shortened Summer recess etc. This was popular with
hoi polloi
who liked to see their MPs worked to death for the smallest sinecure possible. The Lords were, in particular, having a right bate about this and did not like the idea of only having limited debate on such important questions. They had a point, they really did; some of what we did was absolutely criminal, even by the standards of a modern parliament, which is why we had to revisit much of it within a few years. However, it was needed; whilst I have never agreed with the old Americanism of an activist judge, we had a number of capricious souls on the High Court bench at the time whose goodwill could not be stretched, never mind a Master of the Rolls who was either regarded as barking mad or a genius of English law.

This need for action was especially true where money was involved - we needed to pass legislation concerning businesses as fast as possible. I didn’t understand the details, but there were businesses we could not allow to go bankrupt because they were vital to the national interest, and there were also businesses that would have to merge or they would go under, and there were national parts of multi-nationals. What I do know is that Keith, not for the first time, sent his Teddy flying out of the Pram, closely followed by his rattle, his blanket and a couple of dirty nappies. He came within an iota of being sacked on the spot; he managed to last until the April reshuffle, but it was a very close run thing. Norman Tebbit was absolutely categorical about how some firms were too valuable to go to the wall and that it would pay us back over time; in most cases he has been proven correct.

The free-marketeer wing were, essentially, in full retreat. Margaret and Norman Tebbit were instinctively in favour of them, but they also understood that we were essentially in a wartime situation; they also understood that the way out of this was not a short one. They did what was best for the country, not what was best for their favoured ideology, which in my opinion is the essence of being a good Conservative. Others were not so quick to adapt, and that includes a number of One Nation supporters as well - there were those wedded to their beliefs, and to be honest some who enjoyed the skirmishing rather too much.  Of course, the actions of the government did lead to quite a lot of heckling from some parts of the old Labour benches and Dennis Skinner
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, who became a particular
bête noire
of the PM. Skinner is a vile but necessary part of our democracy; if he didn't exist someone would have to invent him. I must admit that, after 25 years of his moral purity, there was delicious Schadenfreude when his Elephant and Castle love-nest was discovered during our newspapers’ latest moral crusade.

Of course, one of the side-effects of the Dislocation was that we were a colonial power once again - although some would argue that as long as we had Hong Kong we had never stopped being a colonial power. However, apart from the Fragrant Harbour, most of our remaining territories before the Dislocation consisted of a selection of bases for the Forces, a number of Caribbean tax havens and holiday destinations, and some awful outposts like the Falklands or Pitcairn. God, the number of times we tried to give New Zealand or Australia Pitcairn and they wisely declined it. The first question was, of course, what we owned; the second one was more how we owned it; and the third was its usefulness to us. The first two were answered within the first week, although the second was a little more tricky; I’m not entirely sure that the third was ever really answered. For the most part, we owned islands, or ports, or concessions for trade scattered around the world, but then there was the 800 pound gorilla in the room; we had substantial rights to parts of North America and there were over half a million people there - of which around 20% were held there against their will as chattel slaves, which was very awkward to say the least to any modern political party. 

The mere existence of chattel slavery galvanised the left in politics; they had found their moral crusade, and quite rightly so. Fortunately for future politics, they decided to combine their justifiable campaign against slavery with plenty of modern political rhetoric about colonialism, imperialism and racism which made their crusade unpalatable to many people. They also advocated withdrawal and independence, which caused them a big problem with the West Indian population of the United Kingdom - who, whilst generally favouring the left in those days, recognised that just leaving the liberated West Indies to fend for themselves was not an option.

There was a very early list which indicated roughly the use of each of our colonies to the UK; both the RN and the RAF had quite a bit of input into that, and there were some fairly extensive discussions on the status of others. Originally, the plan appeared to be to retract as much as possible, but that was subject to considerable intervention - long lists of what the UK needed to survive as a modern industrial state were being churned out, along with assessments that these could not be provided by our European neighbours - either without what was euphemistically called “direct intervention” or not at all. It wasn’t more than a week before a decision had been taken, after a considerable row in Cabinet, to colonise parts of the former South Africa. I took very little part in that debate, going along with the consensus of the leadership; I was more concerned with trying to just do my job.

In the end, very little of our colonial empire was abandoned - a small failed outpost in what would have been Indonesia, a couple of slave ports in West Africa and a tiny strip of Central America. Other parts were traded away as parts of larger deals with France and Portugal, although the French deal took over 3 years to come to full fruition. Places were also added, usually by the RAF or the RN, although they were generally believed to be uninhabited.

There was also pressure starting from those non-British who were resident in the UK - Australians and New Zealanders mainly, but also a fair number of Canadians and some South Africans - they wanted to go home. in addition to this, there were all sorts of other people - mainly from Europe and the USA - who also wanted to go home as well. This caused a huge number of problems for the Government: in some cases there was nowhere to go to, such as for Australians; in other cases there was no state resembling the one they came from; and in a few more cases, there were people with the sort of knowledge that some of our advisers suggested would not be a good idea if it went “home”.

Having said that, there were also a large number of people who were scared of being sent home and did not want to go there. That was easier to deal with; whilst we could not say what Parliament would determine in the end, we could assure everyone that we would not force people to leave the UK. The PM announced that herself on television, which was a very good move - although she did get abusive letters from the likes of the National Front. However, that was par for the course; any political action will get some nasty letters from someone, often in the notorious green ink.

We were now in the fourth week since the Dislocation, and before I could head off to Chelmsford I was summoned to 10 Downing Street - the PM wanted a chat. Luckily, it was one of the more sympathetic aides and they carefully coded in the call that it wasn’t bad news. It was always best to know before presenting oneself. In essence, the PM noted that David was struggling somewhat, things weren’t quite going as he thought - especially with the Americans. Could I possibly assist with making arrangements for visits and what some science fiction aficionados had started to call First Contacts? I could use some of my staff from Arts, if I felt they had the right skills. It would allow David to concentrate on the awkward situation with the Americans etc. Well, I was delighted to help - and there were certainly a few people in Arts who had the right sort of knowledge. I was a little conscious that it was yet another demand on my time, but to be honest keeping busy was probably the right sort of thing to do at the time and it had some interesting opportunities. Anyway, it is hard to say no to the Prime Minister, especially during an ongoing crisis of this magnitude.

I had received a number of approaches, as had just about every MP, from local businesses - some of which were facing an uncertain future, and some of which were close to shuttering their doors. There was an immense amount of pressure for Government to “Do Something”, but all of this was still under consideration by the Treasury and by the the various Trade and Industry ministers. Essentially, there was the plan that vital businesses would be kept going by hook or by crook; in some cases they might be required to drop their hours, in some cases they might have to be mothballed, but decisions had to be made. There was a scheme which would give transition grants - so, if you had produced a widget for export but could easily produce a doodad for home use which had previously been imported, funds would be found. We were also trying to sort out foreign-owned businesses and trying to suggest strategic mergers. The last two points were, in a way, the last hurrah of the finance industry, which was laying off substantial number of people; M&A departments kept going into early 1982 without large layoffs, and unlike some sectors like Foreign Exchange M&A shrank somewhat overall but kept going.