First Among Equals (38 page)

“One day you
may have all these problems onyour shoulders,” she said.

Simon smiled
and left her to walk slowly back to his office on the other side of Whitehall.
He stopped to stare at the statue of Montgomery that stood on the grass in
front of the Ministry of Defense and thought how much the Field Marshal would
have relished the skirmish that was about to take place. A full moon shone like
an arc light above Saint Paul’s Cathedral as he hurried back to his office.

At one, he
joined the Joint Chiefs. None of them looked tired, although they had all shared
the lonely vigil with their comrades two thousand miles away. They told stories
of Suez and the Falklands and there was frequent laughter. But it was never
long before their eyes returned to the clock.

As Big Ben
struck one chime, Simon thought: three o’clock in Libya. He could visualize the
men falling backwards over the side of the boat and deep into the water before
starting the long, slow swim toward Broadsword.

Simon returned
to his desk for what was to be the longest hour of his life.

When the phone Yang, breaking the eerie silence like a fire alarm,
Simon picked it up to hear Charles Hampton’s voice.

“Simon,” he
began, “I’ve finally gotten through to Qaddafi and he wants to negotiate.”
Simon looked at his watch; the divers could only be a hundred yards from
Broadsword.

“It’s too
late,” he said. “I can’t stop them now.”

“Don’t be such
a bloody fool-order them to turn back. Don’t you understand we’ve won a
diplomatic coup?”

“Qaddafi could
negotiate for months and still end up humiliating us. No, I won’t turn back.”

“We shall see
how the Prime Minister reacts to your arrogance,” said Charles and slammed down
the phone.

Simon sat by
the phone and waited for it to ring. He wondered if he could get away with
taking the damn thing off the hook – the modem equivalent of Nelson placing the
telescope to his blind eye, he considered. He needed a few minutes, only a few
minutes, but the phone rang again only seconds later. He picked it up and heard
her unmistakable voice.

“Can you stop
them if I order you to, Simon?”

He considered
lying. “Yes, Prime Minister,” he said.

“But you would
still like to carry it through, wouldn’t you?”

“I only need a
few minutes, Prime Minister.”

“Do you
understand the consequences if you fail, with Charles already claiming a diplomatic
victory?”

“You would have
my resignation within the hour.”

“I suspect mine
would have to go with it,” said Mrs.

FlRs – r AMONG
EQUALS

Thatcher.
“In which case Charles would undoubtedly be Prime
Minister by this time tomorrow.”

There was a
moment’s pause before she continued, “Qaddafi is on the other line, and I am
going to tell him that I am willing to negotiate.” Simon felt defeated.
“Perhaps that will give you enough time, and let’s hope it’s Qaddafi who has to
worry about resignations at breakfast.”

Simon nearly
cheered.

“Do you know
the hardest thing I have had to do in this entire operation?”

“No, Prime
Minister.”

“When Qaddafi
rang in the middle of the night, I had to pretend to be asleep so that he
didn’t realize I was sitting by the phone.”

Simon laughed.

“Good luck,
Simon, I’ll phone and explain my decision to Charles.”

The clock said
2:30.

On his return
the admirals were variously clenching their fists, tapping the table or walking
around, and Simon began to sense what the Israelis must have been feeling as
they waited for news from Entebbe.

The phone rang
again. He knew it couldn’t be the Prime Minister this time, as she was the one
woman in England who never changed her mind. It was Charles Hampton.

“I want it
clearly understood,
Simon, that
I gave you the news
concerning Qaddafi’s desire to negotiate at twotwenty. That is on the record,
so there will be only one Minister handing in his resignation later this
morning...”

“I know exactly
where you stand, Charles, and I feel confident that whatever
happens
you’ll come through your own mound of manure smelling of roses,” said Simon,
slamming down the phone as three o’clock struck.

For no
fathomable reason everyone in the room stood up, but as the minutes passed they
sat back down again one by one.

At seven
minutes past four
radio
silence was broken with the
five words,

“Shoplifter
apprehended, repeat Shoplifter apprehended.”

Simon watched
the Joint Chiefs cheer like schoolchildren reacting to the winning goal at a
football game.

Broadsword was
on the high seas in neutral waters. He sat down at his desk and asked to be put
through to Number 10. The Prime Minister came on the line. “Shoplifter
apprehended,” he told her.

“
Congratulations,
continue as agreed,” was all she said.

The next move
was to be sure that all the Libyan prisoners who had been taken aboard
Broadsword would be discharged at Malta and sent home unharmed. Simon waited
impatiently for radio silence to be broken again, as agreed, at five o’clock.

Commander
Lawrence Packard came on the fine as Big Ben struck five. He gave Simon a full
report on the operation.

One Libyan
guerrilla had been killed and eleven injured. There had been no, repeat, no,
British deaths and only a few minor injuries. The thirtyseven SBS men were back
on board the submarines Conqueror and Courageous. HMS Broads-word was sailing
the high seas on her way home.

God Save the Queen.

Simon
congratulated the commander and returned to Downing Street. As he limped up the
street, journalists with no idea of the news that was about to be announced
were already gathering outside Number 10. Once again Simon answered none of
their shouted questions. When he was shown into the Cabinet room, he found
Charles already there with the Prime Minister.

He told them
both the latest news.

Charles’s
congratulations sounded insincere.

It was agreed
that the Prime Minister would make a statement at seven o’clock. The draft was
prepared and 361 revised before Mrs. Thatcher stepped out onto Downing Street
to give the waiting press the salient details of what had happened during the
previous six hours.

Television arc
lights were switched on and cameras flashed for several minutes before Mrs.
Thatcher was able to speak. As she read her statement, Charles Hampton stood on
her right and Simon Kerslake on her left, now the undisputed contenders as her
successor.

“I must admit
that my opinion of Charles Hampton has gone up,” said Elizabeth in the car on
the way to Lucy’s field hockey match.

“What do you
mean?” asked Simon.

“Hes just been
interviewed on television.

He said he had
backed your judgment all along while having to pretend to carry out pointless
negotiations. He had a very good line to the effect that it was the first time
in his life that he had felt honorable about lying.”

Elizabeth
didn’t understand her husband’s response. “Smelling like roses,” he said
sharply.

It amused Simon
to watch his daughter massacred in the mud while he stood on the sidelines in
the rain only hours after he had feared Qaddafi might have done the same to
him. “It’s a walkover,” he told the headmistress when Lucy’s team was down by
four goals at halftime.

“Perhaps she’ll
be like you and surprise us all in the second half,” replied the headmistress.

At eight
o’clock on the following Saturday morning Simon sat in his office and heard the
news that Broadsword had all engines on full speed and was expected to reach
Portsmouth by three o’clock – exactly one week after his daughter had lost her
match 0-8.

They hadn’t had
a good second half. Simon had tried to console the downcast Lucy, and might
even have succeeded if she hadn’t been the goalie.

He was smiling
when his secretary interrupted his thoughts to remind him that he was due at
Portsmouth in an hour.

As Simon
reached the door, his phone rang. “Explain to
whoever
it
is I’m already late,” he said.

His secretary
replied, “I don’t think I can, sir.”

Simon turned
around, puzzled.

“Who is it?” he
asked.

“Her Majesty the Queen.”

Simon returned
to his desk, picked up the receiver and listened to the sovereign. When she had
finished Simon thanked her and said he would pass on her message to Commander
Packard as soon as he reached Portsmouth.

During the
flight down, Simon looked out of the helicopter and watched
a
traffic
jam that stretched from the coast to London with people who were
going to welcome Broadsword home.

The helicopter
landed an hour later.

The Secretary
of State for Defense stood on the pier and was able to pick out the frigate
through a pair of binoculars. She was about an hour away but was already
surrounded by a flotilla of small craft so that it was hard to identify her.

Sir John told
him that Commander Packard had signaled to ask if the Secretary of State wished
to join him on the bridge as they sailed into port. “No, thank you,” said
Simon. “It’s his day, not mine.”

“Good thing the
Foreign Secretary isn’t with us,” said Sir John. A squad of Tornadoes flew
over, drowning Simon’s reply. As Broadsword sailed into port, the ship’s
company were
all on deck standing to attention in full-dress
uniform. The ship itself shone like a Rolls-Royce that had just come off the
production line.

By the time the
captain descended the gangplank
a crowd of some five hundred
thousand were
cheering so loudly that Simon could not hear himself
speak. Commander Packard saluted as the Secretary of State leaned forward and
whispered the Queen’s message in his ear:

“Welcome home,
Rear Admiral Sir Lawrence Packard.”

I
T WAS JOYCE who left a clipping from the Standard for him to read
when he returned from the Commons one night. She had scribbled across it: “This
could end up on the front page of every national paper.”

Raymond agreed
with her.

Although he
spent most of his time on the overall strategy for a future Labour government,
like all politicians he had pet anomalies that particularly upset him. His had
always been war widows’ pensions, a preoccupation that dated back to his living
with his grandmother in Leeds.

He remembered
the shock when he first realized, shortly after leaving the
university,
that
his grandmother had eked out an existence for thirty years on a
weekly widow’s pension that wouldn’t have covered the cost of a decent meal in
a London restaurant.

From the back
benches he had always pressed for the redeeming ofwar bonds and higher pensions
for war widows. He even supported veterans’ charities that worked on their
behalf. His weekly mail showed unequivocally j ust how maj or a problem war
widows’ pensions had become. Over all his years in Parliament, he had worked
doggedly to achieve ever increasing, though small, rises, but be vowed that
were he ever to become Secretary of State for Defense he would enact something
more radical.

With Joyce’s
clipping in his hand, he tried to press his view onto a reluctant Shadow
Cabinet, who seemed more interested in the planned series of one-day strikes by
the print unions than the case of Mrs. Dora Benson.

Raymond reread
the story carefully and discovered that the case didn’t differ greatly from the
many others he had looked into over the years, except for the added ingredient
of a Victoria Cross.
By any standards, Mrs.

Dora Benson
highlighted Raymond’s cause. She was one of the
handful
of surviving widows of the First World War, and her husband, Private Albert
Benson, had been killed at the Somme while leading an attack on a German trench.
Nine Germans had been killed before Albert Benson died, which was why he had
been awarded the Victoria Cross. His widow had worked as a chambermaid in the
King’s Head at Barking for over fifty years. Her only possessions of any value
were her war bonds; with no redemption date, they were still passing hands at
only twenty-five pounds each. Mrs. Benson’s case might have gone unnoticed if
in desperation she had not asked Sotheby’s to auction her husband’s medal.

Once Raymond
had armed himself with all the facts, he put down a question to the Secretary
of State for Defense asking if he would at last honor the Government’s
long-promised pledges in such cases. A sleepy but packed House heard Simon
Kerslake reply that he was giving the program his consideration and hoping to
present a report on his findings to the Chancellor in the near future. Simon
settled back onto the green benches, satisfied that this would pacify Gould,
but Raymond’s supplementary stunned him and woke up the House.

“Does the Right
Honorable Gentleman realize that this eighty-three-year-old widow, whose
husband was killed 366 in
action
and won the Victoria
Cross, has a lower income than a sixteen-year-old cadet on his first day in the
armed forces?”

Simon rose once
more, determined to put a stop to the issue until he had had more time to study
the details of this particular case. “I was not aware of this fact, Mr.
Speaker, and I can assure the Right Honorable Gentleman that I shall take into
consideration all the points he has mentioned.”

Simon felt
confident the Speaker would now move on to the next question.

But Raymond
rose
again, the Opposition benches spurring him on.