Agent Lavender: The Flight of Harold Wilson Read online

  At precisely five minutes past noon on this crisp November Saturday, Mr Clive Shaw of Forest Fields, Nottingham, found this equilibrium shattered (along with the side of his skull, which was a slightly above average 6.8 millimetres in thickness). The cause was a massive application of force to the left side of his head. The cause, in turn, of this, was a wooden bat, initially crafted as an implement for playing cricket, which was presently held in a tight grip by a Mr Eric Jones, also of Forest Fields, Nottingham.

  Clive and Eric had never met. They did not know each other’s names, and nor did they know that their homes were within walking distance of each other. But in the moments leading up to Eric’s decision to cave in the side of Clive’s head, they had learned some crucially important information about one another.

  First, Clive learned that Eric was wearing the black-on-white armband of Civil Assistance. This was enough to provoke Clive to approach him.

  Second, Eric learned that Clive had no intention of abandoning the blockade of the High Street his shop steward had organised that morning. Eric learned this when Clive shouted it in his face.

  Third, Clive learned that Eric didn’t get shot in the leg at Anzio for the likes of him.

  Fourth, Eric learned that Clive had been in Suez, and believed the two of them should be side by side. After this, Clive learned that Eric would be happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with him if he wasn’t a bloody red.

  Finally, Clive learned that Eric did not take kindly to being spat at.

  As he lay on the pavement, his vision blurred to the point of near-blindness, Clive could just make out Eric’s bat swinging wildly at the faces of the advancing men. At least one of Clive’s friends was trying to parry the cricket bat with his placard. As he felt himself being hoisted into a fireman’s lift by John (the quiet man who normally operated the sheet metal cutter), Clive heard a cry, a shout, and suddenly a cacophony. Just before he lost consciousness, he heard sirens.

  “Today’s violence is not the first such incident, but it is the largest,” Ian Gilmour said, flipping through a bundle of papers as he addressed yet another emergency session of cabinet.

  “Thank you, Home Secretary,” the Prime Minister interrupted, “it is situations precisely like these that have led to the legislation that Her Majesty will announce on Monday.”

  Gilmour made as if to continue.

  “Thank you,” Thatcher repeated, “but I think that will be all we shall say about this afternoon’s disturbance. The priority is to finalise the Emergency Queen’s Speech. Mr Howe, anything to add?”

  “Nothing, Prime Minister – as long as my concerns regarding some of the anti-striking legislation were properly minuted when I made them clear earlier,” he shot a glance toward the typist before continuing, “I only wish I had more to tell you about the ongoing attempt to bring Mr Wilson into custody.”

  “No matter,” Thatcher beamed, “he will be caught once the country is back on track and in working order. He cannot hide forever. The strike is the priority.”

  As she closed the large folder in front of her, Airey noted how much Margaret had grown into the role of Being The Prime Minister over the past week.

  “I think that is as good a moment as any to end this meeting,” the Prime Minister said, quietly but brightly.

  The men around the table looked at one another, an awkward silence hanging over them. Thorpe raised an eyebrow at Gilmour.

  “Thank you, gentlemen!” Thatcher thundered, and Howe banged his knee on the table as he threw himself up and out of his chair. He was not alone, sharing a wince with a suddenly red-faced Joseph. As they scurried out of the cabinet room, Howe furrowed his brow in thought. Thatcher had looked different when she gave that final instruction. Her voice, too, was different. She sounded like she was speaking from her diaphragm – deeper, more commanding. Well, he thought as Jo Grimond gave a mumbled apology for barging him out of the way, if there was more of that to come things might just be alright.

  Back in the cabinet room, the Prime Minister’s heart was beating against her chest. To finally speak that way to the sorry mob of wets and – she shuddered again – Liberals had felt exhilarating. The Queen’s Speech might just work. No, it would. A united public would force the TUC to come to the table, and the emergency legislation would make short work of those who still argued for ‘civil disobedience’. A moment before a smile could creep across her face, the distant wailing of a police siren reminded her of that which she had dismissed perhaps too readily a few minutes earlier. The country’s former Prime Minister and greatest traitor was still at large – and God knew what treachery he was up to at that very moment.

  Harold Wilson was, at that very moment, inspecting his beard. It was the product of a week in the company of men – two, ever since John Stonehouse had come banging on the door last Sunday morning, covered in mud and bringing with him a whirlwind of details about extraction options, courtesy of Moscow via Prague and Walsall. Wilson and Stonehouse hadn’t traditionally got on, but in the last week they’d found they had a lot more in common than they’d ever realised.

  Harold hadn’t had facial hair since the war. When one bright day in the autumn after D-Day he returned to the office from after ‘losing’ a copy of Britain’s coal projections for 1945 while having lunch with a Soviet emissary, he was incredibly relieved to find that the cause of his new office nickname of ‘Uncle Joe’ was in reference to the rather substantial growth on his upper lip. A period of careful trimming and cultivation had led to Nye sparing no opportunity to tell him he looked like Tom Dewey, while Mary had, in more tender moments, compared him to Rhett Butler.

  He felt a pang of sadness at the thought of Mary. Was she alright? He had no way of knowing that she was, in fact, sleeping in a small flat under police guard but under no suspicion whatsoever, and so he was forced to carry on worrying. Robin and Giles would be fine, he assured himself. Their jobs well outside the sphere of government meant there was no possible reason for the rozzers to cause them any trouble. All the same, he wished he knew for sure.

  Leaving Jacob’s bathroom, he smelled the aroma of bacon wafting up the stairs. Excellent, he thought, and decided to pass the time by, as he had grown accustomed to doing, browsing his old friend’s library. He was once more amused by the apparent lack of any ordered system, which saw The Amateur’s Introduction to Topiary placed side-by-side with an English commentary on the April Theses. Harold pulled out what must have been a first edition of Casino Royale – in good condition, too – and flicked through it. Something about the passage he found himself reading reminded him of one of the more bizarre moments during his second period in office. As he stood, reading in a relatively cheap smoking jacket, he found his mind transported back to the events of the year before...

  “I want you to know I have no desire to do this,” Wilson was saying, his hand gripping the handle of the silenced Tokarev that, until an hour before, had been gathering dust in a secret compartment in the Prime Minister’s personal safe.

  John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, stared back at him, standing defiantly against the wall.

  “Just get on with it, you treacherous piece of slime,” he spat through gritted teeth.

  “I just wish you’d been less persevering,” Harold continued as if Lucan had not spoken, “we wouldn’t have ended up where we are now.”

  “Well, we have. Aspinall and the others know everything I know, I don’t know why you think killing me will—”

  “But that’s just it, John,” replied Wilson coolly, “they don’t know everything you know. They suspect everything you suspect, but only you had the tenacity to track down any semblance of proof.”

  “The t-telephone line—”

  “Was dismantled within minutes of my call to Moscow ending, you daft git. As always. There would be no trace of it even if you had told Aspinall and chums about it – which I know you haven’t, because I tailed you here. And don’t think that means the good people of Special Branch know wher
e I am – I lost my ‘bodyguards’ half an hour ago. I have been doing this for a very long time.”

  The colour drained from Lucan’s face.

  “W-well,” he stammered, “what are you waiting for, then?”

  “Good question,” replied Harold, steadying the gun. Lucan closed his eyes and screwed them shut. Wilson could see liquid running down his trouser leg. He straightened his arm, aimed squarely for Lucan’s heart, and froze.

  After about ten seconds, Lucan’s eyes opened again. He looked Harold in the face.

  “You didn’t fight in the war, did you?” he said in a whisper.

  Harold shook his head.

  “Have you ever—”

  “Not like this,” the Prime Minister replied through gritted teeth.

  Lucan’s eyes widened and, incredibly, found himself unable to stop himself from laughing.

  “Stop it,” growled Wilson, “stop it, you bastard!”

  “I can’t believe this,” cried Lucan hysterically, “little Harold Wilson, grammar school boy made good, international superspy and here he is, unable to pull a bloody trigger!”

  There was mania in his eyes. Harold wasn’t looking at him any more. He was only hearing his laughter. It was echoing through his mind. They’d always laughed at him. They’d laughed at school. They’d laughed when he first opened his mouth at Jesus. They’d laughed when he told them he’d been doing important work at the Civil Service and so no, he hadn’t ‘gone over on D-Day’. They’d laughed when he first went up against the 14th Earl of Home. And now the 7th Earl of Lucan was laughing. And he wouldn’t stop.

  “This is what they’ve done to you, Wilson,” Lucan spat, still doubled over with mirth “they’ve taken you, they’ve moulded you and they’ve pretended there’s this invisible line they won’t make you cross. Well, hello there! You’re going to cross the line. That’s what they do. If you’d spent a moment of your life in uniform, you’d understand that...”

  With that, he returned to fits of the most unholy giggles. Harold snarled and tried to block them out. But soon it was all he could hear, and it seemed there was only one thing he could to make them go away.

  The gun bucked slightly in his hand, although he did not remember pulling the trigger. There was silence in the room at last. Harold took several deep breaths, then walked over to Lucan’s body.

  “I understand alright, your Lordship,” he murmured as he carefully wiped the speck of blood that had ended up on the wall behind Lucan, “it’s just that—”

  The basement door opened.

  Harold froze, looked up, then raised the gun. No! His brain shouted at him. The young woman in the doorway looked at the body and back to him. Harold saw recognition in her eyes. Without thinking, he knelt down and picked up a piece of piping from the floor. He got up and looked her in the face, trying not to be sick. She was petrified, rooted to the spot.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured as he advanced well and truly across the line.

  Eight minutes later, Harold was hissing into a public telephone two roads away, a handkerchief over the bottom of the receiver. He was speaking to the ‘Regional Distributor’ of ‘Brown’s All-Purpose Goods Vehicles’.

  “Make it look like he did it. Fake some phone calls. I know it can be done. You’ve pulled off bigger than this in the past!”

  There was a silence.

  “What do you propose first? You are the ranking intelligence officer at the scene, Lavender.”

  Harold felt a mixture of relief and further panic.

  “Come and get him! Make him disappear! You hear me? It’s the only way. Come and get him!”

  “Come and get it!”

  Harold came back to reality with a jolt.

  “Coming, Jacob!” he called.

  Harold walked downstairs and back into the kitchen, nodded to Jacob at the stove, and cut himself a piece of cheese before turning on the radio. A vaguely familiar voice crackled from its tinny speaker, and he drew up a chair to listen.

  “I have spoken to multiple eyewitnesses since this afternoon’s incident, and there is an overwhelming consensus that the violence began among the strikers. So, frankly...”

  “...rather than what your quasi-Marxist corporation would like to tell the good people of this country, what today’s events show is that Civil Assistance is needed now more than ever. It will—”

  “Sir Walter—”

  General Walker interrupted Robin Day.

  “And it will,’ he began forcefully, ‘still be needed as long as this country has a government which allows it to be paralysed to be strikes. What we need is leadership—”

  Day rallied. When they’d asked him to do an ‘early evening interview’ as part of the daily allotted four hours of ‘ongoing emergency programming’, he’d taken it in his stride, and secretly been rather flattered. He had been somewhat taken aback, however, when he had found out he would be talking to Walker. Narrowing his eyes, he reminded himself that he didn’t take kindly to being bullied.

  “Sir Walter, do you think brawling in the streets provides leadership?”

  Sir Walter was unfazed.

  “No, I think strong government provides leadership—”

  “With respect, Sir Walter, that doesn’t answer the question – your ‘Civil Assistance’ movement has had more than eighty of its members arrested for breaches of the peace—”

  Walker thrust his head towards the microphone.

  “But none charged, Mr Day!” he said triumphantly, “and countless more are assisting police in their enquiries into the shocking attacks on public buildings by strikers. Civil Assistance’s code of honour explicitly states that violence is only ever necessary in self-defence. Our representatives have been escorting loyal workers through pickets, managing the distribution of supplies for hospitals and food shops, and even on some occasions nobly taking on the jobs which the red scum of the TUC are refusing to do!”

  Day gave a thin smile.

  “It is worth mentioning, then, that Thursday’s derailment at King’s Cross has been blamed on two Civil Assistance members trying to operate a diesel locomotive without the proper training—”

  Walker’s face was turning a fetching shade of crimson.

  “Such incidents are inevitable when public order disintegrates. And no-one was hurt! All this comes back to the central problem: it has become clear that Mrs Thatcher is unable to provide strong government. There is only one man for the job, in my opinion, and he is not even a member of the Conservative Party!”

  Day smirked.

  “I did not expect you to offer an endorsement of Mr Jenkins, Sir Walter.”

  The General turned almost purple.

  “I was not referring to the agents of the Soviet Union which still, disgracefully, sit in the Commons!”

  It was Day’s turn to rapidly change colour. Leaning forward towards the microphone, he adjusted his tie nervously.

  “We should stress that Mr Jenkins was released without charge and there is no suspicion resting upon him or any of the Labour MPs who have been released so far—”

  “They released that lunatic Benn! Do they really expect us to believe there’s no suspicion against him? And after his behaviour this week there can be no doubt.”

  “Mr Benn has been cautioned by the police for actions close to incitement twice since his release, but it is not against the law to speak at a picket line, Sir Walter—”

  Walker waved his hand dismissively.

  “Enough of this. I did not come here to speak about comrades Benn or Jenkins. I am here to say that there is one man, and one man only, who can save this country now. His name is John Enoch Powell, and I would like to add my voice to those calling for his immediate invitation to form a governmen—”

  Enoch Powell prodded the power switch on his radio set with such ferocity he almost knocked it over. With a scowl, he sat back down in his armchair. It was becoming hard to just walk down the road without someone asking when he was going to become Prime
Minister. Frankly, he was getting rather tired of it.

  Last Sunday, Britain had awoken to the morning after the longest day in its constitutional history. As the sign of peace was offered at St Margaret’s, he had lost count of the number of people who had accompanied their handshakes with an insistence that he should ‘be in charge’. The church had been more full than usual, he’d noted, and there were of course those for whom a handshake with Enoch would be as welcome as afternoon tea with Generalissimo Franco. Still, a churchwarden had detained him for forty-five minutes after the service, outlining a plan to ‘decisively root out the communist enemies of the people’. Enoch had bitten his lip at each insinuation that the solution was obviously an emulation of 1930s Germany, but found himself subject to a coughing fit when it was suggested he lead a Parliamentary Select Committee on Un-British Activities. When the churchwarden had made concrete allegations against Tony Benn, however, Powell had found himself unable to do anything but make an immediate and curt exit from the discussion. Having shared a platform with Benn during the Referendum (incredibly to some, they’d been able to unite against the EEC – just as Enoch had done with Michael Foot over Lords Reform in the 1960s), Powell simply couldn’t countenance any suspicion for the man. He was a firebrand, an intellectualist and, at times, an ass – but no traitor. Standing up to select an LP, Powell mused over whether he’d have said the same about Wilson before last week.

  Thumbing through his record collection, he cast his mind back to Monday. As the news came in that the Soviets had allowed Swiss delegates to search their London embassy for any sign of Mr Wilson, the librarian at the front desk had tutted and said ‘it ought to be you running things, you know’ as he thanked her for putting aside the British Library’s only Russian-language edition of An Incident at Krechetovka Station. The next night, he had barely taken in the Nine O’Clock News’ announcement that the TUC had successfully balloted for a general strike before he’d had to shoo those infuriating twins from his doorstep. They’d managed to insist he reconsider his refusal to work with them before Powell’s particularly violent gesture with his hatstand had scared them off.