2020 by Kenneth Steven

Author:Kenneth Steven [Steven, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628728828
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2018-08-07T07:00:00+00:00

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OH, I DON’T think anybody in the country realised just how serious things were in Whitehall. I’m not even sure I realised! Perhaps you don’t feel the true force of a crisis, if that’s the best description, until afterwards. Perhaps something of the PM’s panic got through to the tabloids; I think a hint of that was there, certainly. But the truth is that the leader of the opposition didn’t have an awful lot to throw at him. I think he realised that himself, and though there was inevitable sparring about sodding Sudburgh—that was what it tended to be known as behind closed doors—it was all quite careful. The opposition knew damn well it was a case of there but for the grace of God. They knew fine the PM was quite right when he said that a magic wand couldn’t be waved over such a situation. They might even have gone as far as to feel something like sympathy for what the whole thing had spiralled into. I suppose the London lot—those who couldn’t quite see anything north of Watford without a telescope—would have muttered to begin with that it was a case of the tail wagging the dog. Yes, I might have been guilty of that kind of attitude in the first days. The fact was that rather a lot was happening elsewhere in the world—as there always is!—and that we were in danger of spending a disproportionate amount of time worrying about a little idiot in Sudburgh. His nickname up there—sometimes used rather affectionately—was the Little Hitler. I think that was our way of cutting him down to size in Whitehall, by simply slicing that to the little idiot. Because that’s effectively what he was. He happened to be able to appeal wildly to the flog ’em and hang ’em brigade, and he made reasonably good speeches. But there was no substance there: what did he think he was going to do about it? He wasn’t about to bring in naval vessels to cart off hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis! There’s too much of a fondness for curry in his neck of the woods for that to happen anyway. You can just see these White Rose sympathisers having their five pints on a Friday night and then going home with a curry. The whole thing’s lunacy, but it was very dangerous lunacy at the time all the same. And the fire-bombing of the White Rose offices marked a very real escalation of it all. I suspect the PM thought that some kind of order had been restored after the election of Eric Semple as MP. They were really praying there wouldn’t be any acts of retaliation; all of the imams in the North were being contacted to beg them to use what influence they had. And to give them their due, I think they were doing their best. But it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.

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