A Very British Coup (4 page)

“We gotta be careful, Mr President,” cautioned McLennon, a veteran of too many failed State Department spectaculars to want to be rushed into a new one. It was always the same. A Secretary of State whose knowledge of the geography was largely gleaned from a
Time-Life
Atlas and the currency markets. A President who wanted to be seen acting tough. And when the whole thing blew up in their faces, nobody would want to know. The CIA would be left to take the rap.

“Britain's not some third-rate banana republic,” said McLennon. “If we move too fast, we could create a backlash and turn the other European allies against us.”

“Sure, George,” said the President irritably. Deep down he knew the CIA Director was right. But just now George McLennon was not his favourite person. “What I want to know,” said the President, “is can we expect any help from the inside?”

“I reckon we can, sir.” McLennon had perked up a bit. “Fact is there are going to be a lot of very unhappy people in Britain after tonight. A lot of very important persons are about to get their toes trodden on and they aren't going to like it. We can expect to find friends in the top levels of the armed forces, the business community and the civil service, not to mention our cousins at DI5. As far as propaganda goes, we can start the fightback right now, since most of the British press is in friendly hands – although Perkins has said he's going to do something about that.”

There was a brief silence, broken only by the sound of the President chewing, then he summed up: “Right, gentlemen. Agreed we wait and see how things turn out. Meantime, George, get your people in London to take some soundings and find out who our friends are going to be. Marcus, you get the NSC boys to put some flesh on that de-stabilisation blueprint. And, very discreetly, sound out the rest of the Alliance to see who we could take with us if the worst comes to the worst.”

The President paused, took a deep breath, and looked in turn at each man. “Let's be clear. The election of Harry
Perkins could be the biggest threat to the stability of the Free World since Joe Stalin. We have to do everything possible to keep him in his place. Everything short of landing the Marines at Dover.”

Harry Perkins did not intend to become a Labour MP. Having left school at fifteen he followed his father into Firth Brown, the Sheffield special steels plant. From the start he was active in the union, first as assistant branch secretary and later as treasurer.

After five years at Firth's the union paid for him to go on a scholarship to Ruskin College, where he gained a first class honours degree in politics and economics before returning to Sheffield. Before long he was elected convener for the whole plant, which made him chief negotiator for the union side in all dealings with the Firth management. His relations with management were cordial, but not matey. The managing director once remarked, “If I stepped under a bus tomorrow the mills would still be rolling the next day, but if Harry went under a bus the whole place would grind to a halt.”

“So long as you realise,” Perkins had responded cheerfully.

One evening after he had been back from Ruskin for four years, there came a knock on the front door. It was the secretary of a constituency Labour party on the other side of Sheffield, where a by-election was pending. “We want someone local, someone who knows about steel and who's on the left. So far all we've got applying are bleeding London barristers and sociology lecturers. Some of the lads thought you might be interested.”

Perkins was not keen. His father had been dead twelve years and his mother was getting on in life. Who was going to look after her if he was running up and down to London all the time? But Mrs Perkins, when consulted, said she rather fancied the idea of her Harry being an MP.

Then there was the union, what about the union? They hadn't wasted all that precious money sending him to Ruskin just so he could be a Labour MP. But a phone call to the
district secretary confirmed that this was exactly what they had in mind.

Perkins said he'd think about it. He thought for two days before agreeing to let his name go forward. The selection was a walkover; as for the election itself, in Sheffield they weigh the Labour votes. His majority was massive. Next morning his workmates from Firth's turned out in force at the station to see him off to London.

Like many working men who find themselves catapulted into Parliament, Harry Perkins let the place go to his head a little. Although he stayed out of the bars and ate mainly in the Strangers' cafeteria the House of Commons brought out a streak of vanity which had hitherto lain dormant. As time passed he lost the ability to concentrate on what other people were saying. His appreciation of events began to revolve around the part he had played in them. His eyes would start to wander during conversation or he would butt in before the other person had finished speaking.

By parliamentary standards it was nothing serious. Indeed, the trait was almost invisible to anyone who did not know Perkins well, but in Sheffield some of his old friends did remark quietly that Parliament seemed to be going to Harry's head. Even so, no one questioned that Perkins was doing a splendid job of shaking up the parliamentary establishment. For a while he became the scourge of the Tory front bench at question time and on occasion did not hesitate to tear a strip off the Labour front bench as well.

Like many before him, however, Perkins soon realised that wherever power lies in Great Britain it is not in the chamber of the House of Commons. Thus he began to concentrate on leading the fight outside Parliament. For three years there was hardly an invitation to speak which he turned down. The more meetings he addressed, the more the invitations multiplied. Gradually, the rise of Harry Perkins had begun.

When Labour was returned to government Perkins was asked to be Secretary of State for the Public Sector, a new post designed to make the nationalised industries accountable to Parliament. It was a meteoric rise for someone who had
never been so much as a junior minister. With no love lost between Perkins and the Labour leadership, he was under no illusions as to why he had been offered the job. “They're just trawling for a left-winger to make the régime look respectable,” he told his friends. All the same, he accepted.

Perkins' spell in government was dominated by what was in later years to become known as the Windermere reactor affair. As Secretary of State for the Public Sector he was responsible for the Central Electricity Generating Board. The Board was in the process of choosing the type of nuclear reactor for a series of new power stations which would generate enough electricity to meet demand until well into the next century. By the time Perkins took office the decision involved a straight choice between a water-cooled reactor made by the Durand Corporation, an American multinational with a reputation for hard sell, and a gas-cooled reactor to be made by British Insulated Industries, a corporation with its head office in Manchester. To the winner the contract was worth a billion pounds.

Every day delegations of hard-nosed businessmen and learned scientists filed through the Secretary of State's second floor office at Millbank. Behind them they left abstruse memoranda setting out their case. The Americans said their version was cheaper. The men from British Insulated claimed they could get back their costs by selling reactors to the Shah of Iran (whose demise at that time was but a twinkle in the eye of the Ayatollah). The Americans said their version was already in use and had proved as safe as houses. British Insulated brought in experts who alleged that it was not.

And so it went on day after day, week after week. Each night when Perkins boarded a number 3 bus he took back to his flat in Kennington red despatch boxes brimming with memoranda arguing the comparative merits of water-cooled and gas-cooled reactors. There were times, as he sat up late into the night poring over papers he could scarcely comprehend, when he wished he was back at Firth Brown's. Alone in the living room of his three-room flat in the small hours of the
morning, the absolute self-confidence he carried through life deserted him. This was no job for a Sheffield steel worker. More than once he reflected on the irony that he, a product of Parkside Secondary School who had barely scraped an ‘O' level in Physics, was in a position to over-rule the finest minds in the scientific establishment.

In the end that is exactly what he did. Against the advice of his own civil servants, the Atomic Energy Authority and the CEGB itself, Perkins ruled in favour of British Insulated. The first reactor would be built on the shore of Lake Windermere. The recommendation went to the Cabinet and he talked it through in the face of bitter hostility from his own civil servants. So committed had they been to the American reactor that they refused point blank to provide him with the necessary briefing papers for the Cabinet. Instead he had to commission a report setting out the case for the British reactor from outside academics.

For Perkins the deciding factor was jobs. It was no secret that British Insulated was on the edge of ruin. If they lost the contract a string of factories from Portsmouth to Port Greenock would close. The union men had been to see him. Delegations of shop stewards from every British Insulated factory in the country. In Greenock alone thirty per cent of the town's labour force were employed at British Insulated. Perkins had no desire to be remembered as the man who closed down Greenock. Having satisfied himself that there was nothing to choose between the two reactors on safety grounds, he opted to buy British.

“If you don't mind my saying so, Minister,” said Sir Richard Fry, the Permanent Secretary, “I think you have made a big mistake.”

“Time will tell,” Perkins had replied.

Time did tell. Several years later at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania an overheated uranium core in a water-cooled reactor led to a radiation leak and the evacuation of a large number of people from their homes. Shortly after the incident Perkins, who had long since returned to the backbenches, received a hand-written note in an envelope bearing the seal
of the Public Sector Department. The note, in elegant italic script, said simply: “You were right. We were wrong.” It was signed Richard Fry.

Perkins had the letter framed and hung it on the wall of his room in the House of Commons.

It was during the reactor negotiations that Perkins first met Molly Spence. The managing director of British Insulated had come to see Perkins at the Department. He had brought with him his head of research and development, two scientists to advise on safety aspects and a striking blonde girl who took notes. She was aged twenty-seven, her nose was lightly freckled and her expensive accent had a trace of Yorkshire.

Mid-morning they broke for coffee. Someone from the private office produced a packet of digestive biscuits and the girl took hers and walked over to the window. Perkins followed.

“I like your view,” she said, indicating the River Thames. She was standing sideways on to the window, half looking at Perkins, half at the river. The light on her face made her eyes gleam.

“I don't get much chance to look at it,” said Perkins, drawing alongside. A convoy of red buses passed over Lambeth Bridge and below, on the river, a barge passed on its way to Hammersmith.

“What's that?”

“What?”

“That sort of castle on the other side of the bridge.”

“Lambeth Palace, where the Archbishop of Canterbury lives.”

“He's done all right for himself.” She smiled lightly.

“Aye,” said Perkins, “the Church of England's worth a bob or two.”

They were interrupted by a private secretary who came with letters to be signed. Perkins took a fountain pen from his inside pocket and signed, scarcely glancing at the letters. The girl waited in silence, staring out at the river. It was Perkins who broke the silence. “Sounds like you're a Yorkshire lass.”

“Sheffield,” she said.

“That's where I'm from.”

“I know,” she said.

Before he could speak again the private secretary was back. “Minister, I think we ought to make a start. You have the Select Committee at noon.” There was a clinking of crockery as a lady with a trolley collected the cups. They turned and walked back to the conference table and she said, almost in a whisper, “I think you knew my dad.”

“Did I?”

“Jack Spence, works manager at Firth Brown.”

“Good heavens,” said Perkins, “is he your father?”

She nodded. They did not get a chance to talk again, but when British Insulated came back to the Department two weeks later, Perkins slipped her an envelope. He tried to do it discreetly so that the private office would not gossip, but he had been seen. David Booth, a young high-flyer on secondment from the Treasury to the nuclear division of the Public Sector Department saw the girl put the envelope in her handbag. At the time he thought nothing of it. The girl was beautiful and the Secretary of State was unmarried. He might have done the same himself had Perkins not beaten him to it.

Molly was dying to open the envelope. On the way out she excused herself and disappeared into the ladies. She cut along the top of the envelope with a nail file. Inside was a single sheet of notepaper which at the top bore the legend “From the Secretary of State”. The message inside written in red ink simply said: “Lunch Sunday? Ring me at midnight.” And then a telephone number.

There was nothing else. The envelope did not even bear her name. Afterwards it occurred to Molly that this was because Perkins did not know her name. Trembling slightly she stuffed the letter into her handbag and went to catch up with her boss who was waiting in the main reception. That evening, at midnight precisely, she telephoned to say “Yes.”

Where women were concerned, Harry Perkins was a late developer. He passed through Parkside Secondary School without ever giving the girls in his class a second glance. It was not that he didn't have friends. There was Nobby Jones whose father was a signalman on the railway. Bill Spriggs, who lived in Jubilee Street, which backed on to the same alley as the Perkins house. And Danny Parker, whose father also worked at Firth Brown. They were all in the same class and went around together. At weekends and during school holidays Nobby's father would sometimes smuggle them into his signal box, where they would sit for hours, with notepads and pencils, jotting down engine numbers. Sometimes when it rained they would go back to Perkins' house and play cards, gin rummy usually. They used to sit round the dining-room table, each with a heap of used threepenny stamps as the stake. Harry never had much luck with cards and very often his supply of used stamps was cleaned out by the end of an afternoon. “Never mind, Harry,” Mrs Perkins used to say, “unlucky in cards, lucky in love.”