Dislocated to Success by Iain Bowen Read Free Book Online Page A

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 [34] 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 [35] 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.