Second paragraph of third chapter:

Elbowing his way through a crowd of demonstrators outside Number Ten, he walked up Whitehall. That morning’s special briefing at the F.O. had been ludicrously bare of fact. Obviously the Cabinet had not yet decided whether to move against the new white régime in Rhodesia, and we should have to go through the usual humiliating prevarications at the U.N. Still, it was difficult to see what a Tory P.M. like Harvey could do, with four rightwingers in the Cabinet and anything up to a hundred rebels in the party…. Slotting the facts together, he wrote an anodyne column in his head.

Thriller written by the future foreign secretary and one of the founders of Private Eye, first published in early 1968 and set in the dark and distant future of 1975.

This review has major spoilers for a book published 58 years ago.

It is 1975. A British government with a large but fragile majority (does that sound familiar?) is hit by a foreign policy crisis. Back in 1968, Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia made a (counterfactual) deal with the UK to gradually, eventually, some time real soon, make a transition to majority rule. Now, several years on, they have been overthrown by a more extreme white faction, and South Africa is threatening to invade to support the new government.

There is international and domestic pressure on the British government (which under international law was still the colonial power) to intervene and restore the Ian Smith regime along with a clear path to majority rule. But there is discontent within the Conservative Party, with a faction led by an Enoch Powell-type figure urging hands off Rhodesia. On top of that the army seems to be of questionable loyalty, with mutiny threatening in some regiments. There is a riot between pro- and anti-Rhodesian factions in Oxford, and seventeen people are killed.

The King, who has a school-age son (swift work given that the book is set only seven years in the future) happens to be on holiday in Italy, and flies back home early to make a speech supporting the Prime Minister’s intervention. But – surprise! – the King’s plane explodes in mid-air over the Mediterranean, and the speech read out by his rapidly installed young son supports the Rhodesian rebels and sacks the prime minister, appointing a National Government instead.

All appears lost. But a journalist who happens to be staying in the British embassy in Rome becomes suspicious of a British aerospace industrialist who is also staying, breaks into his room and opens a large trunk hoping to find blueprints of a missile bound for illegal export to South Africa. But in fact – surprise! – the trunk contains the King, who is not dead after all but has been kidnapped by pro-South African conspirators including his own private secretary and the industrialist.

The dim but honest peer who had been appointed to lead the National Government immediately hands power back to the real prime minister, the King’s private secretary commits suicide, the industrialist is arrested, the British successfully invade Rhodesia with support from Tanzania and Zambia, and Ian Smith is also restored to power with a minority of black ministers in his government and a timetable to transition. This last bit takes up only the last ten pages of the 250 in the book.

Of the three Hurd and Osborne thrillers (the other two are The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, about Hong Kong, and Scotch on the Rocks, about Scottish independence) this is the one whose politics has aged least well. Hong Kong’s status changed in 1997 but remains a matter of comment, and Scottish independence is still very much with us. But Ian Smith actually did do a deal with the British and his country’s own majority, though in 1979 rather than 1968, and Rhodesia as a concept is now a distant memory – indeed, it is more than thirty years since South Africa dismantled apartheid and rejoined the community of nations.

Enoch Powell self-destructed in 1974 and spent a decade in irrelevant political exile in Northern Ireland before finally losing in 1987. His party was unable even to win one of the five Assembly seats in his old constituency in the last two elections, and lost their deposit in the 2024 Westminster election.

(Trivia question for you – which UK political party had an election for Deputy Leader in 2024, in which the losing candidate was born in Zimbabwe in 1988?)

I was very tempted to think that the plotline of the murky establishment exerting royal pressure to mount a coup against the elected government must have been inspired by the infamous “loose talk” episode of 1968, when the owner of the Daily Mirror tried to persuade Lord Mountbatten to overthrow Harold Wilson and lead an emergency government. Mountbatten declined (though how energetically he did so is not clear) and Wilson survived.

But the thing is that the crucial moment of the real life 1968 crisis-that-wasn’t occurred in May; whereas The Spectator was reviewing Send Him Victorious in February, so Hurd and Osmond cannot have been reflecting it in their story. Does this mean that, turned around, the Daily Mirror‘s attempt to overthrow British democracy was inspired by the novel? Or perhaps 1968 was just a year where there was a fair bit of treason about.

The King in the novel is probably not the man we know as Charles III in our timeline, because he went to Eton (and sends his son there as well), whereas Chuck did not. William and Harry both did attend Eton, but were born in 1982 and 1984, slightly too late to be taking the throne in a 1975 emergency. I tend to think that Hurd and Osmond were avoiding the distracting controversy that might have arisen by placing the real Queen into the narrative by having a clearly fictional king. I note that the president of Italy in the book is Amintore Fanfani, who was a perfectly plausible future candidate for that role in 1968 and actually did serve as acting president for three weeks in 1978.

Several passages are told from the point of view of British diplomats, notably the ambassadors in New York and Geneva. This of course was a world that Hurd knew well. I was struck by the instinctive assumption of the primacy of international law, combined with the unquestioned legitimacy of the British veto at the UN and the unquestioned illegitimacy of the South African government (and by implication the Rhodesians).

There are not many women in the book. The Enoch Powell chap turns out to have been innocent of all but malice; however his (French) wife was in the conspiracy up to her neck. The journalist’s crucial visit to the British Embassy in Rome is enabled by the fact that his girlfriend is the ambassador’s daughter. The (real) prime minster’s wife complains that he works late. Queen Elizabeth II has disappeared without trace or explanation.

Having said that the politics of the book has aged least well of the three, I think it is also the best written of them. The plot twists towards the end mount up impressively, and the rushed resolution of the last ten pages is actually a relief from the hectic pace of the previous chapters. It reminded me very much of The Day of the Jackal, with the difference that while we know that De Gaulle lived, we don’t know the outcome of the novel (well, we do if like me you had read the later two in the series). It’s a fascinating insight into 1960s British political neuroses.

You can get Send Him Victorious here.