Biafra and All That

One of those incidents that seems to have survived only on Wikipedia (and, I suppose, on its various imitators and copycats) is the strange affair of the “Harry letters”. This was one of Mad Polly Toynbee’s early claims to fame. Whilst she was working for Amnesty International she coughed up what she intended to be a scandal about the Hard-Left Wilson Government's supporting Amnesty International by giving them public money.

So far, so dodgy, one might think. And yet of course Mad Polly, who has never been one not to ignore real wrongdoings when imaginary ones will do, got completely the wrong end of the stick. She complained that Wilson’s people were actually bribing Amnesty to ignore “politically sensitive” parts of the world such as Nigeria and, er, Southern Rhodesia.

The problem with this particular conspiracy theory alas was simply cui bono? Yes, Wilson’s government was one of the most notoriously corrupt in British history. (Quite how corrupt we only really found out with his Resignation Honours.) And yes, one can easily imagine they’d have wanted to divert attention from their support for Nigeria's military dictatorship, not to mention (later on) their illegal interventions in the Biafran civil war. But Rhodesia? Really?

Where the conspiracy theory breaks down is the thought that there might have been a ha'penny worth of difference between Amnesty International and Harold Wilson’s administration about anything at all ever. Biafra was fighting for independence from Nigeria and supported by Rhodesia, as well as by Israel, France, and what by then was left of the Catholic Church. Britain supported Nigeria because duh!

And the idea that Harold Wilson or Amnesty International could ever have supported Rhodesia can only even have been the most paranoid of paranoiac fantasies. (No, in fifty years the British Far Left really hasn't changed much.)

Political Assassinations and Secret History

Auntie's recent series about Mrs T was as usual interesting as much for what it left out as for what it included. The convoluted but essential history of the Labour Party's vicissitudes in the 1980s was almost entirely neglected. The Falklands and the Belgrano were skated over briefly and the yomp to Port Stanley was barely mentioned. But most intriguing, given that the Brighton bomb was covered in some detail, was the absence of any assassinations.

Airey Neave in fact got several mentions from the time when he was Mrs Thatcher's campaign manager. But his assassination by the INLA was entirely ignored. And Ian Gow, who was similarly assassinated by the Provisional IRA, didn't so much as see the light of day.

On the one hand yes there's the BBC's commitment to the "peace" process. Mention Fenian violence and you'll get complaints. And on top of that there's Auntie's perennial implicit anti-Catholic bias, which in the case of Neave and Gow works in a particularly interesting way. Because Neave and Gow were almost certainly targeted specifically because they were "Catholics" (or rather, in Gow's case, an "Anglo-Catholic"). So even less reason than usual to mention them? Possibly!

But what about the Beeb's similarly perennial anti-Right bias? It may seem odd to complain about that Tory favourite old chestnut when considering a series that was for the most part admirably objective and even-handed. But one can't escape a lingering uneasy feeling that they wouldn't have wanted to make Neave and Gow into martyrs. Partly this will be because they wouldn't want people to know how right-wing they really were. The Far Left have always wanted people to think Mrs T was on the Right of the Party, when in reality she was always in its liberal pro-abortion, pro-gay, anti-Rhodesia and anti-Apartheid "centre". And the libertarians conversely now want to claim her as one of their own. Either way, remind people that an Ulster integrationist and a pro-Rhodesian anti-abolitionist were amongst the Lady's closest political allies and you'll get more than just complaints.

Somewhere in the middle though is of course just good old-fashioned squeamishness about the role of political violence in a liberal democratic order. Neave and Gow were murdered for political reasons and, however unpalatable the truth may be, yes, political murders can work. Mrs T's career could have been quite different if Neave had lived. And Gow's death helped to isolate her in the Cabinet as her enemies within her own party plotted her downfall. It just shouldn't be surprising that a "liberal" Establishment doesn't like to imagine that even as recently as the 1980s we still lived in that sort of world.