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.)
