Eastern promises

Just in case you needed another reason to loathe and despise the French (I mean, as if Olivier Besancenot wasn’t enough), there was a corker in Norma Percy’s characteristically brilliant new documentary series Iran And The West (BBC2, Saturday).

It concerned the Lebanese hostage crisis of the 1980s when the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia (‘practitioners’ as Jon Snow would no doubt call them) kidnapped dozens of Westerners, among them American journalist Terry Anderson, Archbishop’s envoy Terry Waite, and various Frenchmen and seemed determined to hold them indefinitely.

Our then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was adamant on how to deal with this: there could be no concessions to hostage-takers for it only encouraged further hostage-taking. However, at a joint press conference, her opposite number in France took a more nuanced (i.e., typically devious, cheese-eating, surrender-monkey-ish) line. ‘I don’t think one can negotiate with people who commit such crimes but the problem is very delicate because we are talking about human life,’ said François Mitterrand, preparing his get-out clause, and the contemptuous curl of the blessed Margaret’s lips as he uttered it was glorious to behold.

But in terms of pure weaselry, Mitterrand had nothing on Jacques Chirac who was then campaigning for election as prime minister. Chirac’s opposition party, we learned from episode two of the series — ‘Pariah State’, produced and directed by Delphine Jaudeau — had no qualms about manipulating the hostage crisis for its own slippery ends. A deal had secretly been negotiated by Mitterrand’s government whereby the French hostages would be released for an eye-watering bribe — sorry, repayment of money owed — to Iran of around $1 billion. Then, at the very last minute, the deal was called off.

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