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We should have intervened in Spain

26 July 2006

Granada

The papers have been full of the Suez story. Both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph have zeroed in on Eden’s adventure of 50 years ago to try to draw parallels with Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is another anniversary that so far has gone all but unnoticed. It also has lessons for contemporary history.

Seventy years ago this month (July) a British pilot took off from Croydon airport. On his Dragon Rapide aeroplane were a Spanish newspaper man, an MI6 officer and two pretty young women for cover. They flew via France and Portugal to the Canary Islands. There they picked up a no-nonsense conservative general called Franco. The plane took him back to his soldiers at the Spanish Foreign Legion base in Morocco. From there Franco, who had won the plaudits of the Spanish and European Right by his brutal suppression of a strike by starving miners in the Asturias in 1934, launched the invasion of Spain to overthrow the centre-left government that had just been elected.

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