A diplomat who could yet be the British Obama
Paul Boateng, our man in South Africa, dismisses comparisons with the American presidential contender. But Tim Walker says he has unfinished business in Westminster
When I raise what Boateng’s opponents always used to see as his soft underbelly — his early days on Ken Livingstone’s GLC and what the Guardian once called the ‘political Planet Zog that was Brent’ — the highly experienced barrister offers a persuasive and well-thought-out defence. ‘People say that I was anti-police when I chaired the GLC’s police committee, but I was never anti-police. The fact is there was a problem then in the relationship between the police and the communities and there were issues around race, sexism and homophobia.
‘What people like me were talking about then was considered controversial, but now it is accepted. What I said about racism in the police force in the 1980s, now — post-Macpherson (the inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence) — seems quite unremarkable. The Women’s Refuge Movement was then also thought of as very radical — the police in those days would not involve themselves in domestic disputes — but now violence that takes place in the home is rightly taken very seriously by the police.’
South Africa will certainly look good on the CV. There was talk of ‘jobs for the boys’ when Tony Blair appointed his Chief Secretary to the Treasury as the High Commissioner to South Africa in 2005 under a special diplomatic Order in Council. Frederick Forsyth bitchily branded it an ‘oh-deary-me appointment’. Others saw it as inspired: the very particular challenges that South Africa faced — and continues to face, not least in respect of Zimbabwe — required a very particular individual to try to sort them out.
Certainly, few politicians in Britain have for so long been as passionate about un-shackling South Africa. Even on the heady night in 1987 that he was returned as the member of parliament for his former north-west London constituency, he declared: ‘We can never be free in Brent until South Africa is free too. Today Brent South. Tomorrow Soweto!’
Over coffee at the opulent Mount Nelson hotel, he is generous enough to concede that others were every bit as committed to the cause at that time and not all of them were on the Labour benches — Alan Beith, Dick Caborn and Lynda Chalker being among them. He remembers, however, that speech very well. ‘I felt that it would have been very easy to have been triumphalist about the state of race relations in our country, but it was necessary to remind ourselves and others that there was unfinished business in another part of the world. I don’t think any of us at that time felt South Africa would come to liberation as rapidly as it did, and certainly I could not have imagined I would one day end up sitting here talking to you now doing the job that I am.’
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JohnC
March 13th, 2008 12:52pmYou amaze me this man ranting and bullying in Westminster and general aggressive manner pushed Blair to get rid of him with the juicy post and finacially lucrative number in South Africa is more akin to me of any "fine upstanding African Dictator" than a Liberal minded Western Democrat.
Max Kaye
March 14th, 2008 6:43pmCan't we send this highly experienced ambassador somewhere else - so long as it's far, far away?
Woody
March 14th, 2008 8:01pmBoateng!What has this man done in Africa but turn out to be just backing Mbeki and other African "leaders" in refusing to tackle the tyrant Mugabe. While Britain pays out millions to feed Zimbabwe's hungry blacks millions of hectares of arable land are deliberately left idle when they could be growing wheat and maize. And all our ambassador can say is" it's and African problem". Talk about the white man's burden!
RogerR
March 16th, 2008 5:12pmAn oleaginous creep. Just the man to take the post Blair once held.