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On red alert

Aiden Hartley

Wednesday, 18th June 2008

Aidan Hartley on the Wild Life

While trying to track down the warlords in Leicester the other day, one of the leader’s family members started threatening a Somali colleague accompanying me. They also snapped a photo of him on a mobile phone. We later discovered his picture was being circulated among the warlord’s tribesmen in Britain. I got my first death threat from a Somali warlord 15 years ago in a rubble-filled Mogadishu street resounding with gunfire. Now you can be menaced by Somalis using phone cameras in Leicester. That is globalisation for you.

These latest threats come in the same week as the unveiling in London of a sculpture in tribute to journalists killed in the line of duty. The monument is a ten-metre glass-and-steel cone that sits above the BBC’s Broadcasting House and will be illuminated every evening at 2200 GMT. The United Nations chief Ban-Ki Moon, who led the opening ceremony, said the sculpture was also dedicated to surviving journalists who risk their lives ‘to report what they uncover in the face of deadly threats’. I have to say the existence of a glass ‘shaft of light’ over the BBC does not really make me feel any better about being ‘got rid of’.

I cheered up slightly when I noticed that the ‘glass cone’ more closely resembles a stack of tumblers waiting for a big round of vodkas. And in light of this the sculpture’s title, ‘Breathing’, has an unintended significance for me. I am reminded of the seriously alcoholic breathing of many a correspondent friend, notably Brian Tetley — who died with Mohamed Amin in an Ethiopian Airlines hijack in 1996 and was later buried alongside several bottles of his beloved Tusker beer.

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David Short

June 20th, 2008 6:03am

I see the Spectator has got my friend Aidan's name spelled wrongly again!

How can you guys spell it as 'Aiden' on one line and then 'Aidan' a mere centimetre below on the same screen?

Get a grip.

M Golf

June 20th, 2008 7:17am

Let another thing be known about what Britain is doing in Africa:
Those white Africans, British descendents who still live in Kenya, and who until recently used to be able to get a stamp on their Kenyan passports proving their right of abode in the UK are now denied it. They need a visa to enter Britain and this is now in the hand of an agent, not the High Commission. If the visa is denied, as it is happening, they cannot go back. There, British citizens not allowed in Britain for being white, and Somali warlords welcome. Thank the Left for it which has ran the FCO for the past decade.