Blood relatives

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy.

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy.

It is unusual, as Benazir’s niece Fatima points out in Songs of Blood and Sword, for a Bhutto to die a natural death. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father and Fatima’s grandfather, had been at Christ Church (Benazir was at LMH and Catz), and had recently been denied an honorary doctorate, having supposedly burnt down a university. As Prime Minister of Pakistan he was besieged by enemies, and that July he would be arrested on a murder charge by the Terry-Thomas lookalike, General Zia. Benazir was at Oxford not to imbibe culture but to make politics: to wave the flag and bang the drum, to plot revenge, and to become — as her father had not — President of the Union.

As a political nursery, the Union’s advantage over the student union is not so much the obvious one — that it is a toy parliament with access to actual prime ministers and presidents — but that its elections dispense with such fripperies as party and policy to focus on the real business of politics: the management of personal alliances and rivalries by means of flattery, deceit and betrayal, not to mention bribery, threat and blackmail.