In 1940, Leo Amery, speaking in the House of Commons, rebuked Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues with the Oliver Cromwell quote, ‘In the name of God, go!’ This was after the fall of France with England on the brink. Those asking for Mubarak to go are on the street, not in parliament, which doesn’t exist in the way we know it.
Mind you, I was in Damascus back in 1970 when a Hearst correspondent, John Harris, burst into my room and announced Nasser’s death from a heart attack. We drove to the airport, got into a prop Electra laid on compliments of the Syrian regime, and landed in Cairo in a jiffy. That’s when Harris put on a Groucho Marx mask and walked up to passport control, where he was waved through. I thought I was seeing things but what I write is the absolute truth.
Harris had been kicked out of Egypt the previous day so had bought in Damascus a mask of his favourite comedian in case he was ordered back there. As the plane was full of hacks, Harris was told in no uncertain terms that what he was doing was childish and counterproductive. In fact, one terrible bore, whose name I simply don’t remember, warned that the bunch of us might be refused entry because of Harris’s prank. ‘That’s how much you know,’ said Harris, once past customs. Nasser was no Mubarak. He was seen as Godlike by a great majority of Egyptians despite the fact that he had lost two wars against Israel. His sudden death brought on paralysis to the extent that even a man wearing a Groucho Marx mask could be waved through.
Harris and I stayed friends but have now lost touch. We covered the Yom Kippur War and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 — in fact, it was Harris who went down to the lobby of the hotel at 6 a.m. in Nicosia and told a couple of sleeping Cypriot soldiers that the brown parachutes floating down were Turkish troops; but no one paid much attention to him until the bang-bang started. But back to Egypt.
What we encountered once in central Cairo was a scene out of Dante. There were millions of people running around like crazy, weeping, beating themselves and exhorting everyone to pray and cry for Nasser. Frankly, I was scared because I hate crowds and had seen a couple of lynchings as a boy during the Greek civil war. Harris, always at the centre of things, was almost killed by some Egyptian who had thrown himself off a roof. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me when I lamented missing the picture of a lifetime. ‘There will be hundreds more.’ And there were. I remember thinking how ridiculous it would look were I to be killed by a flying Egyptian.
A few months before that, working as a photographer for Newsweek’s Arnaud de Borchgrave, who had managed to interview both Golda Meir and Nasser in the same week, I had been arrested by the Cairo fuzz for taking pictures. ‘You Jew,’ said one cop to me once inside the police station. ‘No, I’m not,’ said yours truly. ‘Speak for yourself.’ It was not the smartest of remarks. An officer heard me and punched me in the mouth. I chose not to retaliate as there were about ten of them and they carried canes. But what really pissed me off was my friend Borchgrave’s reaction when I got back to the hotel. ‘You mean you didn’t get a picture?’
When I lived in the Sudan during the late-Fifties I used to visit Egypt every weekend. I was in love with a Levantine lady, played tennis at the Gezira tennis club and gambled at the Mohammed Ali club. Only Egyptian beys and pashas were allowed in, and this was six years after King Farouk’s fall. Life was very sweet and Alexandria still a peach of a city. Now both places are dumps, ruined by overpopulation and great poverty.
As I write, there are some very nervous people near here, in Davos to be exact. They are so-called Arab élites, which in my book means successful thieves and knaves. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states should be tinder boxes but are not. Just look at Qatar. It has only 300,000 natives, the rest are all immigrant labourers. If you call that a country, I’m a giraffe. The Saudis have been known to let young girls burn to death rather than allow them to flee a school fire not dressed properly. If you call that a civilised country I’m the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Saudis and the Gulf states are safe because they pay the people to sit quietly under the palm trees eating their dates.
The conman who rules Kuwait smelled a rat before everyone and pledged 3,000 greenbacks to every citizen. It’s no big deal for him, as the place is full of underpaid foreign workers and some very fat Kuwaiti natives.
The only place I’m worried about is Jordan, a tiny country which the ghastly Likudists in Israel would like to hand over to the Palestinians. The majority of Jordanians are Palestinians, most of whom were dispossessed by those nice guys of Haganah and the Stern Gang back in 1948.
Here’s my fearless prediction writing on Monday, 31 January. Mubarak will resign because of ill health sometime in the future, Gamal Mubarak will end up in Eaton Square, no one will commit suicide after Mubarak croaks, and Netanyahu will demand more billions from Uncle Sam because of the Egyptian situation.
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