The Spectator’s Notes | 30 September 2006

Juba, Southern Sudan

A columnist in the English-language Khartoum Monitor has it right. Under the headline ‘Blair; prove to us this is yogurt, not hot soup’, Mohamed Osman Adam reflects on the Egyptian saying that ‘he who has been burned by a hot soup, will blow at a bowl of yogurt’. His argument is about why the Khartoum government does not want UN intervention in Darfur, even if encouraged by Tony Blair’s suggestion of ‘incentives’, but I feel it applies to the Labour party’s attitude to Mr Blair back home. The columnist speculates that Mr Blair ‘could infiltrate the hearts and minds in Khartoum, by proving that this is yogurt. Amen.’ But, for all Tuesday’s tears, that infiltration is even harder work in Manchester. It is interesting how a Prime Minister’s support hollows out, rather than eats away from the edge. In her last years in office, Mrs Thatcher was an almost mythically popular figure in many parts of the world, yet was imploding in Britain. The speaker of southern Sudan’s assembly told me how marvellous it would be if Mr Blair were to visit them to push forward progress on implementing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with the north; I’m sure the Labour party would happily spare him.

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As is often the case in Africa if you are British, it does not take long to hear that it is all your fault. On the day in 1956 when the flag of the Anglo–Egyptian condominium of the Sudan (the Sudan was never technically a British colony) came down, a southern district commissioner refused to run up the new flag, saying the new country represented ‘sunrise for the north, sunset for the south’. He was duly dismissed from his post.