It remains a risky thing to say, but is it possible that, in Libya, the West may be about to have a foreign policy success on its hands? Criticism of the Nato bombings has been based on the idea that the allies had no real knowledge of what they were doing.
It remains a risky thing to say, but is it possible that, in Libya, the West may be about to have a foreign policy success on its hands? Criticism of the Nato bombings has been based on the idea that the allies had no real knowledge of what they were doing. This is not true. The targeting seems to have been accurate, and so does the intelligence about the state of the Gaddafi regime. Defectors tell us useful things. No Arab nation tries to save the dictator. He is desperately trying to buy his way out. If this all ends as it should, I hope some critical attention will be devoted to the behaviour of the ANC in South Africa, not only under Jacob Zuma, but back to the Mandela era. Gaddafi, killer of many black Africans in Chad, has consistently been lionised and protected by the ANC. One wants to know why.
I recently met a man who had flown to Tripoli in very different circumstances. In the 1960s, he told me, he gave PR advice to Hugh Hefner of Playboy. Under good King Idris, Libya was a burgeoning market for the magazine, so off they all flew in the famed black Playboy Jet with a bunny on the tail, attended by Jet Bunnies, and accompanied by the revolving bed. They were tumultuously received. When the time came to depart, air traffic control refused the jet permission. The controllers had heard that the latest Playmate of the Month was on board, and would not let the Hefner party go until she had signed their copy of the magazine’s centre-spread. She did so with gusto, inscribing her name across the picture of her own bottom, and the plane was allowed to take off. I’d previously managed to get through more than half a century of life without any warm feelings towards Mr Hefner and his empire, but when I heard this tale, and thought of the dreadful things that have happened in Libya since, I caught myself thinking of Bunny Girls as proud ambassadors for our civilisation.
All parties agree with David Cameron’s recent announcement that the Military Covenant will become law. But is it really such a brilliant idea? Any decent person would want servicemen to be properly looked after, but one should not have to legislate for proper behaviour. Nor should parliament provide even more opportunity for litigation. I am suspicious about the ever-increasing sentimentality towards the armed forces. Every soldier, sailor and airman is now described as a ‘hero’, every refusal by government to grant some of their financial demands is described as a ‘betrayal’. The suggestion that veterans should get priority treatment on the NHS, or that service families should jump the queue for council houses, may sound patriotic, but is really a more right-wing version of John Prescott’s rotten idea that ‘key workers’ (invariably state employees) should be given all sorts of privileges denied to the rest of us. As we are already seeing with the Joanna Lumley-inspired granting of residence rights to the Gurkhas, such privileges turn good people into welfare drones and eventually remove the reason why we admire them. The Military Covenant is an expression of a guilty conscience about the armed services. Instead of devising the right strategy for them, we emote about how much we love them.
Last week, I attended the funeral of a woman unknown to fame because she lived all her life in one village, and all the 70 years since she married on one farm. But Certhia Harden was famous to members of our hunt because she came out with us mounted for 75 seasons. By the time I resumed hunting with our pack in 1997, Certhia was already 80, but was out every day, tiny, bowler-hatted — always on horses which she had bred herself in direct line from her first — but no longer jumping. She conformed perfectly to Trollope’s description of ‘The Man Who Hunts But Never Jumps’: ‘His knowledge of the country is correct to a marvel. While the man who rides straight is altogether ignorant of his whereabouts … the man who rides and never jumps always knows where he is with the utmost accuracy.’ If you jumped, and placed yourself proudly at what you thought was the front, you would find, at the end of it all, that Certhia was there before you.
The best thing in Certhia’s funeral, though, did not concern hunting. It was an extract from the diary of her father, Collingwood Ingram, about his first sight of his daughter. He was serving with the RFC in France in January 1917 when he received a wire with the news of her premature birth. He found a chance to fly back, with a colleague, to see her. The night before, he kept waking to check that ‘the moon was still shining and the heavens clear’. They left St Omer: ‘The world below us appeared to slip slowly backwards, while the upper air — as cold and crisp as though it blew from some snowy peak — roared with a noisy rush in our ears.’ They flew over Calais, and then, after passing through cloud, ‘we found ourselves over a rippled green sea, which seemed to curl upwards towards an invisible horizon.’ Soon he could make out ‘the funnels of the steamers that crept under the South Foreland’ and the ‘old, familiar golf-courses’ of St George’s, Deal and Ebbsfleet. Then they ‘finally spiralled down’ and landed on Manston Aerodrome. ‘Half an hour later I walked into Flo’s room and was introduced to a very minute infant.’ There was something touching about this wartime Winterreise by the then newest form of transport, read almost a century later. Ingram, by the way, was a great ornithologist. He called the minute infant Certhia, because it is the Latin for a tree creeper.
Much rejoicing in my birthplace, Hastings, at last month’s news of a vast grant from the National Lottery Fund to restore the pier. Apparently, an important factor in the decision was the welcome given to the Fund’s commissioners when they arrived in the town. As they got off the train, the tannoy broadcast their arrival. I pass this on as a useful tip for other grant-seekers.
Comments