Wild life | 4 April 2019

East Africa

  The late Michael Meacher represented almost everything I loathe in a politician. Before his death in 2015, this veteran Labour MP was Jeremy Corbyn’s ardent fan. He had served under Wilson and Callaghan and he was so left-wing he earned the nickname Tony Benn’s ‘vicar on earth’. Yet when I compare Michael to most MPs in the Commons today — disgusting cowardly weathercocks — I remember with admiration that effete, parchment-white Englishman I saw standing about at Mogadishu’s wrecked airfield 27 years ago. Somalia had collapsed into anarchy. Dried blood and bone fragments were smeared across the airport terminal and militia battlewagons were zooming around the runway. I was a Reuters correspondent covering the civil war with Dan Eldon, the young photographer killed during fighting in Mogadishu a year later, and we took pity on this strange fellow who had nobody to collect him. I had no clue who Michael was, but he introduced himself as a British Labour MP. I later discovered he was the shadow secretary of state for foreign affairs. He was entirely alone and carried a rucksack but no food or water. He said he had come to see for himself what was going on in Somalia. Dan and I thought he was very foolish but he would have been kidnapped or murdered if left to fend for himself, so we bundled him into our vehicle and set off for the inland town of Baidoa. On the road we hurtled past wrecked villages and smashed wagons crowded with sun-dried corpses. Armed youths stoned out of their brains stopped us at roadblocks demanding cash. Four hours inland across the sparse, beautiful Somali acacia bushlands, we started seeing herds of walking skeletons. There were groups of figures crouching in the shade, brown rags, long teeth, sunken eyes, emaciated children along the roadsides.