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Africa, wonga and Scratcher: a morality tale for our times
Life, as has all too often been said, is much stranger than fiction. It beggars belief often and it often outdoes fiction writers, which is why they rarely make things up. From Tolstoy to Hanif Kureishi, they write about things and people they know, which is why friends and lovers get so angry.
You don’t need to make things up, least of all about Africa, which has always been so rich in extremes and absurdities. It was not comic genius in Evelyn Waugh to write his great novel Scoop about a bogus revolution in Africa; it was merely close and brilliant observation with only a light touch of the fantasist’s art.
So forget fiction. For sensational holiday reading over the long weekend you need look no further than last week’s newspaper accounts of The Coup That Wasn’t in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Even Waugh would have hesitated to over-egg the pudding of this story quite as much as the most respectable newspapers did, hampered though they are by the laws of libel.
I don’t know which part of this story is most implausible. It is high classical tragedy, it is Monty Python, it is pantomime, pathos and bathos all horribly entangled, with a dazzling cast. We have Simon Mann, an Old Etonian mercenary and former SAS officer who smuggled a message from a filthy Zimbabwean jail demanding a “large splodge of wonga” from Scratcher and Smelly and others to get him out.
Both Smelly and Scratcher (and others) have an awful lot of wonga, as it appears to be called in this cautionary tale, although it is not an African word but a Romany term meaning moolah, dosh or loot. However, Mann did not get out, whatever anybody may have done for him; on Friday he was found guilty in a Zimbabwean court of attempting to buy arms for an alleged coup plot in Equatorial Guinea, an exceptionally wretched country with huge oil reserves.
Scratcher turned out to be Sir Mark Thatcher, wayward son of the legendary Margaret, a man who left Harrow with only a couple of O-levels and who has a title only because his mother asked the Queen not for a peerage for herself, but for a hereditary baronetcy for her husband, thus ensuring the elevation some day of her dearly beloved son to a distinction that she must know he little deserves, unless getting rich mysteriously quick entitles you to a title these days, which perhaps it does.
He is now said to be extremely rich and lives — although currently under house arrest and the threat of extradition — in great luxury in a millionaires’ ghetto in South Africa. Curiously enough — so small is this weird world — none other than the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea is Scratcher’s neighbour in this same ghetto.
Smelly turns out to be Ely Calil, a friend of Scratcher as well as of Mann; he is an extremely rich and reclusive Lebanese entrepreneur and oil trader living in serious splendour in Chelsea, who once had a spot of bother in the massive French Elf oil scandal but emerged without any charges against him. No self-respecting story teller would dare to use the names Scratcher and Smelly. The connotations are too obvious for fiction — Scratcher for you-scratch-my-back and Smelly for stinking rich. Scratch and sniff but don’t scratch too deep.
Serious splodges of wonga would be needed for a coup, obviously; you would need mercenaries and guns and ammo and helicopters and mosquito spray and cash for bribes, presumably, and no doubt all the expensive kit that poor William Boot in Scoop had to buy from the top London tropical outfitters.
Of course, I have no idea whether a coup was really being planned or, if so, who was involved. This is a story bristling with “allegedly” and “reportedly” and assumptions of guilt by association. And the verdict of a Zimbabwean court hardly seems to cast much light on the matter one way or another.
But there is allegedly a “wonga list”, compiled by a young Englishman (now helping the South African police with their inquiries), of rich people prepared to finance the alleged coup in exchange for rich pickings in an Equatorial Guinea under new management.
Smelly and Scratcher have firmly denied any involvement in any such thing. Meanwhile, the perjured peer and ex-con Lord Archer — he of the “fragrant” wife — has cropped up in the story like a minor character from one of his own novels. We also have doughty Carol Thatcher, twin of Sir Mark, distraught about her mother’s anguish and declaring that she doesn’t think much of Africa or of her brother.
Then there are two wicked African rulers, Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Obiang of Equatorial Guinea; it is hard to guess which is worse but it might be Obiang, who is alleged to eat the testicles of his enemies (when dead) to enhance his virility. Medically that would be unwise; he may perhaps be unaware that cannibalism is known to lead to kuru, a nasty disease rather like bovine spongiform encephalitis.
Then we have the playing fields of Eton and of Harrow, we have the oil fields of the equator and we have a supporting cast of fantasists, chancers and wrong ’uns out of Oxford, out of Africa, out of the Middle East, in a web of unedifying complexity. Underlying all this is torture, starvation and kleptocracy, and the white man grabbing greedily and stupidly at Africa yet again. Allegedly.
I keep wondering rather guiltily why I am enjoying the whole thing so much (and I am assuming that most other people share my low tastes). It would be nice to be too high-minded for schadenfreude.
In extreme cases like this, when reality seems so exceptionally sensational and fantastical, the news takes over from religion and from film and fiction in providing morality tales. However jaded we imagine we are, most of us still long for morality tales.
Most people love spy thrillers and gangster movies because they are about good and evil and how to be and how to measure oneself. And there are some simple morals in this complex tale that can make us all feel rather better about our much less exotic, less enterprising lives.
For instance, and in no particular order, it is not only wrong but also stupid to interfere with Africa for any reason; the risks are too horrible. Equally, there is little outsiders can do for Africa, however good their intentions. The only thing that the West could do is to stop providing safe places for kleptocrats to hide their stolen money.
There are not many ways of getting seriously rich that are entirely honourable. The most virtuous of mothers can be putty in the hands of the least virtuous of sons. Women often prefer their less deserving sons to their more deserving daughters. That makes perfect sense in terms of evolutionary biology and such mothers are driven not by their judgment but by their genes.
Being extremely rich seems to make you more, not less, hungry for money. Gated communities are bad for people. Watch out for people who talk in mannered class-driven slang. Greedy and amoral people are often surprisingly brave; courage can be value-free. And moral lessons are much more interesting when demonstrated in the university of life than in the closed academies of fiction.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 29, 2004 | Comments (0)
A family’s grief can teach us nothing about the war
Anyone who has a low opinion of Tony Blair and John Prescott ought to have been absolutely delighted by their embarrassing public denunciation by Rose and Maxine Gentle last week.
Gentle and her daughter are in mourning for Fusilier Gordon Gentle of the Royal Highland Fusiliers, their son and brother, who died when he was only 19 on the day the American coalition handed over sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government. He was blown up by a roadside bomb in Basra after serving only three months in the army.
Mother and daughter went to Downing Street where they were received not by the prime minister, who is busy on his lamentable holiday jaunts, but by our deputy prime minister — he of the white-water rescue that wasn’t — to express their anger at Gordon’s death and their demand that Blair should resign. They made various other angry accusations and in the end walked out on Prescott in contempt.
That seems to me entirely reasonable in itself. The Gentles are and ought to be free to make their feelings known like any other citizen. But when they were interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme on Friday in the prime political slot at 8.10am, demanding that our troops should be pulled out of Iraq, I found that I was angry.
This was a classic example of the contemporary infantilisation of public debate — a deliberate emphasis on personal feelings rather than on rational, dispassionate adult argument, on the assumption that, like infants, we the public are not mature enough to respond beyond personal feeling and can’t be expected to. This is convenient commercially since the infantile corresponds so closely to the sensational, and there are megabucks to be made out of all that sensational emoting.
There is probably little that one can or should do to stop the independent media capitalising on this or splashing such personal, emotional responses, and it would be a bad day for Britain if protests like the Gentles’ were not aired widely.
But for a public service broadcaster and an influential, reputable political programme such as Today to splash such personal emotion across the airwaves as if it amounted to serious debate is another matter. The BBC should not be taking part in this infantilisation of the listener, least of all when exploiting the bereaved at the same time. It should be a bulwark against the trivialisation of public discourse.
The terrible grief of the Gentles and their understandable anger have no bearing on the rights and the wrongs of the invasion of Iraq or the deployment of troops.
Their dreadful personal loss does not give them any special insight into what is going on in Iraq and certainly no insight that they did not have before Gordon died or that families of surviving soldiers in his regiment do not have. They are entitled to their views but you can be absolutely sure that if Gordon had not died, his mother and sister would have been of no public interest whatsoever. As it is, they teach us nothing.
The death of even one soldier is, of course, terrible. Everyone thinks so. But it can make no difference to my view or yours about the current complexities in Iraq or about the invasion.
The BBC should have had nothing to do with the Gentles, especially as it seems that they may have links with anti-war lobbyists, who may perhaps be exploiting them as well.
The Gentles’ Today interview is a glaring example of the infantilisation of debate, but it is only one of many. The massacre at Dunblane produced plenty, for instance. As soon as media sharks had arrived, in their feeding frenzy they began asking the shocked inhabitants — in almost the same breath — both for their feelings and for their views on gun control.
This was our media at their contemporary worst. For obviously enough there is no special reason to suppose that a particular person in the street has any well-considered views at all on gun control, or on anything else, merely because a sensational shooting has just taken place that has probably profoundly disturbed them.
And equally obviously a person who is probably in deep shock is hardly in the best state to give her views at all, well considered or otherwise. It was not only a failure of human kindness to ask them; it was a serious intellectual mistake and one that has been rapidly creeping up on public argument.
In serious argument you cannot generalise from the particular. That used to be an old chestnut of school philosophy lessons: you cannot extrapolate from one instance or from one personal experience, and most particularly not from one unusual experience. That was why in the bad old days women had such a poor reputation for intellectual rigour. It was believed that women argued purely personally, from personal experience.
Whether that was fair to women, the objection was reasonable enough in itself. It is unsound to generalise from your own limited personal experience, for obvious reasons. But these days, I suspect, the reasons may no longer be so obvious, if only because of the dumbing down of general education.
Judging from last week’s reports about A-levels, I wonder whether more than a minority of A-star students would know the meaning of the word “extrapolate”.
With all due respect to my sex, I have long suspected that the dumbing down of the media has also, in part at least, been due to the feminisation of the media, following the increasing power of women generally and of feminists in the media.
Sixties feminists came up with the slogan “the personal is the political”. This was entirely understandable because for so long personal feelings had been too much repressed in western culture, privately, publicly and politically. But with feminism came an extreme overreaction and today the personal is hugely overemphasised.
It has almost reached the point where if you do not have direct personal experience of something, you may be considered unqualified to speak about it, no matter how much expertise you may have. Contrariwise, a person who does have direct personal experience of something, however uninformed, inexpert or unqualified she may be otherwise, will be listened to seriously.
For instance, on the subject of disability I have various views that are far from politically correct and I occasionally speak publicly about them. I might well expect to be silenced or at least hissed. But because I have the standard required personal experience — a close family member has a disability — my views (which have nothing at all to do with her disability) are always tolerated.
Such are the absurd consequences of the touchy-feely approach to argument. But it isn’t funny. It is dangerous because this anti-rational approach has quickly come to dominate public argument.
Curiously enough it is not just a failure of intellectual discipline. By an odd paradox this emphasis on emotion quite often involves a failure of proper emotional discipline, too, as in the response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and, in its different way, the Today programme’s exploitation of the grieving Gentles.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 22, 2004 | Comments (1)
Death isn’t the worst thing in life, and we deserve a choice
Until recently there were only two certainties in life — death and taxes. Taxes were left to the politicians and death was left to providence or to fate. Now there is only one certainty, because death has become ambiguous, and besides we no longer leave it to providence.
Science and technology have made it easier to monitor — but much more difficult to understand or decide about — the process of dying, or even exactly what we define as the moment of death. Precisely because we know so much more, it has become more and more difficult to agree on when life has ended.
Equally, ideas have changed about when precisely life starts. There are those who are troubled by stem cell research at the microscopic beginning of life. Questions of life and death are no longer left entirely to deities or to experts; they are questions we now all ask, and more and more, people expect the right to decide the answers for themselves.
Many people will remember the very sad case of Diane Pretty in 2002, a terminally sick woman facing a very unpleasant death who longed for the right to be helped to die. She fought extremely bravely through the courts, ill though she was, and in the end she lost – both the legal battle and her life; she died as she had so much feared.
There were many people at the time, including me, who felt she should have been able to choose the moment of her death, probably through an overdose of anaesthetics, under very controlled circumstances, but necessarily with the assistance of a doctor or nurse. The law said no.
The law was wrong; the wishes of the individual should come first, particularly in a case like hers where all reasonable counter-arguments could be met. Besides, what she wanted is more or less what has happened up to now anyway, in many, many cases, but informally and therefore not as a legal right.
I can’t count the number of friends who have told me with great gratitude that their elderly mothers and fathers were gently eased out of life, and out of the great pain and distress of a terminal illness, by a good doctor who genuinely wanted the best for the patient and listened carefully to all concerned.
Upping the painkillers to lethal levels is in effect mercy killing, and if done with all due respect, it is truly merciful. Diane Pretty was wronged.
However, these things are never simple. There are hard cases the other way too, like the case in the High Court last week of Leslie Burke, a postman from Lancaster who is terminally ill with a degenerative disease.
His fear has been that at some point in the course of his disease, after he has become unable to move or speak, doctors will withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH), without which he would die.
Mr Burke does not wish medical people to decide upon the hour of his death; he doesn’t want ANH to be withdrawn at all.
On Friday he won his battle; the High Court ruling on his case has now made it significantly more difficult for doctors to withdraw life-sustaining treatment from seriously ill patients.
Until Friday, doctors had discretionary powers to withdraw such treatment, depending on their judgment about a patient’s quality of life. But naturally enough it is possible that a patient who could not speak or move might have a different view from the doctor’s about his quality of life.
As the old joke has it: “Who on earth would want to live to 103?” And the answer is “Anyone of 102”.
It must be quite terrifying to imagine that when you become unable to communicate, but are possibly still conscious or wishing to live, or are simply determined to leave your departure from life in the hands of God, somebody can take away your life-support system.
Now, as a result of the Leslie Burke ruling, this will be very much less likely. Guidance to doctors from the General Medical Council will have to be redrafted. Where a patient has made no living will, doctors will be able to withdraw life-sustaining treatment only according to a much more rigorous standard of whether the patient’s life has become “intolerable”.
And if there remains any doubt, the judgment adds, the question should be resolved “in favour of the preservation of life”. Naturally enough, Mr Burke is very pleased with Friday’s decision, and it is very easy to understand why, and to sympathise with him.
All the same, I do not think this is a ruling that will do anything for the freedom of the individual to decide for himself the hour of his death, when what he wants is to die.
The “intolerability” of the judgment is as long as the proverbial piece of string, just like “quality of life” — so no progress there in either direction. The problem is that, where there is any doubt among doctors and nurses about whether treatment should be withheld or withdrawn, the question should be “resolved in favour of the preservation of life”.
What’s more, the judgment adds that where there is no consensus among professionals, or relatives and carers, any decision must be authorised by the courts.
It seems to me that while it is good to return power to the patient in such cases, it is a mistake to reduce the power of families and to add to the power of the courts.
No case is like another, and there are already plenty of safeguards against high-handed and unthinking practice. What this really means is bad news for people who wish to be helped to die when the time that is really appropriate — when life becomes intolerable — comes.
Already they have been denied the reasonable legal right to do so, as Diane Pretty’s case so painfully demonstrated. Now it will be much harder for doctors to help them unofficially (extra-legally or scarcely legally or maybe illegally) — something I myself have been counting on if need be, for myself and for people close to me.
I understand the fears of the disability lobby, about a hidden wish to get rid of people. It is true that some seriously ill people are seen pretty much as bed-blockers, and that must be resisted.
However, death is not the worst thing in life. And those who choose death should not be prevented from doing so by the anxieties or the squeamishness of those who feel differently.
I say squeamishness because I think there is a semi-conscious, rather censorious distaste for those who do not value life at almost any price (I mean their own lives or their unborn babies’ lives).
Perhaps in this country it is one of the last remnants of Christian teaching. But there are other traditions, such as stoicism, that are no less moral than Christianity, no less scrupulous, but which take a different view of life and death.
We know not the day and we know not the hour, but if there are any decisions to be made about death, we certainly do know who should make them.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 01, 2004 | Comments (1)
