The Spectator’s Notes | 9 July 2005

What a scramble for Africa. A full-page advertisement in Monday’s Guardian, rather cautiously worded, said that its signatories ‘supported the overall aims’ of those lobbying the G8 leaders and recognised ‘the complexities of the challenge in hand, but commit ourselves to asking our leaders to make positive and practical steps forward to help lift millions out of extreme poverty’. They were leading business people, and their names were splashed across the map of Africa, in varying sizes. Thus the important words ‘Niall FitzGerald KBE’ were so large that they stretched almost from coast to coast, cutting through what look to me like Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. Two names higher up, ‘Sly Bailey’ filled the whole of Zaire, while ‘Sir Richard Branson’, I am glad to say, was stuck in the Sahara, and ‘Peter Bazalgette’, whose contribution to civilisation is Big Brother, clung precariously to the Egyptian coast. It looked strangely old-fashioned, as if these potentates were staking their claim to great swaths of the Dark Continent. In this surreal week, when millions seem to believe that Western political leaders can transform the future of an area several times larger than the European Union if only we shout at them loudly enough, I found myself asking what it would be like if it were the other way round. Suppose lots of black pop stars held a concert in, say, Johannesburg (currently squatted on, in my Guardian map, by Philip Green), and told the leaders of the African Union to save Europe, what would we think? We might be rather touched by their concern, but we would not give much for their chances of success. Yes, comes the answer, but we are rich and they are poor; we have the power and they don’t. True, but does that give us confidence, when you look at the history of our engagement with Africa, that we know what to do next?

In July 1965, when Alec Douglas-Home resigned as Conservative leader, it took six days to elect his replacement, Edward Heath.