What made Jack Straw tell the truth about the botched coup in Equatorial Guinea?

Jack Straw, though by no means a distinguished foreign secretary, nevertheless possesses animal cunning. He is an acknowledged master of dissimulation, contrivance, machination, manoeuvre, evasion, guile, trickery, craft, diversion, disguise, distortion, persiflage, falsehood, deception, sophistry, stealth, artifice, sharp practice, underhand dealing, sleight of hand, subterfuge, prevarication and every other stratagem of concealment and deceit. Occasionally, however, the Foreign Secretary is capable of candour. This was the case with his parliamentary answer to Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary, two weeks ago.

Ancram wearily asked Jack Straw when the British government first knew of the botched coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea last March. A characteristically long space of time elapsed before the question was answered. But the answer itself was to the point. ‘In late January 2004,’ replied Straw.

This answer is pregnant with significance, and casts the failed coup — led by the mercenary Simon Mann with alleged backing from (among others) Sir Mark Thatcher — in an entirely fresh light. For up to that point Jack Straw had gone to astonishing lengths to maintain the pretence that the coup attempt came as a complete surprise in Whitehall. Three months after the coup the Observer newspaper, long famed for its well-informed African coverage, received a tip that HMG knew of the plot well in advance. The story was put through official channels to the Foreign Secretary — who issued a categorical denial. This denial was not one of those artful rebuttals in which Jack Straw is an established expert. Not content with merely telling a reporter that the story was untrue, the head of the Foreign Office news department took the unusual step of ringing Roger Alton, editor of the Observer. He issued an assurance that Britain had no ‘prior knowledge of the alleged plot’.