My favourite document in the cache released by the Cabinet Office this week is the one that starts ‘Dear Muammar’ and ends ‘yours sincerely, Gordon Brown’.
My favourite document in the cache released by the Cabinet Office this week is the one that starts ‘Dear Muammar’ and ends ‘yours sincerely, Gordon Brown’. Have you seen it? In the first sentence, our former prime minister reminds the Libyan despot that they recently met at a G8 summit. Pretty bleak, that. It is as though Brown felt close enough to the freakout dayglo bampot of the Middle East to address him by his first name, but not so close that he was confident Gaddafi would actually remember who he was.
This is the note in which Brown tells Gaddafi that Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, is about to be released on compassionate grounds, but that it would be nice if he, Gaddafi, didn’t make a fuss about it. This is like telling your mugger that he can have your mobile phone, but asking him not to wave it around in the street thereafter, because it might make you look a bit foolish.
I’ve been wondering — is this the most undignified missive ever sent by a serving British leader to anybody? I ask in a spirit of genuine inquiry. I’ve always regretted not studying history at university; if I had done maybe I’d know about the letter Neville Chamberlain sent to Adolf Hitler, which began, ‘Maybe you remember me from the Stalins’ fondue party. I was the tall bloke in the silly shirt.’ Or the one from Harold to William the Conqueror which said, ‘God knows the country is crying out for Norman conquest, Will old mate, but the one thing I ask is that you don’t shoot an arrow into my eye.’
In all honesty, I’m sort of overawed by the Al Megrahi thing. I’d like to be shocked, but I’m finding it really confusing that nobody else is. The Tories shut up about the whole affair after half a day. Only one newspaper even bothered putting it on the front page. I don’t get it. You’ve got a concerted campaign here, by half a government, to spread misinformation and untruth. Doesn’t that matter a bit?
Consider Ed Balls in 2009, just after Al Megrahi was released. ‘None of us wanted to see the release of Al Megrahi,’ he said. The exact opposite of the truth. I mean, sure, maybe they didn’t want to want what they ended up having to want. But he didn’t say that, at all. He missed out two whole wants.
Or consider David Miliband, asked whether Al Megrahi had been released to facilitate UK-Libyan relations. ‘I really reject that entirely,’ he thundered. ‘That is a slur on both myself and the government.’ That one is actually quite clever, because it’s not even technically lying. Because this is just what they tried to do, right? Not what they actually did. I mean, imagine you tried to steal a pie, and failed, and then some Scottish bloke stole it for you, and handed it over. Then, imagine you went on Newsnight, and Jeremy Paxman had said ‘did you steal that pie?’ How much outrage could you genuinely muster at the suggestion? As much as David Miliband?
Jack Straw did similar. ‘Was there a covert, secret deal struck with the Libyans to release Megrahi in return for oil?’ he asked. ‘No, there was not.’ Again, it’s one of those statements which is both true and entirely misleading. ‘Give us a pie and we’ll give you a biscuit,’ say the Libyans. And they get their pie, and you get your biscuit, but because you aren’t the one who actually provided the pie (because you couldn’t; because you devolved responsibility for pies to Scotland) nobody can call this a ‘pie deal’. Even though it totally was one.
Or Gordon Brown himself. ‘There was no conspiracy, no cover-up, no double-dealing, no deal on oil, no attempt to instruct Scottish ministers, and no private assurances by me to Colonel Gaddafi,’ he said. Fed into the Over-Extended Rifkind Pie Analogy Generator™, I think that one gives us him spluttering ‘There were no pies, no pies, no pies, no pies, no pies and no pies,’ over a mouthful of pie.
The point is, anyway, they were all full of it. (Not pie. Enough pie.) But nobody seems to care. Half the last government caught out in a campaign of brazen deception, and the British political and media consensus just seems to be, ‘Yeah? And?’ So, like I said, I can’t help but feel I’m missing something. But what?
What about Top Gear and the Mexicans, then? Richard Hammond, the driving show presenter who looks like Jeremy Clarkson played by a hobbit (as opposed to the other one, James May, who looks like Clarkson played by an ent) is in trouble for his mockery of a Mexican sports car. It would, he said, be ‘lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus’. This led to a discussion of Mexican food (‘sick with cheese on it’, said May) and the Mexican ambassador, who Clarkson said was probably asleep.
In fact, he was watching. The Mexicans are now furious as, inexplicably, is Steve Coogan (he wrote a column about this in the Observer, nobody knows why). It’s hard to know whether they have a point. Normally, sure, when people are rude about Mexicans, they are indeed being unforgivably bigoted and xenophobic. But that’s because they’re normally in America, where you actually get Mexicans. Here, it’s like the Chinese being faintly amused by Yorkshiremen. It’s like Inuits dissing the Dutch.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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