On one occasion, I went on a day trip to Delhi, arriving in the morning on the Lonrho jet and interviewing two people before flying back to London on a scheduled British Airways flight in the evening. One was the Prime Minister, Narisimao Rao (who later went to jail); the other the same Swami before whom Tiny had prostrated himself, a man who counted Richard Nixon, the Sultan of Brunei and Elizabeth Taylor among his disciples. I interviewed him while he was working out his gigantic frame on an exercise bike. The Swami also ended up in jail.
• • •
Rowland’s main value to The Observer – apart from his company’s financial support, especially in funding a properly staffed business section and investing in the conversion to new technology – was securing interviews for the paper with people who were otherwise hard to pin down. He arranged for me to see Colonel Gaddafi twice, as recorded elsewhere, to visit Iran and to meet a number of global celebrities.
Tiny had some hold over Adnan Khashoggi, the famous Saudi arms trader, and used to impound his private plane at Gatwick airport from time to time. He would then arrange for Khashoggi to help The Observer with some interview or information for a story in return for releasing his plane.
On one occasion, Tiny asked me to fly on Concorde to meet Khashoggi at his apartment in New York, just off Fifth Avenue, close to St Patrick’s Cathedral. The apartment, which was so high it was surrounded by clouds while I was there, was crammed with Old Masters, or what looked like Old Masters to my untutored eye. When we went out to dinner with some of his friends, we were required to tell a dirty joke. I funked it because I can never remember any. But one of the women – a sultry, dark-haired Iranian beauty nursing a tiny dog – told a story that was positively cloacal.
Later, one of the guests called on me at my office in London and gave The Observer a scoop about the collapse of a major Arab bank. I asked him about the mystery woman at Khashoggi’s party in Manhattan. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ he replied. ‘Khashoggi has just married her.’ I can only assume he must have enjoyed her sense of humour.
The point of my New York trip had been to fly in Khashoggi’s plane from New York to Dallas, where he was attending a party given by Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress. I wasn’t invited to the gathering myself, but he said I could interview Imelda Marcos, who was one of the guests, on the way there.
The widow of the Philippines dictator was much bigger than I expected. When she saw me glancing at her feet, she burst out: ‘I know I had a lot of shoes, but they were all given to me by the makers. Most of them were too small for me anyway.’ When I asked if she was seeking political power, as the papers were suggesting, she replied rather girlishly: ‘Mr Donald, I do not seek power. I seek love.’ If the Observer photographer hadn’t been sitting next to me, and grinning, I might have been more nervous.
Once, Tiny took me to meet Khashoggi at the Hyde Park Hotel, where he was getting ready for a party that night in Beirut. He was in a dressing gown and sitting in front of a mirror, surrounded by a hairdresser and a make-up team. Tiny stood talking to him in the doorway while I waited next door. Then Tiny silently summoned me to peep into the next room. The tired old man I had met earlier had been miraculously transformed into a handsome playboy of the Eastern world.
Tiny also once took me to Mexico on the Lonrho private jet. No interview had been set up, so I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the visit was. We settled for the overnight flight on comfortable beds on either side of the aisle. In the morning, I felt his hand on my shoulder to wake me up.
‘Do you know what day it is today?’ he demanded.
‘No, Tiny, what day is it?’
‘It’s my birthday. I’m sixty-six today. And do you know what that means?’
‘No, Tiny, what does it mean?’
‘It means I don’t give a damn any more, about anything.’
Thinking this was just routine banter, I countered: ‘Well, Tiny, I’m forty-six and I don’t give a damn either.’
At this he gave me a hard look and seized my arm tightly. ‘But you do. You do care about things. And that’s why I’m bound to beat you in the end.’
This was all happening at 50,000 feet and I felt like James Bond facing Goldfinger or Scaramanga, fearing that I might be hurled out of the plane at any moment into Mexico’s golden dawn.
I never knew where that moment of malice came from. Friends suggested that it was because Tiny could never get used to the idea that there was someone on his payroll over whom he had no control, who could oppose him or disobey him, and he couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
The rest of the trip was perfectly friendly. In Acapulco, I stayed in amazing luxury in the Lonrho-owned Princess Hotel while he and Josie stayed at their house. On the terrace, there was a telescope trained on another house. Josie said it was the first one they had bought in Acapulco. For the sake of something to say, I asked: ‘When did you sell it?’
That brought on one of Tiny’s tirades.
‘Sell it? Sell it?! Why would I sell it? I don’t need the money. I never sell anything. I still have the first Rolls-Royce I bought in 1954, and all the others since. I still have all my Mercedes. I never sell anything.’
‘Would you ever sell The Observer?’ I asked mischievously.
‘Never,’ he replied firmly, then added with a glint: ‘As long as you behave yourself.’
I went along when Tiny had a meeting with his local managers in Mexico. At one point, when they were discussing how to approach a particular problem, I made a modest suggestion. Tiny turned to me and said sharply: ‘I’m not allowed to interfere in The Observer, so you keep your nose out of Lonrho’s business.’ Fair enough, I thought.
• • •
D. K. Ludwig, the man who had brought Rowland and Anderson together, fascinated Tiny. He told me of an occasion when he had been in New York and rang to see if Ludwig was free for dinner. Ludwig said he was entertaining a young man at the 21 Club who wanted him to invest in a project. ‘Why don’t you come along too, Tiny, and tell me what you think of his idea?’
When the young man left the table to take a telephone call, Ludwig asked: ‘What do you think?’ Tiny said he was very impressed and would be happy to take a share in the project himself. ‘Wait,’ said Ludwig sternly, ‘just wait. We haven’t finished yet.’ When the young man returned, the pudding trolley came round and he ordered two of the desserts. Soon after that he left, Ludwig having declined to commit himself to the project. He thumped the table and said: ‘Did you see that, Tiny? Two puddings. No discipline. No deal.’
I remembered that story towards the end of a dinner at the Berkeley Hotel, Tiny’s favourite. It was attended by most of the Lonrho board, known to me by then (though out of their hearing) as the Crazy Gang, plus The Observer’s two managing directors and myself. When the table was asked about a pudding, Tiny firmly refused. Roger Harrison said: ‘Thank you, Tiny, that looks delicious.’ Brian Nicholson said: ‘Sorry, Tiny, I’m trying to lose some weight.’ Then, to a man, the Lonrho directors all declined dessert. I assumed they had all heard the Ludwig story, probably more than once. I was last to be asked and, despite Roger’s imploring look, I also declined, leaving him struggling to finish his plate in lone embarrassment.
• • •
In 1983, I asked my eldest daughter, Sally, what she wanted for her eighteenth birthday. She said she would like to see where she was born. She had left Malawi soon after her first birthday. We flew first to Harare, where we were greeted at the airport, much to my surprise, by Godwin Matatu, an African journalist from Zimbabwe, who was acting on this occasion as Tiny’s messenger. He said Tiny had made a Lonrho plane available to us for the onward flight to Malawi and that he would escort us to ensure that the arrangements all went smoothly, which they did. Matatu, an intelligent and witty companion when he was sober, had a reputation as a bit of a surly drunk. On this occasion he behaved, but he was later to bring me a whole heap of trouble.
Sally and I made a radio broadcast for the B
BC after her trip, using tape recordings we had made in African villages. When we went to Broadcasting House in London to record the programme, I told Sally not to worry if she made any gaffes; the BBC studio technicians would be very understanding. I added reassuringly that I had made dozens of these recordings myself. In the event Sally made no gaffes at all, but her smug father made plenty.
• • •
At one of Tiny’s Sunday lunches at Hedsor, the chief guest was Joshua Nkomo. One couldn’t help noticing that he had grown so fat that he needed two chairs to sit on at lunch, one for each buttock. There was clearly a great deal of affection between the two men. Tiny had backed Nkomo and his ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) party for many years, when they looked certain to form the first government in an independent Zimbabwe. The fifteen-year civil war to oust Ian Smith’s rebel regime had resulted, however, in a power shift in Zimbabwe’s African politics. The Shona tribe, led by Robert Mugabe, had played a prominent part in the terror campaign and they had more voters than the Ndebele people, who were mostly located around Bulawayo in Matabeleland.
So, Mugabe had won the first election after independence and Nkomo had failed to come to terms with the country’s new leader. There had been sporadic rioting in Matabeleland, which had been put down ruthlessly. Mugabe lashed out at Nkomo at a rally, declaring: ‘ZAPU and its leader, Dr Joshua Nkomo, are like a cobra in a house. The only way to deal effectively with a snake is to strike and destroy its head.’
I once asked Tiny why he hadn’t backed both horses in Zimbabwe, which had been his practice elsewhere. He said he had. He had paid £40,000 to Mugabe’s man in London some years before, but he later discovered that the man had used the money to buy a house in Hampstead and it had never reached Zimbabwe.
• • •
Lonrho’s position now was hazardous. Its huge investment in Zimbabwe was at risk. Mugabe saw Rowland’s hand everywhere and suspected him of being behind the troubles that had broken out in Matabeleland. What Tiny desperately needed was access to Mugabe, just as he had access to African leaders elsewhere. But the door was firmly closed on Lonrho, not just by Mugabe but by his senior ministers as well. Tiny was in urgent need of a friend at the court of King Robert.
He was finally saved by Godwin Matatu, last seen helping my daughter and me in Malawi. His uncle was Edson Zvobgo, Justice Minister in Mugabe’s government. Although he too was wary of Rowland, his attitude changed when his wife Julie, a nurse, began to work for a Lonrho company.
Although he was an intelligent and witty talker, a law graduate from Chicago University and a published poet, Zvobgo still came across as a bit of a thug. But he was willing to be Rowland’s thug – at a price. The price included a loan to buy a farm, financial help with some hotels he owned in Zimbabwe – and a promise to find some work for Matatu on The Observer.
Zvobgo was invited to London by Lonrho and Tiny asked me to lay on a lunch at The Observer. The aim was to show Zvobgo that he could have some influence with the British press by talking to the editors at one of its leading newspapers. Zvobgo then seemed to think he could have lunch at The Observer on all his visits to London. I didn’t mind this too much, since he was entertaining company and gave us some useful information about African countries, including his own.
Before one of these lunches, Pat Ferguson, from the foreign desk, showed me an article about Zvobgo becoming involved in a road rage incident in Harare. A white woman driver who had failed to give way to his Mercedes had been struck by Zvobgo’s bodyguard. At the lunch, the minister made great play about the progress for women’s rights in Zimbabwe. Ferguson and I could barely suppress our laughter.
The Zimbabwe minister was not so welcome when he turned up in my office at The Observer on a Saturday morning demanding £500, which he said Tiny Rowland had authorised, Lonrho’s Cheapside office being closed for the weekend. I was cross about the interruption because I was busy getting the paper out. I rang Terry Robinson at home and asked him what I should do. ‘Pay him,’ he said immediately.
At this I blew up, saying: ‘Terry, it’s not my job to pay Lonrho bribes to corrupt African politicians. You should do your dirty work yourself.’ Terry said it wasn’t a bribe; the minister was simply short of cash in London, and the loan would be repaid. He arranged for The Observer’s accounts department, which worked on Saturdays to pay the printers, to supply the money.
Wherever Zvobgo went, Matatu went too, always drinking more than he ate. He had disgraced himself at Tiny’s home by turning up late and drunk for dinner, rejecting the food on offer, eating an apple and slugging more wine. He started hanging around my office, and the ways I used to avoid talking to him became an office joke. There was a jauntiness about him that made me suspect that something was going on that I wouldn’t like. I was right.
By this time Colin Legum had retired as Commonwealth correspondent, mainly to avoid a fight with Rowland. He wrote a long farewell article for the London Review of Books in which he expressed his fears for The Observer under Lonrho’s ownership. But he included a generous reference to me, saying The Observer’s only chance of keeping its integrity was if I remained editor.
Thinking about his successor, I had a brainwave, appointing Richard Hall, who had lived in Africa for many years, was a close friend of President Kaunda of Zambia, and had been the lone Observer voice supporting Tiny Rowland’s ownership. I assumed Lonrho would be grateful to him for the evidence he gave to the MMC, saying Rowland had never interfered with the editorial content of his paper in Zambia when they owned it. I thought he could build on the good relationship he had with Rowland and would be able to deflect him from a particular story if he didn’t think it right for the paper, without causing a row or lasting offence.
On reflection, I think Hall’s evidence was probably crucial in tipping the MMC’s decision Lonrho’s way. Although Astor, O’Brien and myself had given severe warnings about the conflicts of interest that would arise over Africa, our objections were hypothetical fears about a possible future, whereas Dick was providing direct evidence from a real past.
My appointment of Dick Hall as Commonwealth correspondent of The Observer may have seemed like a brainwave, but it turned out to be a disaster. He had been so irritated by jibes from Observer colleagues that he was Tiny’s stooge that he set out to distance himself from Lonrho and refused to talk to them about Africa or anything else. In a curious volte face, the lone voice supporting Lonrho had become the champion of those who opposed the slightest interference from Lonrho, whether real or imagined.
But then Dick Hall had always been an excitable, volatile figure who liked to be at the heart of any drama. The next development in this saga suggested, however, that he might have been right to suspect Lonrho’s motives – even though he had told the MMC that he believed them to be above suspicion.
That was when Edson Zvobgo told him that Godwin Matatu had replaced him as The Observer’s Africa correspondent. Dick had gone to Zimbabwe and arranged to meet Zvobgo, who took him on a trip to Heroes’ Acre, outside Harare, where the country honoured its nationalist pioneers. As they drove along in the car, Zvobgo had said to Dick (according to Dick): ‘What are you doing here? You are the Commonwealth correspondent and you should be in Canada or the Caribbean. Godwin Matatu is now The Observer’s Africa correspondent.’
Dick was naturally dumbfounded to hear this, as I was when he reported the conversation back to me. Unfortunately, Dick didn’t just tell me. He told the whole office in his excitable way and stirred everyone up. Before long a motion was being proposed that the NUJ chapel should take the matter to the independent directors as a breach of the safeguards Lonrho had agreed to at the time of the takeover. Instead of leaving it to me to sort out the situation in my diplomatic way, he had turned a muddle into a crisis.
We only have Dick Hall’s word that Zvobgo described Matatu’s job as The Observer’s Africa correspondent, and we don’t know exactly what, if anything, Tiny had promised Zvobgo about the job his
nephew would do on The Observer. Tiny never raised the subject with me, except to say from time to time that he hoped Godwin could supply the odd story for the paper. Tiny never asked me to make him Africa correspondent, let alone ‘ordered’ me to do it, as some reports suggested. For by now Hall had got the whole of Fleet Street excited too.
Having been the diarist on the Financial Times, Dick knew all the gossip columnists and kept them informed about every twist and turn in the Matatu story. Alan Rusbridger, later The Guardian’s editor, was writing the paper’s diary at this time and latched on to the story with some relish. He also started leaking my evidence to the MMC, having found, so it was claimed, an A4 manila envelope containing all 10,000 words of my submission on his desk. Who sent it became a matter of some interest and concern to me, since my unflattering description of Rowland could have an explosive effect.
The obvious suspect was Hall himself, though he strongly denied it. The only way he could have got hold of a copy would be if Colin Legum, whose office he took over, had left one in his files. Tony Howard had easy access to my secretary’s office, which was next to his. He had also inherited John Cole’s files, which might have contained a copy of my submission. If Tony was the culprit, he was too canny to have supplied the copy direct to Rusbridger; he would have used one of his cronies, either Simon Hoggart or Peter Hillmore, who had both worked for The Guardian.
At the time I couldn’t believe that Tony would seek to undermine me in this way; now I’m not so sure. I remembered what Alan Watkins had said when I asked him if I should make Howard my deputy: ‘He’ll be after your job.’ I’m not saying Tony did it, for I have no proof, but that he was capable of doing it. As the police might say, he had means, motive and opportunity.
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