It was incredibly strong stuff, much worse than the rhetorical flourish that everyone remembers. But don’t be downhearted: this was far from acceptable even in its own time. Though only one person in the audience present apparently showed ‘any sign of annoyance’, Powell’s words caused an instant media firestorm.8 On Monday, The Times denounced it as ‘AN EVIL SPEECH’. The coverage finished forever the friendship between Powell’s family and the Joneses, with Marjorie handing Enoch’s kids back on the doorstep and telling him: ‘I don’t think we shall be seeing each other again for a very long time.’9
There is no evidence that any of Powell’s story was true. He hadn’t even spoken to the woman he was talking about. Powell’s biographer Simon Heffer says the MP’s information came from ‘a letter to him from a woman in Northumberland’, more than two hundred miles from his own constituency.10 And despite scores of journalists from both local and national titles scouring Wolverhampton top to bottom, no one was able to find anyone who matched the old lady’s description. Powell’s former friend Clem Jones, who edited the Wolverhampton Express & Star, never found her, and suspected the whole thing was just one of ‘many myths about the immigrant population doing the rounds, some of which ended up in Powell’s constituency correspondence’.11
‘You were dealing with dynamite. Didn’t you have a fantastic duty to check that story to find if it was true?’ demanded interviewer David Frost the following year. ‘I haven’t the slightest doubt that is as true as it is typical,’ replied a stony-faced Powell. He could only say that he had ‘verified the source from which I had that information.’ Frost persisted: ‘Do you know the lady?’ Powell replied, still stony-faced: ‘I have never agreed to answer any question whatever which could lead to the identification either of the source or of the case and I’m not going to do so.’12 He kept his word right up to his death in 1998.
It took some serious detective work by the BBC in 2007 to track down the only suspect who fitted the ‘special combination of features’ outlined by Powell in his speech. Druscilla Cotterill owned one of the seven terraced houses on Brighton Place, Wolverhampton, where she had previously taken in lodgers; she was sixty-one in 1968; and a large majority of immigrants had moved into the street around that time. But not all of the other white residents had fled – another family stayed until they died – and in plenty of other respects, she sounded nothing like Enoch’s pensioner. ‘She would never give in to any sort of prejudiced behaviour,’ local resident Lance Dunkley, a West Indian, insisted to the BBC. ‘You had a child and you were working, you couldn’t find a childminder, she would step in and say, “I’ll do it for you,” free of cost. You couldn’t class her as a racist.’ He wasn’t alone in his assessment. ‘No, I didn’t find that with her,’ confirmed neighbour Roderick Foster. ‘If she did have a problem, we weren’t aware of it,’ said Carol Antonio, who grew up in the street. The last two did admit that, as kids, ‘We did tease her quite a bit,’ but they were adamant that the only incident when dog excrement was put through a letter box involved ‘a black family at number 6’.13
Either Powell or his mysterious Northumberland correspondent seems to have spiced the story up beyond all recognition in the telling. If Powell was responsible, it was not his first offence. In a speech two months earlier he had announced that ‘only this week a colleague of mine in the House of Commons was dumbfounded when I told him of a constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school.’14 It was only after five days of investigating that the Wolverhampton Education Committee were able to establish and announce that this was because so many children had been off sick on a particular day.
Maybe that was one of the reasons why Powell remained so insistent that he would never reveal any more details of the letter. ‘He had a very strong view that anyone who wrote to him, wrote to him in confidence, and that should not be broken,’ his long-serving private secretary told the BBC in 2007.15 Five years later Powell’s widow Pam provided another explanation that was just as convincing. ‘The letter most certainly did exist. I did see it, but I don’t know where it went…. I saw that letter and probably put it somewhere so safe that we could never find it again. Whatever happened to it I don’t know, I wish I did; we all turned the place upside down and we couldn’t find it.’16
‘This monstrous brutality is but the latest act in Colonel Gaddafi’s reign of terror. The evidence is now conclusive that the terrorist bombing of La Belle discotheque was planned and executed under the direct orders of the Libyan regime.’
Ronald Reagan, address to the nation, 14 April 1986
The most useful thing any government can have is an enemy, some foreign power that every ill and misfortune can be blamed upon. It doesn’t much matter if the foreign power is actually responsible – look at George W. Bush’s attempts to associate Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 attacks; what matters is that the foreigner can be portrayed as a convincing baddie. And if the figure is prepared to play along with the pretence – because it also suits his (or her) purposes to pretend that it is your imperialist regime that is the baddie in this black-and-white game of realpolitik – then all the better.
There is not the space here – probably not the space in all the pages of this book – to do full justice to the story of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s flip-flopping relationship with the US, and by extension Britain. We’ll instead have to make do with a brief chronology. In the mid-1980s Gaddafi was public enemy number one, blamed for events his regime was behind – the 1984 shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher by a gunman inside the Libyan embassy in London – and events it was not – simultaneous grenade and rifle attacks on Rome and Vienna airports in 1985 which were the work of a rogue Palestinian faction – as well as events whose true perpetrators remain unclear more than three decades later. In many cases Gaddafi was only too happy to drop hints that he might be involved: the Rome and Vienna attacks were, he declared, ‘heroic acts’. Sometimes he would go so far as to stump up reparations: families of victims of the 1989 Lockerbie bombing got more than $1.5 billion in compensation though Libya refused to accept responsibility for the attack. In other cases, Ronald Reagan’s White House were happy to pin the blame on their favourite bogeyman even when there was very little evidence for his involvement, or even for any plots existing. Such was the situation in 1981, when news broke that US interceptions had revealed a Libyan ‘hit squad’ was on its way to Washington to assassinate the president. The government leak came complete with sketches of the squad’s supposed members. In the words of the journalist who was selected to receive the leak, it all ‘turned out to be phoney’.17
In 1987, while Reagan was still the sitting president, Robert Oakley, a diplomat who served as director of the State Department’s office of combating terrorism and had a seat on Reagan’s National Security Council, admitted to the BBC in an interview that Gaddafi’s regime had been selected as a ‘soft target’ for a show of strength against terrorism. ‘There were less downside consequences, if you will. There’s less Arab support for Gaddafi. We figured there would be less Soviet support for Gaddafi.’18 After Italian authorities announced that they had found no evidence of Libyan involvement but plenty of ‘clear implications of a Syria connection’ in the airport attacks, the US State Department simply dismissed the findings, and Reagan announced they had ‘irrefutable evidence’ of Gaddafi being behind both atrocities.19 At the time, Syria was under the rule of Hafez al-Assad (father of Bashar), who was considered a key US partner in the Middle East, since he was standing strong against an Islamic uprising like the one that had toppled the Iranian regime a couple of years earlier. America needed a different enemy.
Just a few months after the airport attacks, on 5 April 1986, a bomb exploded in West Berlin’s La Belle discotheque, a favourite haunt of US servicemen. The bomb killed an American soldier and a Turkish woman and injured hundreds of others. Within two days Reagan announced that Gaddafi was ‘definitely a suspect’; within ten days he confirmed in a tele
vised address that it was definitely him. ‘Our evidence is direct, it is precise, it is irrefutable,’ he informed the American people.20 It was anything but that. In fact, it primarily consisted of some intercepted messages from the Libyan capital, Tripoli, to the country’s embassies ahead of the attack, which the Israelis, no friends of the Gaddafi regime, had dismissed as ‘wild rhetoric’.21 But as the president noted in his address, the evidence didn’t really matter: ‘Several weeks ago… I warned Colonel Gaddafi we would hold his regime accountable for any new terrorist attacks launched against American citizens.’ He had ordered US planes – flying from a base in the UK, chosen as much to bind another country into the operation as for logistical reasons – to bomb targets in Tripoli in retaliation.
Naturally, Gaddafi played his part, appearing on Libyan TV from the ruins of his house to claim that his wife had been badly injured in the attack and that his adopted daughter Hana had been killed. (Despite him producing a child’s body for the cameras, it was later reported that Hana had lived to adulthood; there were also suggestions she never existed.) The US hardly helped gather allies to their cause by boasting that they had targeted sites that had a ‘full terrorist connection’ with ‘precision bombing’ – before it turned out they had hit the French embassy in Tripoli and a residential area more than two miles from the military base they were aiming for.22
Initially, the investigations into who had been responsible for the La Belle bombing pointed in a different direction. That November two Jordanians were convicted of another terror attack in Berlin, conducted a week earlier using the same kind of explosives; they confessed to working for the Syrian government, then recanted, and German police announced they didn’t have enough evidence to charge them with the disco bombing too. The trail went cold until the Berlin Wall fell four years later. Evidence from the Stasi secret police archives provided enough evidence for a Libyan who had worked at the country’s embassy in East Berlin to be charged. He was put on trial in 1997 along with two of his former colleagues, a Palestinian and a German, and the latter’s wife and sister, who it was claimed had carried the bomb onto the dance floor after it was brought across the border in a diplomatic pouch. The sister was acquitted and the others convicted, but the proceedings were described as ‘murky’.23 Judge Peter Marhofer complained about the unwillingness of the German and US secret services to fully share intelligence, even a decade after the events. In November 2001 he finally concluded that while ‘Libya bears at the very least a considerable part of the responsibility for the attack’, there was no evidence Gaddafi himself had personally been involved, as Reagan had asserted.24
By then, the colonel himself was well on the way to being rehabilitated in the international community. He had agreed to surrender two Libyan suspects for trial in Europe over the Lockerbie bombing, which killed 259 airline passengers and crew over the Scottish town just before Christmas 1988. The investigation into that atrocity had also swerved sharply away from Syria around the time it became necessary to keep that country onside during the first Gulf War; some very dubious evidence presented at the subsequent trial was not enough to convict one of the men, and the other, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, continued to vehemently (and convincingly) protest his innocence right up until he was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 – an act of mercy which prevented any further evidence being presented at appeal.25 And although Gaddafi discomfited the British and Scottish governments by turning al-Megrahi’s return into a hero’s welcome, Reagan’s ‘most dangerous man in the world’ somehow seemed to have been completely transformed into one of our best friends. Having installed Saddam Hussein in the top spot Gaddafi once occupied, US President George W. Bush pointedly left Libya off his list of countries in the ‘axis of evil’ who were providing arms to terrorists in his State of the Union Address in 2002. Again, there was no evidence of Saddam doing anything of the sort, and plenty concerning Gaddafi. (To name but one, the colonel had been sending guns to the IRA throughout the Troubles.)
Two years later, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, the president’s right-hand man, Tony Blair, travelled to Tripoli to be photographed shaking hands with the Libyan leader in the desert tent he liked to do business in. Gaddafi had said he fully intended to get rid of his country’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – which was handy because it meant Blair could say they had found some WMDs somewhere – and was fully on board with the global fight against al-Qaeda.26 He was duly rewarded with the lifting of sanctions, which allowed him to start doing serious business with the West for the first time in decades – including welcoming BP back into his oil-rich lands and sending his son to London to study (or at least pick up a PhD from a university that received a £1.5 million donation from his family). ‘The relationship between Britain and Libya has been completely transformed in these last few years,’ enthused Blair in 2007, after another desert love-in. ‘We now have very strong co-operation on counter-terrorism and defence.’27
This new-found friendliness with the West did not, however, stop Gaddafi from brutalizing his people, who had seen all internal dissent ruthlessly crushed since he had seized power in a military coup in 1969. And when they finally rose up against him in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring and the country erupted into civil war, America and Britain flip-flopped again. ‘It is time for Gaddafi to go – now, without further violence or delay,’ announced Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.28 ‘This behaviour cannot be allowed to stand,’ declared Prime Minister David Cameron. ‘It is quite clear to me that someone who I have never supported, whose regime I have never supported… is clearly behaving in a totally and utterly unacceptable way’.29 Both countries committed to a NATO-led military intervention in March of that year; it proved just as disastrous as the one in Iraq. Five years on, Libya had two rival parliaments and three governments, but the real power had devolved to well over a thousand armed militias, each under distinct leadership. ISIS had also established a serious power base in the country.
‘Libya is a mess,’ admitted Barack Obama in April 2016.30 He was the eighth US president to try to deal with Gaddafi, and he was also the last: the Libyan leader was cornered in an underground drain by a mob of his former subjects in October 2011 and beaten, shot and bayoneted to death. A crowd queued up to pose for selfies with his body afterwards.
‘So on the fiftieth anniversary of the NHS this Government will now make the biggest ever investment in its future, giving the NHS for the first time for decades the long-term resources it needs. Under the last Government the increase for the last three years was seven billion. For the coming three years, I am announcing an increase in health service funding of a total of twenty-one billion.’
Gordon Brown, House of Commons, 14 July 1998
One of New Labour’s tactics to take power in 1997 involved convincing the public that they would not be as profligate as their party predecessors by pledging to stick to the spending targets set by the Conservatives for the first two years they were in government. Another was promising to give health and education the generous funding they said had for so long been denied them. It was very difficult to reconcile these two things, and when Gordon Brown announced a £21 billion infusion of cash for the NHS in the summer of 1998, it came as a huge and welcome surprise.31 ‘This settlement is far better than we had dared hope,’ the head of the NHS Confederation told the BBC. ‘All our expectations had been around a figure of £10 billion to 12 billion. To have received £21 billion is beyond our wildest dreams.’ The director of the Institute of Health Services Management hailed a ‘massive injection of new cash in a desperately threadbare NHS’.32
It all seemed too good to be true, and it was. Brown was doing the sort of counting that earns you a big red cross on your maths homework, and quite possibly a ‘see me’. Health services spending in England that year stood at £37 billion; by the end of the three-year period covered by the spending review it would rise to £46 billion – a simple increase of £9 billion. But that wasn’t how things
worked under the chancellor’s alternative maths. The 1999 budget was £3 billion higher than the 1998 one; the 2000 budget was £6 billion higher; and the 2001 budget was £9 billion higher. Add 3 + 6 + 9 and you get 18 – which, when added to an extra £2.8 billion for health in Scotland and Wales, rounded up to 21. Yes, it involved counting some of the money twice, and some of it thrice, not to mention the fact that none of it was coming just yet, because there was still another year to go on New Labour’s spending guarantees. But the vagueness of the term ‘a total of…’ covered a multitude of mathematical sins, and in the meantime he could bask in headlines like ‘CASH GIFT STUNS NHS’ (Guardian), ‘BROWN GOES ON A SUMMER SPREE’ (Daily Mail), ‘GOLDEN BROWN’ and ‘BROWN PUMPS £21BN INTO THE NHS’ (both BBC News).33
The Treasury select committee spotted the deceit. Just a fortnight later they reported that ‘Assessing the extent of the increase in real resources going in to key departments over the next three years has been complicated by “presentational” issues’ and further that ‘it is clear that as a percentage of GDP (a useful measure of real resources being spent) expenditure on the NHS is set to rise from 4.4 per cent in 1998–99 to 4.7 per cent in 2001–02…. There is thus no cash bonanza of the type which newspaper headlines might suggest’.34 This didn’t sound quite as sexy as a multi-billion-pound giveaway, and the media continued to cite the £21 billion sum for years to come.
Brown continued his creative approach to accounting throughout his ten years at the Treasury, never announcing a spending commitment once if he could announce it several times. Debts, meanwhile, weren’t counted at all, if he could help it. The private finance initiative (PFI) – inherited from the Tories but massively expanded and exploited by Brown – allowed him to farm out public building projects such as schools and hospitals to the private sector; in return the private companies would receive ever-increasing payments from the public purse for decades to come. The rules – his rules – said such commitments could be kept ‘off balance sheet’ and not counted as part of the public debt.35 That helped with another of Brown’s arbitrary rules, a pledge to keep debt below 40 per cent of GDP in order to demonstrate what a responsible fellow he was.36
The Lies of the Land Page 14