A View From The Foothills

by Chris Mullin

  No sooner have the doors closed, than the plane started to move. This is not like ordinary travel. The plane goes when we arrive.

  The Prime Minister’s plane, somewhere over the Sahara

  For the next few hours I am an honorary member of The Court. Cast, in order of appearance, is as follows:

  Window seats, left: The Man, Liz Lloyd (a bright, earnest young woman who, with the departure of Anji and Alastair, has served The Man for longer than any other courtier), Tom Kelly (the Prime Minister’s official spokesman) and Gavin the Unflappable (in charge of logistics).

  Centre: The First Lady; behind her Nigel Sheinwald, the PM’s principal foreign affairs adviser, formerly Our Man at the EU (low boredom threshold, very upwardly mobile, not much interested in Africa); David Hallam, the pleasant young Number 10 official who stood in for Liz Lloyd during her maternity leave from which she has just returned (he will be departing shortly); Minister Mullin and Private Secretary, Mr Tom Fletcher.

  Window seats, right: Andre, who attends to The First Lady’s hair and make-up (very camp, frock coat, dressed from head to toe in black and never far from her side); the tabloids have yet to find out about Andre and when they do they will have fun; Sue Reeves, personal assistant to The First Lady; Kate Garvey, personal assistant to The Man.

  Somewhere beyond the curtain, a phalanx of clerks, officials and the ten protection officers who in these post 9/11 days guard The Man day and night. Also, unseen in steerage, the hacks, mostly political correspondents with no interest whatever in Africa or the Commonwealth; ‘Half of them are here to make trouble,’ I remark to The Man as he goes backstage to talk to them.

  ‘Only half?’ he says with a sardonic smile.

  Once we are airborne and the hacks have been attended to, the mood lightens. Everyone has changed into the lightweight grey pyjamas that are standard issue for denizens of the First Class cabin. Champagne is served. The Man mingles. Several times he comes over to where I am sitting. Hilary Benn’s name is mentioned. Someone remarks on Hilary’s uncanny resemblance to his old man. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘same mannerisms, drinks tea, keeps a diary …’

  The Man’s ears prick up. ‘Does he?’ He then launches into a diatribe about political diaries, how self-serving and subjective they are, citing by way of illustration those of Paddy Ashdown. Alastair’s diaries are mentioned. ‘They will never be published,’ says The Man firmly. He speaks with great assurance. I assume he means ‘while I am in office’, but that’s not what he said.

  ‘Have you got that in blood?’

  He smiles. I am sure Alastair will remain loyal to the end, but I am also confident that I will live long enough to see his diaries published.

  The Man laments the wickedness of the media and interference by Murdoch. I mention that John Major once thought seriously about breaking up the empires – one daily, one Sunday, everything else on the market – but dropped the idea because those queuing to buy whatever came on the market are at least as unsavoury as existing owners.

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ he says. ‘There are Germans and other Europeans who would be much better.’

  I press the point: ‘You would have to strike with deadly force, a week after we win a third term.’

  He is about to reply, but stops himself. He did remark firmly that the owners of the Daily Mail would never be allowed to get their hands on the Telegraph. ‘Have you got a plan?’ asked Liz Lloyd, but again he did not respond. I may be wrong, but I had the impression that he is toying with taking on the media – if he lasts long enough.

  Tuesday, 9 December

  To the House, where I sat beside The Man on the front bench as he reported back on the Commonwealth summit. He seemed tense and wound up and barely acknowledged my existence, except that several times, as the Tories were firing questions, he’d mutter, ‘What’s the answer to that?’ The first time it happened I was struck dumb, not having heard the question and my later answers were inadequate. He can’t have been impressed. Anyway he arrived without so much as a hello and departed without a goodbye, leaving me wondering whether I’d upset him.

  Sunday, 14 December

  With the children to South Shields, to buy a Christmas tree. On the way back I turned on the car radio and heard that Saddam Hussein has been captured. This evening the news bulletins were full of pictures of a dishevelled man with a long grey beard meekly submitting to a medical inspection. ‘He looks very kind,’ commented Emma.

  Tuesday, 16 December

  Jack was absent from Foreign Office Questions so we all had a greater share than usual – half a dozen in my case. I went in early and spent a couple of hours studying the fat briefing file, bristling with tags which cover every conceivable eventuality. The trouble is that, once the shooting starts, there is no way I can find my way into the file so I just have to busk. I get uncommonly nervous, my mouth goes dry and my mind empties. Fortunately, Nick Winterton was first up today huffing and puffing about Zimbabwe and I saw him off easily, after which everything went smoothly.

  Wednesday, 17 December

  A nasty little sketch by the malignant Simon Carr in today’s Independent about yesterday’s Question Time. He writes: ‘The Foreign Office front bench is the worst in the government …’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Jack at the morning meeting, but I do. The truth is I am feeling a teeny bit vulnerable.

  Michael Williams, who works for Jack, called in. Jack, he says, recently asked him a curious question: were there any countries which have abolished the death penalty and then reinstated it? What can Jack be thinking of? The Soham murderer, Ian Huntley, who was sentenced today?

  Michael also said that the Hutton report is due out soon. ‘Jack’s worried,’ he says. Not for himself, but for The Man.

  Thursday, 18 December

  A bad night. Eyes and nose streaming; shivering and shaking. Scarcely a wink of sleep. I got up at 5.45 a.m. and, barely able to talk, took a couple of paracetamol and fell back into bed before rising an hour later and staggering to the office. By lunchtime I was feeling better and went over to Portcullis House for a bowl of soup, where I ran into Jeff Rooker. ‘The deal has been done,’ he said.

  ‘What deal?’

  ‘Blair will stand down in March or April and Gordon will take over.’

  Jeff says he heard the news from a colleague in the Lords who is close to the Brown camp. Plausible, but not necessarily true. It wouldn’t be the first time that The Friends of Gordon have misread the tea leaves. All the same, there is a sort of fin de siècle mood about.

  I returned a call from Gil Loescher. The first time we have spoken since he lost his legs in the bombing of the UN building in Baghdad.

  He sounded the same as ever. Cheerful, forward-looking, talking about getting back to work. No one would guess he has been through the fires of hell (he was unconscious for weeks). He can remember everything, even the moment the bomb went off. He and a colleague (who died in the explosion) had just come from a meeting with America’s

  pro-consul, Paul Bremer. Bremer’s last words as they parted were ‘The security situation has greatly improved.’

  Wednesday, 24 December

  Sunderland

  We played Cluedo in front of the fire, taking care before we went to bed to extinguish it so that Santa Claus could get down the chimney. Before they went to bed Emma and Sarah (who plays along with Emma) left a plate containing a chocolate biscuit, a satsuma and a carrot for the reindeer; also a glass of whisky. Once they were safely asleep, it was my job to consume them, taking care to leave crumbs and teeth marks (in the remains of the carrot) in the interests of authenticity.

  Monday, 29 December

  Visited Mum in hospital, yesterday and again today. A series of mini-strokes is suspected but I have my doubts. Yesterday she was up, dressed and quite chirpy, if a little forgetful. Today she was bedridden, trembling and not that keen to see us although she put on a brave face. So sad to think that it is barely three years since Mum was deliveri
ng meals on wheels to people younger than her. Afterwards we took Dad home. He is talking about selling up and moving to sheltered accommodation, but I’d be amazed if Mum agrees.

  * Foreign Minister of Vietnam, 1980–91.

  * A former director of education at Sunderland City Council.

  CHAPTER SIX

  2004

  Thursday, 1 January 2004

  The year of The Fall? Of regime change? Hutton is due shortly, a top-up fees crisis looms and The Man is increasingly showing intimations of mortality – 2003 was the year in which the magic faded irrevocably. Whatever happens, from now on, nothing will ever be the same again. The war and the alliance with Bush were massive misjudgements. Odds on that he won’t see out the year. A decent interval after Hutton and then a dignified withdrawal? We shall see.

  The one bright spot on my own horizon is the walled garden at Chillingham, the glittering prize that eclipses all else. There is a chance, just a chance, that something may come of it, in which case my woes pale into insignificance.

  Monday, 5 January

  To London. A brilliant, luminous red sunrise, streaking across the eastern sky as the train crossed the river, light mist hovering over the Wear valley between Newcastle and Durham. On the tube between Green Park and Westminster, a not unattractive blond girl with a grey complexion and a hooded West Indian youth. Boyfriend? Pimp? To my horror she flashed a false smile at the woman with the Harrods bag sitting opposite and then, under cover of her anorak, began injecting herself in the forearm.

  To the ministerial lunch in the India Office Council Chamber. Jack did nearly all the talking, rambling on about Europe, à la JP.

  Much as I admire Jack, I notice it is getting harder to hold his attention beyond a soundbite. I guess that’s what happens after seven years at the top. Liz Symons expressed concern about the lack of progress with the Americans re Guantanamo. She said, ‘It will go badly wrong soon.’

  Tuesday, 6 January

  Lunch with Ann Clwyd, who told of a 73-year-old Iraqi woman of her acquaintance whose home was raided by American soldiers; the woman was taken away hooded, and later made to go down on all fours while one of her (American) interrogators sat on her back, calling her a donkey; also, she was made to lie flat on a concrete floor and told to ‘swim’. She was held for six weeks and only released after Ann intervened with Paul Bremer. Later Ann took a statement from her and handed it to both Bremer and The Man. This was several months ago. Today it was announced in Baghdad that two male soldiers and a woman have been discharged in disgrace for mistreating prisoners; another (female) soldier had earlier resigned.

  Wednesday, 7 January

  Among today’s paperwork a ‘secret, personal, need to know’ partial transcript of The Man’s conversation with George Bush yesterday in which he raised Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army. Evidence that I am not, after all, entirely without influence. Tom, at any rate, seemed impressed.

  Thursday, 8 January

  Jack put his head around my door and chatted briefly. I made a point of telling him how much I enjoy this job. He gave me a friendly touch on the elbow and said, ‘You’re doing fine. If you weren’t, I’d tell you.’

  Wednesday, 14 January

  Inter-Continental Hotel, Asmara

  Arrived late last night in ill-humour, having spent an unscheduled 24 hours in Frankfurt, courtesy of the Aeroflot-like inflexibility of Lufthansa. In the event we switched to Eritrean Airways (the ‘s’ is misleading, they have only one plane), who delivered us without incident.

  My mission: to persuade the Eritreans and Ethiopians to stop posturing and start talking in the hope of averting a new bout of fratricide. Eritrea, unfortunately, is an uptight little one-party state, led by a hubristic ex-Marxist brought up on Albanian-style self-reliance and disinclined to accept advice from anyone (he even refused a call from Colin Powell). Unfortunately, the UN-appointed Boundary Commission, which was supposed impartially to delineate the border on the basis of old colonial treaties, has come down almost entirely on Eritrea’s side (without regard for the realities on the ground), which has only caused both sides to dig themselves in deeper. The Eritreans, despite having started and lost the war, now (thanks to a bunch of academic lawyers in The Hague) occupy the moral high ground and are unlikely to be shifted by a single centimetre. Their position is that the Boundary Commission report should be implemented in full, no ifs or buts. I am the first British minister to visit for ten years and must count myself lucky to be received by President Isaias.

  Asmara

  Clean, unpolluted, bicycles, bougainvillea, faded Italian villas; shades of Hanoi before the onslaught of market forces. It sits on the edge of a vast escarpment which plunges nearly 7,000 feet to the Red Sea. Because of the altitude the temperature remains at around a pleasant 25 degrees for much of the year. As with Hanoi, however, appearances are deceptive. Most Eritreans are clinging to life by their fingertips.

  The neighbours are mostly hostile; trade, since the war with Ethiopia, non-existent. For all the talk of self-reliance, the country produces only a quarter of its own food and, outside of the cities, most children are not even in primary school.

  According to a young architect, who has lived here for months, Eritrea is a society in deep despair. A huge level of mobilisation is necessary in order to maintain the confrontation with Ethiopia (with 20 times the population). Conscription, for boys and girls, is universal and indefinite. On leaving school every young Eritrean is required to report for military training at a camp called Sawa where, it is alleged, bad things happen, especially to the girls; as a result many middle-class parents are withholding their children from education in order to avoid Sawa, and several hundred a month are fleeing across the border to their supposed enemy, Ethiopia, in order to escape the draft.

  Thursday, 15 January

  Asmara

  This evening I was taken to see Isaias, an imposing, handsome figure who bears a passing physical resemblance to Saddam Hussein. Isaias is not your typical African dictator. He lives modestly, travels with minimal security and is nobody’s poodle. He is fluent, well-informed and, despite his revolutionary origins, by no means an ideologue. All the same, he is leading his country to ruin. He welcomed us through clenched teeth. His opening words were uncompromising: ‘I do not blame the Ethiopians, I blame the international community …’ As our (two-hour) conversation progressed he loosened up a little. He talked indignantly of misgovernment in Africa and of his time in China, during the Cultural Revolution (‘I watched with my own eyes as the Chinese destroyed their heritage’). Gingerly, I inquired what mechanism existed in his country for correcting mistakes before they became catastrophes (given that his parliament is unelected, the media neutered and his critics detained on an island in the Red Sea). He offered a learned discourse on the need for checks and balances; he even went so far as to say, unprompted, that the state of war in his country should not be an excuse for the absence of democracy, but clearly it is. We reached no satisfactory conclusion. So far as the border is concerned, thanks to that damn Boundary Commission, Isaias is on the moral high ground and he knows it. All he has to do is keep chanting that it is legal and binding and we have no choice but to agree. In the meantime his country is going to the dogs.

  Friday, 16 January

  The Residence, Addis Ababa

  We arrived this evening from Djibouti, a two-hour flight in a nine-seater Cessna. Flying for the first hour over an empty, barren wilderness. Then, once past Lake Awash, across a sloping plateau surrounded by jagged mountains and dissected by empty, meandering riverbeds, occasional corrugated metal roofs glinting in the sunlight. Finally, over the highlands: brown, yellow, green; the mountains, precipitous valleys, isolated farms and settlements perched precariously, every available inch of soil cultivated.

  I was taken straight to see Prime Minister Meles. ‘A spectacular country,’ I said, ‘but difficult to govern.’

  ‘Spectacularly difficult,’ he replied.


  The atmospherics (as the diplomatic cables say) were good, but the message I am required to deliver is a tough one: accept the report of the Boundary Commission. I felt a bit of a cad delivering it, considering that the Ethiopians are more sinned against than sinning. For two hours I pressed him. I put it to him that the war against poverty was more important than the war against Eritrea; he agreed. I tried flattery: ‘What’s needed is an act of statesmanship; we think you are big enough,’ etc. He took it in good part but clearly isn’t going to budge and why should he? Most of the disputed territory is in Ethiopian hands, the Ethiopians can get by without access to the port at Assab, they know that Eritrea is bankrupt and they can afford to wait.

  Then to the Residence for dinner with a dozen ambassadors and assorted other bigwigs and finally, exhausted, to bed.

  Saturday, 17 January

  Adigrat (Tigray)

  Up at the crack of dawn and back to the airport for the flight to Mekele. Much saluting from the uniformed guards as we swept out of the compound in His Excellency’s Range Rover, Union Flag flying arrogantly from the bonnet.

  From Mekele we raced for two hours through a biblical landscape (stupendous crags casting huge shadows; brown, arid, worn-out topsoil; boulder-strewn valleys; churches perched precariously on every hill) to Adigrat to attend the opening of new classrooms (courtesy of the Japanese) and a new library (courtesy of HMG) at the local secondary school. Two hours, seated with other excellencies under a canvas awning, showered with gifts and kind words and, embarrassingly, plied with soft drinks, while the masses were crammed together in the hot sunshine. The school, we were told, is swamped with refugees from towns along the border. It has 6,000 pupils, crammed 100 to a class in two shifts. We were shown some of the old classrooms, floors of bare earth, ragged green canvas stretched over wooden poles. What do we know of hardship?