Devil's Advocate
Page 3
However, the evening was overshadowed by one of her Australian friends whose attempt to embarrass Benazir was far superior to mine. The year was 1977 and unknown to any of us, her father was destined to fall from power a few months later. But at the time, he was still prime minister of Pakistan.
When it was the Australian gentleman’s turn to speak—I can’t remember his name; history always forgets the secondary player—he rose, cleared his throat and launched into a well-prepared but significantly altered version of ‘Don’t cry for me, Argentina’.
‘Don’t cry for me, Islamabad.
The truth is I never left you.
All through my wild days, my mad existence, I kept my promise.
Don’t keep your distance…’
This had the audience literally rolling in the aisles. The allusion was obvious and the joke, though made in fun, telling. Following the March elections, ferment had already started in Pakistan. Although the end was still unpredictable, the comparison with Eva Perón was stinging.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Benazir interrupted, enforcing her prerogative as president to catch the speaker off-guard. ‘Every queen is entitled to a court jester, but if you’re looking for a job, I suggest you try the Goon Show instead. I already have enough fools around me.’
Shortly thereafter, both universities shut for the Easter vacation. For undergraduates like Benazir and me, who would face our final exams in just two months, it was time to buckle down and study. This was our chance to make up for all the work that had been sacrificed whilst we were presiding over our respective Unions. So I was quite surprised when suddenly, over the Easter weekend, Benazir phoned to ask if she and a friend—Alicia, if my memory is correct—could visit Cambridge. There was little chance I would say no and, fortunately, there were a few empty rooms in my digs because their occupants had gone home on holiday.
Unfortunately, it was a tense time for Benazir. Her father’s electoral victory a few weeks earlier, amidst widely believed allegations of rigging, had sparked widespread opposition protests which seemed to grow day by day. To control them, her father was forced to progressively declare what amounted to martial law. The British press was critical of him.
Benazir spent a lot of her time glued to my little transistor. The BBC World Service news was the most informed way of following developments in South Asia. It was also a lot easier than visiting the common room to watch TV; she knew that there, most of the others would be watching her instead.
On their last night in Cambridge, Benazir and Alicia decided to cook. I can’t remember what they served but later, after coffee, Benazir suddenly decided that we should drive to London in her little MG for Baskin-Robbins ice cream. And that’s precisely what we did. Squeezed into her little car, we set off around 10 p.m. and returned well past midnight. I think this was her way of breaking free from the pall of gloom the dismal news from Pakistan had spread upon all of us.
The next morning, before she left, she handed me a present. It was a 45 rpm record she had brought with her. One of the two songs was ‘You’re more than a number in my little red book’. But what she said was more pointed: ‘I bet you’ll tell the whole world about this and make it seem more than it is!’ And then, laughing, she added: ‘And when you do, I’ll know you’re just a wretched Indian.’
That summer Benazir finished Oxford and returned home to Pakistan, intending to join her country’s Foreign Service, but after her father was deposed in a coup, she entered politics instead and, finally, became prime minister. I chose to move to Oxford.
Neither then nor now am I clear about why I did this. The best answer is that with the Emergency imposed in India, I was reluctant to return. But it’s also true that I hadn’t done much to find a job. So three more years at Oxford, purportedly researching for a DPhil, seemed to be the easy option.
When I visited St Antony’s for my admission interview, Benazir, who had arranged for us to have lunch afterwards and had come to pick me up, was the one who first told me that I would get in. This was virtually as soon as I walked out of a pretty forbidding questioning, where I didn’t think I had excelled myself.
‘I think you’re in,’ was the first thing she said when we met. ‘That old white-haired man who walked out of the room before you did, told the lady sitting beside me who I think is his secretary, “Tick his name.” So you’re in.’
Benazir turned out to be right. The three years at Oxford that followed were completely different to the three before at Cambridge. For a start, I was no longer an irresponsible undergraduate. At the time, St Antony’s was a very modern college without a history of hallowed traditions. All the students were graduates, most were married and several had children. There was no high table but a cafeteria system instead. Meal times were a mad family picnic. Finally, there were more foreign students than English.
I enjoyed Oxford, but I have to admit that I wasn’t very serious about my research. Though I did a fair amount, I’m not sure whether my diligence was rewarded with distinguished results.
Instead, I started to write. Alexander Chancellor was the editor of the Spectator and he accepted several of my pieces. He even commissioned a visit to Afghanistan, shortly after the Soviet invasion of December 1979, which gave me my first cover story.
This was enough to convince me that I wanted to be a journalist, not an academic. So, shortly before completing three years at Oxford and long before completing my DPhil thesis (which remains un-submitted to this day), I wrote to six different newspapers, asking if they would take me on. The result was not just my first job but the start of the only career I’ve ever known.
3
CHARLIE, AND MY FIRST JOB
O
f the six newspaper editors I wrote to, four didn’t bother to respond while one wrote a rather rude reply. However, the sixth letter, to The Times, led to a phone call from the paper’s deputy editor, Charles Douglas-Home.
This was the summer of 1980 and in those days there were no mobile phones. Fortunately, there was a payphone just outside my room. Somewhat presumptuously, I had given this number in my letters, along with the college’s main switchboard numbers.
‘I can’t remember when I last received such a cheeky letter!’ Charlie began. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I kept silent. ‘I think we better have lunch so that I can discover what prompted this audacity.’ I could hear Charlie chuckling. He was clearly enjoying this. He invited me to his London club, The Caledonian.
It wasn’t my academic credentials, leave aside my conversation, that impressed Charlie at lunch. That happened because of sheer good luck. I was able to prove him wrong on a small but significant matter of fact. First, however, the lunch got off to a dreadful start.
I ordered haggis. ‘You sure about that?’ Charlie asked. ‘Have you had it before?’
I hadn’t, but I felt I could hardly admit to that. So I tried to bluff, claiming that I was familiar with it.
Alas, when the haggis was placed before me, the look on my face gave me away. ‘Serves you right.’ Charlie chuckled. I was getting used to his laugh. ‘Now you better eat all of it.’
Charlie was a small man, with a round face and an irresistible smile. He was an aristocrat, but with a distinctly meritocratic and even egalitarian approach towards his colleagues. His father’s elder brother was the fourteenth earl of Home, better known as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had served as the British prime minister as well as foreign secretary. Through his mother’s side, Charlie was Princess Diana’s father’s first cousin, which made him her first cousin once removed.
Mercifully, Charlie was a chatty individual and our conversation soon distracted his attention from my earlier faux pas. ‘You’ve done the opposite of Norman St John-Stevas, haven’t you?’ he suddenly asked.
At the time, St John-Stevas was one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers and a former president of the Cambridge Union. After three years at Cambridge, he had moved to Oxford to do a second degree. I had trodden a similar path.
‘Hmm...’ Charlie muttered. ‘We’ll go back to my office after lunch and check Who’s Who.’
When we did, Charlie discovered I was right. Minutes later, he popped another of his famous questions: ‘There’s someone from India coming to see me tomorrow. Do you know the person?’
This really was an amazing question because, with the Indian population then approaching one billion, it was extremely unlikely that I would. ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘But who’s the person?’
Charlie opened his diary and said (although he mispronounced the name horribly): ‘Nayantara Sahgal.’ This was the last name I’d expected to hear. Aunty Tara, as I call her, is my mother’s brother’s wife, but I had no idea that she was in London and I could hardly believe Charlie had asked me about her.
Astonishment must have been written all over my face because he suddenly said, sounding somewhat incredulous, ‘Do you know her?’ When I said I did and explained how, he seemed inexplicably impressed.
I’m convinced that my handling of these idiosyncratic questions got me a job at The Times. Years later, when I knew Charlie better, I asked him up front. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he responded and laughed away my enquiry. But there was something about his manner that suggested I was right.
The Times needed to send someone to Nigeria immediately where, with a Second Republic inaugurated under President Shehu Shagari after years of military rule, they felt the need for a correspondent. Apparently, at a Mansion House banquet the night before, President Shagari had asked Charlie why The Times did not have a representative in Lagos. This must have been on the top of his mind when we met and perhaps he decided to fit me into a little vacancy that had just opened up.
I now faced a difficult choice. I could either complete my DPhil and forego the opportunity of joining The Times, because the paper would not keep the Lagos position open for long, or accept and hope to start a career but never finish my thesis. I opted for the latter and I’ve never regretted it. In my heart I knew I wasn’t cut out to be an academic and Oxford had just been a way of postponing the real world.
I didn’t realize how kind and thoughtful Charlie was until I started working for him. ‘Don’t file directly to the desk,’ he told me when I left for Lagos. ‘File to me instead.’
This was wise advice, because I was a novice and unaware of the pyramid structure a newspaper article needs to observe. But what took me by surprise was Charlie’s response to the stories I filed.
Practically every night around 11, I would get a call from him. He would have the story I had filed earlier in the day and, like a diligent tutor, would point out my mistakes as well as the little ‘tricks’ I should deploy to make either my writing or the structure more riveting. These conversations could range between five minutes and twenty. I can’t recall a single occasion when a story I filed was not followed by a late-night tutorial.
One day, after roughly three months, Charlie rang up in the morning. ‘From today, I want you to file directly to the desk. Your copy is as good as any other correspondent’s.’ In his eyes I was now a proper journalist!
In the early 1980s, Nigeria was a rough place. Lagos, the capital, is in the heart of Yorubaland, where the people are tall, broad and loud. This part of the country felt like the American Wild West. The people seemed distinctly Texan.
As a new journalist, I lacked discrimination. I wasn’t sure what was important and what should be considered irrelevant. I, therefore, ended up chasing every story, no matter how slight, and that often left me running around in circles.
On one occasion, however, I hit the bullseye without realizing that that’s where I was heading. Through a series of lucky accidents, I played a critical role in Nigeria breaking diplomatic relations with Libya.
It happened on a slow and dull morning when I decided to attend a press conference at the Libyan Embassy because, quite frankly, there was nothing better to do. In a room that was barely full and where I was the only foreign correspondent, the ambassador started to speak. Shortly after he began, a door behind him opened and in marched five Libyan students who declared that they had taken over the embassy. They now proclaimed a ‘jamhuriyat’. The announcement elicited desultory applause, followed by tea and biscuits.
Later that afternoon, I decided to visit the Nigerian Foreign Office. I was still trying to fill my day and didn’t expect very much from this trip either. But it was when I asked the Foreign Office spokesman what he made of the morning’s developments at the Libyan Embassy that I inadvertently pressed a Nigerian panic button.
‘What!’ he almost shouted. ‘Are you sure this happened? You’re not making it up, are you?’
‘Yes, of course I’m sure,’ I said. I couldn’t understand why he was so worked up.
‘Wait here. I must inform the minister.’ And with that he ran out of the room and up six floors to the foreign minister’s office. He was in such a hurry, it didn’t occur to him to take the lift.
Half an hour later I heard him running down the stairs. ‘Come with me quickly,’ he shouted as he burst into the room. ‘The minister wants to meet you.’
When I entered the sixth-floor office, it was like walking into an English Star Chamber. The foreign minister was seated on a raised chair at the far end. Flanking him on either side were the top officials of the ministry, the permanent secretary, the additional secretary, several undersecretaries and many others junior to them. I was left standing at the far end of a long table.
‘Mr Thapar,’ the minister addressed me in a deliberate and somewhat portentous voice, ‘I’m told you have a story of the utmost importance to tell me.’
I repeated everything that had happened that morning at the Libyan Embassy. In fact, somewhat unnerved by the surroundings, I tried to recall the smallest details, no matter how insignificant. The minister listened intently. The accompanying officials kept their eyes focused on me right through. I felt like an accused standing in the dock.
‘I see,’ the minister said when I finished. ‘Come back in two hours’ time and you’ll find that Nigeria is grateful for the service you’ve done.’
Unsure of what he meant and unaware of the alleged service I had performed, I wandered the streets outside the Foreign Office in a bit of a daze. When two hours were up, I returned to the spokesman’s office and, once again in his company, was escorted to the minister’s chambers.
It was the same scene that greeted me, except now there was less tension in the air. The minister seemed more relaxed.
‘Mr Thapar, you have brought a very serious matter to our attention and I’m very grateful. As a reward, I’m going to give you a bit of news before anyone else finds out. Nigeria has decided to break relations with Libya. This is exclusive to you. The rest of the world will only find out tomorrow morning.’
I was stunned. I could hardly believe what I had just heard. Instead, my mind was flooded with questions. Why had this decision been taken? What had Libya done that was so unforgiveable? And what more was there to this story, because clearly there had to be? But before I could ask any of these questions I was marched out of the room by the spokesman, escorted down the stairs and bid farewell at the front door of the foreign ministry.
The Times could hardly believe my story when I filed my report. Charlie actually called to ask if I was hallucinating or bluffing. When he realized I wasn’t, his conclusion was short, sweet and simple: ‘You really are a lucky sod!’
Two days later I received a call from the Libyan Embassy, inviting me to a meeting with their foreign minister at 5 p.m. Apparently this gentleman had urgently flown in from Tripoli to make amends and restore relations. But his efforts had been in vain. By the time I met him, his frustration had turned to anger. For half an hour he ranted. I thought the veins on his forehead would burst. All the while he wagged his right index finger at me. Eventually, exhausted, he told me to ‘get out’. But little did he realize he had just gifted me the perf
ect sequel to my scoop.
The second time I stumbled upon a big story in Lagos, it culminated in the end of my tenure as The Times’s correspondent in Nigeria. It happened late one night, a couple of days before I was anyway due to go on holiday. Returning from The Bagatelle, a Lebanese-owned French restaurant that had just been refurbished and was the fashionable place to visit, I found the Nigerian Foreign Office blazing like a towering inferno. Realizing at once that this was not the sort of thing a journalist encounters every day, I hurriedly dropped home the two people I had taken out to dinner and picked up the night guard from outside my own house before heading back to the burning ministry.
By now, there were a couple of fire brigades outside the building and a lot of firemen who seemed to be simply standing and watching. The burning building was, of course, an unbelievable sight to behold.
However, what caught my attention was a long fire hose that stretched from a centrally parked fire brigade, ran across the adjoining road and dipped into the sea, a distance of perhaps a hundred feet. There, with their feet in the water, a handful of firemen were pouring buckets of seawater into this limp pipe.
Of course, the other fire brigades did have Simon Snorkel ladders fixed to their roofs, each of which had risen to the level the fire was blazing at. No doubt they were addressing the problem adequately. But it was the farce at ground level that stuck in my mind.
So when I filed my report for The Times at around 1 in the morning, this was a part of the story. I didn’t play it up but it stood out nonetheless.
The next morning, the story was on the paper’s front page from where the BBC World Service programme News of the African World picked it up. Its first bulletin led with the disaster that had struck the Nigerian Foreign Office.
It didn’t take long for officialdom in Lagos to work out that I was the journalist who had told the world about the fire. And, as I was soon to discover, this sort of luck doesn’t stand a journalist in good stead. Even before offices formally opened, I received a summons to meet Chief Charles Igoh, President Shagari’s chief press secretary.