R.W. Johnson

Stung by press comment that South Africa’s new government had achieved little in its first hundred days, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, addressing the Cape Town Press Club, suggested that the problem lay with the press. It had, he said, been ‘perfectly correct for the press to criticise the previous government’ – the word ‘correct’ is worth lingering over – but such behaviour was now inappropriate. Instead of looking for crises, he said, the press ‘should ask what its role is in building a democracy’. Mr Mbeki, it turned out, had been particularly incensed by an article in the Financial Mail accusing him of laziness and unexplained absences from important meetings.’

Much of the history of France in the last century is embodied in the strange trinity of Philippe Pétain, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand. Pétain, born in 1856, was old enough to remember the humiliation of France at the hands of Prussia in 1870, and like other French officers of his period, spent his entire military career in anticipation of what he believed would be the inevitable revenge for that defeat. By the time the young second lieutenant Charles de Gaulle joined the 33rd Infantry Regiment at Arras in 1912, Pétain, the regiment’s colonel, was on the point of retirement. The war intervened and gave Pétain an extended military life. In 1925 the hero of Verdun and Marshal of France appointed the promising young de Gaulle to his staff and repeatedly intervened to promote his protégé, even raising his marks when de Gaulle graduated from the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre. Pétain then imposed him on the School as a lecturer, and insisted on going along to introduce him. De Gaulle dedicated his writings to Pétain, acted as his ghostwriter, and called his own son Philippe. But Pétain, presumed too far and de Gaulle, his pride wounded, asserted his independence. The relationship had already grown cool when de Gaulle ended it: on 18 June 1940 he condemned the deal Pétain, had done with Hitler and appealed for resistance. It was a war to the knife. De Gaulle made resistance to Pétain, such an absolute principle that he overcame his previous prejudices and joined forces with the Communists in the struggle against him. Pétain, had de Gaulle condemned to death in absentia, while de Gaulle had Pétain, live out his last few years of life – by then he was over ninety – as a prisoner on a windswept little island in the Bay of Biscay.’’

‘The good news’, said the man from the US Embassy, ‘is that there’s lots of money for voter education. The bad news is that we hear Richard Gere and Kim Basinger are coming out to spend it.’ ‘It’s getting like the late Sixties in Vietnam,’ said his colleague. ‘Last time I saw so many people working such frantic hours on politics. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference there in the end. Probably won’t do here, either. We had Bob Hope there, of course. We were lucky, we didn’t have Jesse Jackson like we’re gonna have here.’ I asked how the funding worked. ‘Well, Washington has this idea that democracy is something you can sorta buy. They say: will it be free and fair? If we say no, not really, they say: well how much more do we have to allocate to get it free and fair?’ I was called to the phone. It was my friend, Jim, who’s been election-watching down on the Natal south coast. He’d just come back from seeing the bodies of a family of nine killed at Folweni. ‘They were butchered, I mean almost literally,’ he said. ‘Of course, neither the local Inkatha guys nor the ANC will say who did it but they obviously know. You can be sure the revenge mission has already begun. It’s getting kind of heavy. Come on down for the weekend. I’ll introduce you to the local killers and we can do some surfing and have a barbecue.’ In Lesotho last year, I talked to an American who’d been an election-observer in Kenya, Namibia, Zambia, Angola and Pakistan. What preparations, I asked, was he making to monitor the South African election? ‘Oh boy,’ he groaned, ‘that one. That’s the eight-hundred-pound gorilla.’

At the Party Conference following Labour’s crippling defeat in the 1983 election Michael Foot stood before the massed ranks of the faithful to account for his stewardship of the Party. ‘I am deeply ashamed,’ he began. Unfortunately for Mervyn Jones, who both loves and admires his subject and would have us dwell on other things, it is the freeze-frame of that moment which lives on. For Foot had led Labour to its worst defeat since 1922, a defeat so bad that it handicaps Labour still. In almost exactly half the country’s constituencies the SDP-Liberal Alliance ran ahead of Labour. Eleven years later, despite the implosion of the Alliance and two better elections for Labour, the Liberals have clung onto the majority of those bridgeheads: for Labour to win a Parliamentary majority of any comfort now it has to perform the difficult trick of going from third to first place in a considerable number of seats. This ‘Foot deficit’ may well live on to haunt Labour leaders into the next century, and with it will go the memory of Foot as the most disastrous Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald.