Letters from London (41 page)

The official British attitude was almost entirely reactive; and that reaction one of conciliatory passivity. Here, for instance, is the sheepish Foreign Secretary of the time, Geoffrey Howe, groveling on the BBC World Service: “I do emphasize that we are not upholding the right of freedom to speak because we like the book, because we agree with the book. The British Government, the British people, don’t have any affection for the book. The book is extremely critical, rude about us. It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany.” It doesn’t, of course, do any such thing, and when I talked to Rushdie after the Oxford reading, he reckoned he might have a nice day out in the libel courts over that last remark, if he didn’t have troubles enough already. Still, what sticks in the throat more is those words “the British Government, the British people.” I can remember no referendum or
even opinion poll on the literary merits of
The Satanic Verses
in early 1989, though it had by this time won the Whitbread Prize for the best novel of the year and been short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Geoffrey Howe went to Brussels shortly after the
fatwa
was issued for a meeting with his European colleagues, and was surprised to find himself briefly kicked into a semi-nonspineless stance. Britain, “diplomatic sources” admitted afterward, was unprepared for the zeal of France and West Germany in the matter, and Howe found himself carried along by a “spontaneous upsurge of feeling that something tough had to be agreed.” This “something tough” was the recall of EC ambassadors from Teheran and the expulsion of the Iranian chargé d’affaires in London. Thereafter, for the next four years, official Britain lay like a sleeping hog in the sun, heedless of the potatoes regularly being thrown at it. There was the death sentence and the bounty; the frequent endorsing of the sentence; the raising of the bounty; the grotesque addition of expenses to go with the bounty (imagine the finance-department quibbles back in Eşfahşn:
“Five
nights at the Dorchester?
Three
rocket launchers?”); the sight and sound of domestic Muslim leaders inciting Rushdie’s murder; the own goal of a terrorist who sat on his bomb in a Paddington hotel; the deportation of Iranian students suspected of plotting murder; the expulsion of Iranian Embassy employees on the same ground; the diplomatic halting of the trial of an Iranian for arson and firebombing despite evidence the judge called “formidable;” and finally, almost comically, the 3,600 percent increase in the cost of a visa for a British citizen to enter Iran. In the last five years, diplomatic relations between the two countries have been officially broken off and officially restored—broken off by the Iranians, restored by the British.

Britain is a medium-ranked trading nation with memories of great wealth and a fear of future poverty: the latest European Commission survey placed us eighth among the twelve members of the Union in terms of average gross domestic product per capita (ahead of only Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Greece). We also used to have a reputation as a libertarian haven: Voltaire and Zola each took refuge here when things were hotting up for them in France. But perhaps
principles go best with either being rich or being poor. It would, of course, be extremely embarrassing to the British Government if Rushdie were assassinated; and he was awarded immediate Special Branch protection. But, beyond this, for the first four of the last five years the Government snoozed. They did initially have one very good excuse, or at least something that could be played as an excuse: the fact that there were British hostages in Lebanon. The Iranians themselves never made any official linkage between the two cases (and, had they wanted to, it wouldn’t have been difficult to think one up: hand over Rushdie or we’ll have the hostages topped). But this didn’t affect the argument: it was nod-and-wink time, and if-you-knew-what-we-knew. Rushdie was told to pipe down: don’t rock the boat or you might kill Terry Waite. This blackmail, or wise diplomatic inducement, worked: for instance, a planned mass vigil at Westminster’s Central Hall on the thousandth day of the
fatwa
was deemed potentially provocative by the Foreign Office and forcibly dwindled into a bookshop reading. As Rushdie himself put it: “Until the day Terry Waite was released, I was a sort of hostage to the hostages.” Then, one fine day, the last of the captives was free. So, presumably, I asked Rushdie, it was at this point that the Foreign Office approached you with thanks and fresh plans? “No, we approached them.” “But did you,” I pressed pedantically, “give them time to approach you?” “Well, yes,” he replied, with a still disbelieving chuckle. “I mean, they knew where I was.”

And so it has continued. There has been one major and continuing success to the story, and it is one that Rushdie, not surprisingly, appreciates: “What the British have had to do is the bottom line—which is keep me alive. The security forces around the world are really impressed by what the British security forces have done. The Americans said, ‘We couldn’t have done it.’” But more often the latest plot wrinkle has tended to be dismaying. Last September, for instance, it emerged that British Airways had banned Rushdie from all its flights, arguing, inter alia, that staff would walk off any plane he walked onto. Unfortunately for the airline, Rushdie had managed to evade the ban on one occasion, flying BA from Paris to London: the
staff, far from walking off, asked him for his autograph. British Airways happily—indeed, proudly—flies politicians and royals with a similarly high level of threat against them. And what is the Government’s position in all this? According to Rushdie, the Government has on three occasions asked its national carrier to fly this particular endangered citizen, and on three occasions BA has refused. A government that can’t even get tough with its own airline is hardly likely to make Teheran break into a sweat.

Novels often torment us with if-onlies, and the Rushdie affair constantly invites us to consider alternative narratives. It might seem, at first assessment, one of Rushdie’s extra misfortunes that his five years of internal exile have been spent with a Conservative government in charge. And, in a sense, vice versa: for what could be less appealing to the average Thatcherite MP as a test of your principles than a brown-skinned left-wing novelist who in an essay at the time of the 1983 election had described the beloved leader as “unusually cruel, incompetent, unscrupulous and violent,” and the nation as “nanny-Britain, straight-laced Victoria-reborn Britain, class-ridden know-your-place Britain, thin-lipped, jingoist Britain”? What’s more, didn’t he in the very damn book that was causing such a hoo-ha down among the natives refer to the PM as “Mrs. Torture”? (He didn’t, actually: he had a satirized Thatcherite briefly and affectionately so refer to her; but that, of course, is being literary.) Pity the poor Tory MP faced with such a hard case—though pity Rushdie more for having to plead his cause before Tory torpor.

Yet the hypothesis, the alternative narrative, that suggests he might have done better with the Labour Party in power is unconvincing. Though historically more libertarian and arts-favoring than the Tories, Labour hardly fell over itself to support one of its well-known supporters. The Party’s former leader Michael Foot (one of the Booker Prize judges who had short-listed
The Satanic Verses)
was a staunch public advocate, but his two successors, Neil Kinnock and John Smith, have been more than ultracautious. Kinnock was hindered by the fact that his chief home and foreign-affairs spokesmen, Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman, seemed keen to cause the Government
the least possible embarrassment on this issue. Hattersley, then Deputy Leader, is a sort of novelist himself (he writes chubby sagas full of characters called Hattersley), and took the twin line that Rushdie had the right to publish his novel but ought to suppress the paperback: some might spot a plump contradiction slopping around in there. Two Labour MPs called for withdrawal of the book, arguing that Labour “ambivalence” on the matter (i.e., pro-Rushdie squeaks) might cost the Party as many as ten seats at the next election. Labour MPs might be sympathetic in private, but publicly the Party didn’t want to know.

Politicians can be very crude and noisy when they sniff votes; the truth in the Rushdie case—or, at least, the truth as most British politicians saw it—was that there was little to gain and much to lose by openly supporting him. The ignoble reasoning presumably was that, while pro-Rushdieites would tend to vote on wider issues, anti-Rushdieites in the Muslim community were likely to be single-issue voters. Between Labour and Conservative there was therefore cross-party support in favor of apathy. Rushdie got more reliable aid from Paddy Ashdown, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, whose seats tend to be in the whiter extremities of the country.

A second alternative narrative is to imagine the affair taking place in another country. When I put this hypothesis to Rushdie, he replied that in another country he might very well be dead by now. Still, it’s revealing to compare British and French attitudes. There is no close parallel to the Rushdie case, but we could remember the time when de Gaulle got Régis Debray out of a South American jail. Despite a profound political antipathy between the two men, the Presidential view was that their shared Frenchness remained the overriding consideration. The French tend on the one hand to refer to basic humanitarian principles, and on the other to be practically effective in obtaining the release of hostages and pseudohostages. (French nationals were the first to be released from Baghdad during the Gulf War, with Paris characteristically claiming that no sort of deal had been done.) The British stiffly view this as hypocrisy; but it came as a bracing relief when an Air France spokesman, asked about the British
Airways ban, simply replied, “We respect the French custom regarding the rights of man, which means that we transport passengers without discrimination. If Mr. Rushdie wished to travel with Air France he would not be refused.”

Similarly, in early 1989, when British and French Muslims were demonstrating on the streets of London and Paris, the French Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, put a straightforward limit on the nature of protest: “Any further calls for violence or murder will lead to immediate criminal prosecution.” In Britain, the police, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Cabinet apparently didn’t notice that there was open incitement to murder in several major cities. This meant ignoring tape of Muslim leaders, footage and stills of street demonstrators. Here, for instance, are two British Muslims in Derby holding a banner saying “Rushdie Must Die;” here is a protester in Slough with an unconvincing effigy garnished with the words “Dog Must Lose Life;” here is a cheerful fellow in collar and tie, beneath Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, with a “Death to Rushdie” placard. (An extra tinkle of irony here lies in the fact that Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize—for literature.) Imagine if one of these slogans had said “Death to Thatcher” and had been waved by an Irishman: some slight action might have been taken. So what was going on? Torpid pragmatism laced with a little upside-down racism: let Britons of subcontinental origin have a burn of street democracy, let “them” run around in “their” excitable way and get it off their chests. Anyway, we shouldn’t provoke them at home—we’ve seen how touchy they can get abroad.

White Britons’ attitudes to nonwhite Britons are, at best, fluid (fine if you’re an Olympic champion, less good if you’re stopped by police and aren’t carrying your gold medal). This inconstancy has certainly applied to Rushdie in some quarters. When an issue is complicated and seemingly insoluble, the urge to simplify is alluring. What could be more simplifying, therefore, than to return Rushdie to “his people”? The story beneath the story can be made to run like this: clever Indian boy, English public school (hated it, but so do we all; character-building anyway), Cambridge, advertising, scribbling, Booker Prize, fame, money: one of us. Then, public figure with opinions
(hostile, God damn it) about the Government, ungrateful for the privileges we gave him, stirrer not just with us but with his own people, went too far this time, should have known better, can’t understand the book anyway: one of them. Got to protect him from hotheads, murderers, and fuzzy-wuzzies generally, but Islam, after all, that’s not really our bag, is it? Anyway, didn’t he prove our point for us, first by converting to Islam and then by calling the whole affair “a family quarrel”? In this line of “thinking,” Rushdie, already condemned in the East as a racist colonialist CIA provocateur corrupted by Western values, is flung back by the West in a game of pass-the-parcel. He has been, in two senses, blackened.

One way of making this point in a slimily indirect manner has been to complain about the cost of protecting the writer. Sir Philip Goodhart, MP, of the Tory right, had the dishonorable distinction of raising this matter less than a month after the
fatwa
, though right-wing commentators, such as Auberon Waugh had anticipated him. Not: a million a year (or whatever), that’s a pretty cheap price to pay for showing the country’s proud belief in individual liberty and freedom of expression. But: this chappie must have a few quid squirreled away, why not make him stump up—after all, he started the rumpus, didn’t he? In fact, Rushdie does help foot the bill, having paid out an estimated £500,000 so far. The same question—how much money is his life worth?—is not, it must be said, asked about minor royals and dud ex-Northern Ireland ministers, let alone more illustrious protectees. Last October, for instance, Lady Thatcher did a signing session in Chester to promote her memoirs. There was the usual protection from the Cheshire police, backed up by officers from North Wales and Manchester, plus a helicopter overhead. A tenacious Labour MP winkled out the information that this hour or so of promo, which hardly constituted state business, cost the taxpayers £26,398, not a pfennig of which was being paid by author or publisher. If such expenditure was typical, then the price to the nation of her twelve-day book tour was around £300,000. Right-wing columnists have not made much noise about this so far.