The Great Cat Massacre (23 page)

The enmity continued to fester so that, when reform of the Navy was on the public agenda a decade later, Edward ignored Beresford’s arguments for broadening out its deployment in favour of those of the First Sea Lord, who preferred a more specialised service based on torpedo boats and dreadnoughts to rival Germany – exacerbating the arms race between Britain and Germany which led to the outbreak of the First World War.

Idi Amin, genocidal maniac, cannibal, racist, madman, British Army cook and good friend of Saudi Arabia, seems to embody the danger of employing people without really getting to know what makes them tick first.

Amin enlisted in 1946 to feed the King’s African Rifles and it was the Ugandan boxing champion’s size – six feet four inches tall and weighing in at twenty stone – that got him noticed by the officers. Britain was looking for a new generation of leaders to take over in her former colonies when they were granted independence, and men were needed who would command respect, who would be looked up to. In the new African republics, these would not be men with degrees in macroeconomics, they would be men like Amin. ‘Not much grey matter, but a splendid chap to have about,’ as one British officer described him.

Indeed, he was promoted far more quickly than his intelligence deserved but that might have been part of the appeal – low intelligence meant low ambitions, which meant pliable and unlikely to cause too much trouble. Soon the cook had become an officer with ambitions his superiors had no idea he harboured, and a brutality that would revile millions around the world.

The men who promoted him were not, however, entirely insensible to Amin’s violent nature. He was nearly court-martialled when, as a lieutenant, he saw action in Kenya in 1961 and ordered his men to kill dozens of local tribesmen, leaving their corpses to be torn apart by hyenas. Amin also personally tortured many men –
castrating a number of them to gain information. Naturally, this was not the normal behaviour of a cook but since Uganda was about to become an independent nation with the much-loved Kabaka of Buganda as the head of state, the British authorities chose not to make one of their last acts the prosecution of the man who was about to become the senior native officer in the Ugandan Army. They informed the Prime Minister designate, Milton Obote, but he too decided to do nothing: he didn’t want to rock any boats just weeks before independence. Of course, rocking and, preferably, sinking any boat with Idi Amin in it would have been a boon to the world beyond anything else Obote could possibly have achieved in his entire life.

The day of 9 October 1962 was one of mixed fortunes for Uganda. It gained independence, but also one utterly psychotic new major, Major Amin. Within a few months, the British officers who had given him his first leg up had left for home, crossing their fingers that he wouldn’t turn out to be as mad as he looked. As soon as they left, the new Ugandan government, in need of senior officers to take their places, bumped Amin up to Colonel and Army Chief of Staff. One quick brutal overthrow of Kabaka by Obote and Amin was pushed up to General Amin – one of the fastest rises for a chef in the history of cookery. Obote was sure he could control Amin, however. After all, he was just a cook with a brain the size of a carrot – and Obote had read Socialist theory.

It surprised precisely no one when Amin mounted a coup. The only surprise was that he waited until 1971 to do
so, using the occasion of Obote’s absence at a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Singapore to decide that Uganda would be a better place with him in charge. Britain was almost certainly aware of Amin’s plans – well, who wasn’t? – but did nothing because Obote looked to be heading down the path of Marxism and that wouldn’t be much good either. So the British government thought it might as well sit back and watch to see how things turn out.

The United Kingdom recognised Amin as the new ruler quicker than you could say ‘pastry’ and the people of Uganda, having no clue what they were letting themselves in for, gave him rapturous support. Even one British observer remarked: ‘I have never encountered a more benevolent and apparently popular leader than General Amin.’

Amin, as most new dictators do, announced that he had no wish to rule for long, and elections would soon be held. They seemed to slip his mind, however, while he was having all his political enemies massacred over the weeks that followed. Around 10,000 civilians died and 3,000 army officers and men who may or may not have supported Obote (Amin’s ironically named Public Safety Unit quickly gave up on identifying those who actually supported Obote, and simply killed anyone they found whose name started with the letter ‘O’). There were so many deaths that the Owen Falls hydro-electric dam on Lake Victoria became clogged with bodies, causing power-cuts in Kampala.

This episode gave rise to one of the most famous stories about Amin: that he kept the head of his erstwhile rival, Brigadier Suleiman Hussein, in his fridge, alongside the body parts of other enemies he would eat.

Amin’s foreign policy was just as crazy as his domestic policy. Since Uganda’s independence, the country had been aided by Israel, which helped develop its infrastructure and agriculture and produce clean drinking water for the inhabitants. When he took power, Amin’s first overseas visit was to Israel, which included a meeting with the Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan. When one of Amin’s first questions was: ‘Can I have 24 Phantom jets?’ Dayan politely enquired why. ‘I need them to bomb Tanzania,’ was the reply.

Dayan’s comment, in Hebrew, to his aide was: ‘This guy is out of his mind. Let’s get out of here.’

But the refusal didn’t make Amin reconsider his approach: he simply asked Britain for the same thing. When Britain also politely turned him down, he turned to Colonel Gaddafi of Libya – and Gaddafi was rather less concerned about the prospect of bombing a neighbouring country for no apparent reason than the Israelis or British. As a result, Amin began sending bizarre letters to the UN praising Hitler, and allowed Uganda to become a base for Palestinian terrorists. He also terrorised Uganda’s Jewish tribe, the Abayudaya. But they were far from alone.

The greatest target for his brutality was the 80,000-strong Indian population who had come over during the British colonial era. In 1972 he expelled them all, stripping them of their citizenship. In so doing, he wrecked Uganda’s economy and condemned most of his countrymen to poverty or starvation: no fewer than 85 per cent of Ugandan businesses were run by the Asian population and at a stroke he destroyed them all.

The property and businesses they were forced to leave
were handed out as plunder to Amin’s friends and supporters. None of them knew the first thing about running a printing firm or a hotel, but suddenly they were in possession of these enterprises. Unsurprisingly, many simply never reopened and their employees found themselves out of work; their families found no food on their tables.

The sudden shock to the economy had long-lasting effects. Suddenly, the people who were the economy, who organised the production, distribution and trade of nearly all the goods sold in the towns were gone. It was years before you were able to buy butter in the markets of Kampala. And there was no chance of being seen by a doctor.

It was partly the Indians’ association with Britain that drove Amin over the edge. Amin always had a strange attitude to Britain: he admired the country, but also seemed to hate it (he was nothing if not unstable). When he visited it as his country’s dictator, he was especially taken with Scotland and liked the kilts. He strongly supported Scottish independence, sending letters of support to the Scottish Nationalist Party and even bringing the subject up with Mao Zedong when the two of them met. Chairman Mao was apparently less concerned about the subject than Amin and somewhat bemused to be discussing it. Amin also declared himself King of Scotland, which sat strangely with his support for its independence.

On the other hand, he did offer to help the British out in Ireland by taming the Irish rebels. Perhaps some of them would have ended up in his fridge too, if he had had his way. In January 1974, during a period of economic crisis in
Britain, he offered to send a planeload of vegetables over ‘to help’. History does not record just how many of his starving countrymen laughed at the joke.

At least we
presume
it was a sense of humour. His psychological condition was deteriorating at this time – the syphilis he carried may have been driving him mad. It’s hard to say where he picked it up: perhaps one of his four wives. As his rule stretched out, schizophrenia and paranoia became his norm and he believed he was speaking to Allah. Whether it was his insanity or mere hatred that made him praise the Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre is uncertain, but he was becoming increasingly murderous. His reign, supported by the Soviet Union and aided by the East German secret police, saw hundreds of thousands murdered. Many of them he killed himself, enjoying the brutality. He found it hysterically funny to personally torture his prisoners, cutting off their limbs or beating them to death. When Kay, one of his wives, died during an abortion that she undertook to conceal the fact that she had had an affair, Amin ordered her body to be cut apart and sewn back together again with the limbs reversed as a warning to his other wives.

His instability eventually led to war with Tanzania, which he invaded with little reason in 1978. Amin may have been adept at using his troops to butcher civilians, but actual warfare was not his strong point (he did, after all, inform the world that the Arab forces were assured of victory in their 1973 invasion of Israel, even though Israel had already beaten them) and he lost the war, despite support from
Libyan troops and planes and Palestinian guerrillas. The Libyans soon found themselves fighting the war on their own – they would be heading for the front line only to be passed by Amin’s troops driving in the opposite direction, their trucks loaded with the booty they had looted. But it was the Tanzanian counter-attack in January 1979 that finally forced Amin out of Uganda.

Gaddafi gave the defeated Amin a home – until Amin attempted to molest the Libyan dictator’s daughter. Even Muammar ‘Mad Dog’ Gaddafi was somewhat taken aback by that and Amin was thrown out again, before eventually gaining refuge and friendship in Saudi Arabia.

Amin’s psychotic rule did have one unexpected positive effect, though. Around a third of the Asians he expelled had British passports and many took their expertise, entrepreneurship and their ethos of hard work to the UK, creating a new pool of economic talent. The Asian corner shop may now be a stereotype rapidly becoming out of date, but in the 1970s it was a welcome service to many Britons and a boost to the economy. And the National Health Service recruited many new doctors and nurses.

Very much without meaning to, Idi Amin did Britain a big favour.

CHAPTER 8

POLITICS

B
y definition, the affairs of state have consequences that reach into every town, village and rocky outcrop of Britain. But the nation is a complicated place. No battle ever fought has been as complex as the economy, no scientific theory as intricate as the schools’ science education syllabus. So a conflict arises as ministers attempt to grapple with the thousand different factors and outcomes in order to reach decisions. And when the British Cabinet is trying to reach those decisions in French, as it bizarrely had to at the beginning of the eighteenth century in order to please a foreign king, it exponentially increases the chance of failure.

Perhaps uniquely in British constitutional law, the creation of the post of Prime Minister was a direct result
of the poor French spoken by Britain’s ministers of state. But it was also, less directly, the product of the conflict between a Protestant nation and its own system of monarchical succession, which, on occasion, would present a Catholic as the heir apparent. And it wasn’t mere bigotry that meant a monarch with allegiance to Rome was unacceptable – a Catholic ruler was a recipe for civil strife or outright warfare of the type that tore the country apart in the seventeenth century. In extremis, it was necessary to look overseas for a suitable heir presumptive to be – ironically – elected to a hereditary position.

George I, the first of Britain’s German Hanoverian kings, spoke no English. He had inherited the throne from his cousin Queen Anne in 1714 despite there being more than 50 relatives closer to her. But there was good reason to disqualify them: George might have been a German, but he was a Protestant German, and the others he leapfrogged over were all Papists, which ruled them out.

Now that he was king, however, he refused to sit in the corner of the room understanding nothing while all his ministers decided what was going to happen in his realm. So, in 1717, it was decided that ministerial meetings would be conducted in French – a language he did sort of understand. This led to the strange situation of everyone in the room speaking in a foreign language that few were comfortable speaking. After a number of decisions were apparently made by accident, the arrangement was abandoned, so George refused to attend any more meetings – meaning that the system of an independent
ministerial government meeting without the monarch developed. Thus it was that in 1732 Robert Walpole became the first real Prime Minister, presiding over his fellow ministers.

The mistake they had made was to attempt to serve both the private interests of the King, who wanted to retain personal charge of the doings of state (given that he was a usurper brought to power by the machinations of politicians, he could be forgiven a certain degree of paranoia about what might happen if he didn’t closely monitor what those self-same politicians were up to), and the interests of the state. Since those two sets of interests were not in synch, something had to give, and the resulting shake-up led to a new form of government far more democratic than that which had preceded it.

Now that Britain had a Prime Minister, he needed somewhere to live. There is a strong reason why national leaders in democracies live in properties provided by the state. It is not merely for the prestige of a large property – most early British PMs were very wealthy and had huge houses in London – but living in a state property divorces them from their former lives and allows them to keep the interests of the nation foremost in their minds.

Perhaps aware of this, perhaps merely as an attempt to curry favour with a man at least as powerful in Britain as himself, in 1732 George II offered Walpole 10 Downing
Street as a gift with full ownership.
*
But Walpole, fancying himself a bit of a chartered surveyor, took one look at it and decided it was going to fall down. He based his belief on the knowledge that the street’s foundations were on Thames silt, which shifted from time to time. Instead of accepting the house as a personal gift, he therefore told the King that he was not personally worthy of such a present and it should remain the possession of the crown. That said, he was more than happy to live there, thanks, so long as any repairs were paid for by the state. He moved in and resided there until he died seven years later, still waiting for it to fall down around his ears.

As it happens, that was nearly the end of the prime ministerial residence. No other PM lived at Number 10 until George Grenville, three decades later. Since then, virtually all British premiers have resided there.

There is a saying that you should never pick a fight with an ugly man because they have nothing to lose. This should have warned the British government of the day off a 20-year war of attrition with John Wilkes. Wilkes was famously
ugly, with a strange squint and a projecting jaw – but he was also strikingly charismatic and boasted that with women ‘give me half an hour and I can talk away my face’. He was, indeed, a noted rake and a fully paid-up member of the Hellfire Club, which would meet for raunchy rituals with a black-magic theme. But all this was secondary to his political radicalism. Indeed, when the Earl of Sandwich told him: ‘You will die of a pox or on the gallows,’ Wilkes replied: ‘That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your principals or your mistress.’

Already a radical MP, Wilkes became a household name as a result of a pamphlet, a strategic error of judgement on the part of the establishment, and a message sent one minute too late.

On 23 April 1763 Number 45 of the
North Briton
pamphlet (named for Wilkes’s Unionist nomenclature for a Scot) hit the streets and became an instant hit. It openly opposed the policy of George III, who had just concluded peace with France; claimed the peace was a product of French bribes paid to British officials and stated that British ministers were ‘the tools of despotism and corruption’. The King was incensed and vowed to silence Wilkes by hook or by crook.

A week later, officers of the Secretary of State, Lord Halifax, arrested Wilkes on the charge that the pamphlet was a libel and a breach of the peace, and took him to the traditional lodging in these circumstances – the Tower of London. He was held for a week and refused permission to receive visitors. While jailed, he wrote a letter to his daughter, Polly:

His friends were, indeed, being turned away at the gate – a decision by Halifax that led to perhaps the most aristocratic protest march in history, in advance of Wilkes’s first court hearing. To organise it, the Duke of Newcastle sent a letter to the Duke of Devonshire, stating: ‘Our friends are in the highest spirits upon this violent proceeding. They say the whole city of London will attend Mr Wilkes to Westminster Hall when he comes up to be bailed or discharged.’

For his part, Lord Middleton wrote to Lord Hardwicke: ‘For God’s sake, my Lord, consider well the point and show Wilkes that we will not abandon him unconvicted to the fury of an insolent minister.’

The march took place on foot and horseback, and included MPs, lawyers and at least 15 members of the nobility. One after another they approached the Tower and demanded to speak to Wilkes. Each was refused. But the resulting publicity forced Halifax to relent and allow Wilkes visitors from then on. The victory became a cause célèbre – ballads were written about the prisoner who became known as the ‘jewel in the Tower’.

As a result, the newspapers of the day suddenly became fascinated with Wilkes, and, when his case came up in the Court of Common Pleas sitting in Westminster Hall, the room was packed with his new-found supporters.
*
The hearing was not to decide whether the pamphlet was, indeed, libellous or a breach of the peace, but whether or not there was a case to answer and thus whether a warrant should have been issued. If not, he should be released immediately.

Speaking for himself, Wilkes told all who would listen:

There was silence. Then Pratt made his ruling. He said that Halifax had been right in his assessment of the nature of the pamphlet – for any ordinary man it would have been sufficient grounds for a trial. But Wilkes was not an ordinary man – he was an MP and as such he enjoyed parliamentary privilege and could not be prosecuted for his writings. The verdict was a sensation.

Unbeknownst to the court, however, the government forces ranged against Wilkes had been working on a way to overrule this privilege and had sent two representatives to hand the judge a legal argument that could have reversed the decision. But they were sent – and arrived – 30 seconds too late, for Sergeant Nares, a government prosecutor, cried out just as the decision was handed down: ‘My Lord, I have just received a note from the Attorney and Solicitor General desiring they may be heard upon the point of privilege.’

Pratt replied solemnly: ‘It is too late.’

Had the Attorney and Solicitor General taken one minute less for their scheming, they could have had Wilkes held in the Tower and smothered his rebellion at birth.
As it was, he burst out of the court in front of a tide of supporters, crying: ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’

Wilkes was not out of the woods, however. A supporter of the King, Samuel Martin, MP, challenged Wilkes to a duel in Hyde Park. Wilkes accepted the challenge and was shot in the stomach but he survived.

Having tried imprisonment and something akin to assassination without success, the government tried to undermine him another way. Wilkes had written, with Thomas Potter (the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury), a poem entitled ‘An Essay on Woman’, an eye-popping filthy parody of Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’.

Let’s compare the start of ‘Essay on Man’ (Epistle I, II. 1–8):

to ‘Essay on Woman’ (II. 1–8):

We can go on to: Pope (Epistle I, III. 9–14):

With Wilkes’s: