11 NOVEMBER 2006, Page 30

It was too risky for Chavez to be seen with a left-wing extremist like Livingstone

An ‘embarrassed’ Mayor Livingstone was reported this week to have flown back to London from Caracas. President Hugo Chavez had ‘shunned’ him. The official reason for Señor Chavez’s cancelling their meeting was given as ‘time constraints of the presidential election campaign’. But the Guardian reported that questions persisted ‘about the motives for the cancellation amid suggestions in Caracas that a visit from Mr Livingstone could be politically awkward for Mr Chavez as he campaigns for re-election’.

According to the Guardian, the Chavez– Livingstone summit was originally for the purpose of signing ‘the recently agreed “oil for brooms” deal, under which London officials will advise Caracas on running public services while Mr Chavez provides the British capital with Venezuelan oil. But the deal has become a political minefield for Mr Chavez ... with his opponents accusing him of giving away cheap oil to rich countries while securing little in return for Venezuela’s poor.’ Some of us reading that dispatch could have done with rather more explanation from the Guardian of this ‘oil for brooms’ deal. ‘Brooms’ could be a euphemism for the more advanced equipment needed to keep spotless the streets of Livingstone’s London. But perhaps London has long been broom-rich, and Livingstone’s intention, with the deal, was to use his broom-wealth to gain influence over Caracas. Tehran would be next. In due course, his brooms would each be exported with a jolly Polish domestic servant. The value of London brooms would be even greater. Soon Livingstone would form an international broom cartel. Broom-hungry countries such as Venezuela would become dependent on him.

Could it be, however, that Señor Chavez’s cancellation of the London ruler’s visit is simply proof that he at last realises that this man Livingstone is a left-wing extremist? Perhaps Venezuelan foreign office experts on London’s internal politics have at last convinced him of the reality of life under Livingstone. His election strategists, desperate to keep Livingstone out of Caracas, might have shown him DVDs depicting the conditions in, say, Chelsea — a teeming barrio on the west of the city. ‘It looks all right to me,’ might have been the President’s first reaction. ‘The women look a bit thin, though.’ The Venezuelan foreign office’s top London-watcher would have seized on that. ‘No wonder their womenfolk are thin, El Commandante. They have to eat only the national dishes forced on them by the system: muesli, Caesar salad, botox.’ It would then be explained to the President that, sure, Chelsea women could put on a few calories by succumbing to a Krispy Kreme Doughnut at Harrods: a huge collective on which they depend for subsistence. But then they run the risk of being subjected to torture in one of the dreaded LA Fitness Gyms. True, Chelsea people own tractors but Livingstone’s totalitarian ‘congestion charge’ makes it impossible to drive far in one. The Chelsea tractor drivers are reduced to amusing themselves by running over the occasional old soldier, known as a ‘Chelsea pensioner’.

Whatever the explanation for his abandoning his ally, it looks as if Señor Chavez is now a Livingstone revisionist. That can only help weaken Livingstone’s exploitive broom diplomacy.

In this Suez season, one thing is much mentioned about Anthony Eden. However wrong he was at Suez, he at least resigned as Chamberlain’s foreign secretary in 1938 over appeasement.

That resignation was in February 1938; Munich not being until the autumn. The resignation was over Italy, not Germany, since Italy and Germany were not yet firm allies. Eden thought Mussolini a threat in the Mediterranean. As the subsequent war was to show, Britain contained that threat well. A Whitehall minute has Chamberlain commenting, ‘It seemed to me that we need not be afraid of attack by Italy.’ At about the same time — months before Munich Eden agreed with Chamberlain that Britain should not become involved in central-eastern Europe and that Czechoslovakia would have to be abandoned. Another document has him agreeing with Chamberlain’s observation ‘that we ought not to become involved in a war on account of Czechoslovakia’.

British voters knew nothing of those thoughts of his. To many of them, Eden remained the youthful idealist. Then early in 1938 President Roosevelt secretly proposed to Chamberlain that the United States appeal for an international conference in an attempt to settle these European questions. Chamberlain suggested that the idea be postponed. He told his diary that the plan was ‘fantastic and likely to excite the derision of Germany and Italy’. He did not believe that, if it came to it, Roosevelt would act against Germany, as United States policy between the German invasion of Poland and Pearl Harbor proved. Chamberlain rejected Roosevelt. The Chamberlain diary says that he did not tell Eden ‘in view of the secrecy on which Roosevelt insisted in emphatic terms’.

Eden resigned. Ever since, it has been suggested that his famous ‘pique’ was an important reason; something which came out at Suez. Still, it is perhaps the most baffling of Cabinet resignations. Voters had no knowledge of the Roosevelt initiative. They were left to assume that Eden vaguely signalled that Chamberlain’s foreign policy had gone wrong.

Giving such a signal seems to have alarmed Eden. Chamberlain’s policy was still well supported. So Eden, on the back benches, did not align himself closely with Churchill. His voice at Munich — where was carried out the policy which he himself had accepted as foreign secretary — was muted and ambiguous. He certainly did not demand war.

When war came, and for years afterwards, until these Suez commemorations, it was much assumed that he had resigned over appeasement of Germany, or even over Munich. That is to judge after the event.

There remains the description of him, at his resignation, in Churchill’s memoirs: ‘One strong figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender.’ That was written after the war, when Churchill needed Eden’s goodwill and much of the Conservative party wanted Churchill to give way to Eden as Opposition leader. As usual, as with Eden’s resignation itself, the best guide to what happened is the time when something was said and done, not what was said long afterwards.