Notebook
Avery good joke by Princess Elizabeth of Toro. Last month I wrote something in the Spectator suggesting that she ought not to have sought damages from the British press for having reported some libellous allegations against her by the former Ugandan President, Idi Amin. Now she is asking me for damages. I had written that when Princess Elizabeth, a Cambridge graduate and former model, became Ugan- da's foreign minister in 1974, it was already widely known that Amin was a murderer; and I quoted her as saying that she decided to serve him 'in the hope of doing some good, however little', I concluded that, although she received more than £50,000 in out-of-court settlements from Fleet Street newspapers, 'as a former willing associate of Amin, she did not really deserve any financial rewards.' Although she was clear- ly libelled, an apology should have been enough', I said. According to Princess Elizabeth's solicitors, Herbert Smith and Company, the 'clear meaning' of these remarks 'is that Princess Elizabeth was morally, and possibly criminially (sic) responsible for the murder of Ugandans in accepting the office of Foreign Minister in 1974'. They go on: 'There is a further im- plication that she is hypocritical in stating that she decided to serve the regime "in the hope of doing some good" .' This is com- plete twaddle. The 'clear meaning' of my words was what they said. I was suggesting that, under the particular and unusual cir- cumstances of the case, Princess Elizabeth ought not to have sought financial compen- sation but should have been satisfied with an apology for the undoubted libels against her, The unusual circumstances were highlighted by the Sunday Times when, on 11 September, it published an extract from her new book (African Princess, Hamish Hamilton, £9.95). In its introduction to this extract, the Sunday Times said: 'There was no doubt, then, that Amin had blood on his hands. Opponents of his government and even officials within it had been killed by Arnin's gang of murderers...She (Princess Elizabeth) says: "The choice lay between flight into exile and political impotence; or serving an intolerable regime in the hope of doing some good, however little".' I took these words to mean what they said; that Princess Elizabeth, while recognising that Amin's government was 'an intolerable regime', decided to serve it 'in the hope of doing some good'. As it turned out, she did eventually head for exile in Britain and political impotence, pursued by a stream of libellous allegations from Amin which were unfortunately reported in the British press. It would be preposterous to suggest — and I most decidely did not do so — that Princess Elizabeth bore responsibility for anybody's murder, Nor did I believe or imply that she was a hypocrite. But in describing her as 'a former willing associate of Amin', I was saying no less than the truth. If she wants to get a penny out of the Spectator, she will have to take me to court. But as I said at the beginning, I am sure she must be joking.
T have a letter here from Mr Leo Larch-Symes of Bramley in Hampshire which begins: 'Your flood of material in re- cent issues on the impending sale of Reuters would move us more if you yourself were less guilty of that very suppressio
amounting to distortion, which you fear any new proprietors of Reuters might be in- clined to countenance. Would it not have been more professionally ethical to have in- formed your readers that you were for ten years a Reuters employee, and that your father was that agency's general manager and a trustee?' Mr Larch-Symes has a point. Maybe I should have informed readers of my father's and my own past connections with the company. My father indeed still has an interest in Reuters which perhaps ought to be declared; he draws a pension from the company of £30 a month. But I think Mr Larch-Symes is being a little harsh. Since I left Reuters in 1974, I had given the agency very little thought until the idea of floating it as a public company began being promoted in the financial pages of various Fleet Street newspapers. Even then it did not occur to me to write about it until it became apparent that the ethical and legal issues involved were being completely ignored. This struck me as outrageous. So I obtained a copy of the Reuters Trust Agreement from my father and gave it to the barrister Geoffrey Robertson for an objective opinion. His
opinion formed the bulk of the article which we wrote together and which was published in the Spectator of 22 October. It was, I believe, a very fair and objective arti- cle. Indeed, nobody has suggested to me that it wasn't. Confident that the article was fair, and the issues raised in it impor- tant, I thought it might be positively misleading to mention the fact that one of its authors had been a Reuters employee and that his father had run the organisation for some 15 years. As Mr Larch-Symes im- plies, readers might have thought: `Oh, well. Here's someone with a special axe to grind. What he says cannot be important.' And if they had thought that, they would have been wrong. Neither I nor my father have anything either to lose or to gain from whatever may happen to Reuters in the future. Personally, I felt inhibited from writing about it precisely because I had been an employee of the company. It was only when it appeared that nobody else would write about it that I decided to do so. And I was fortunate in having a father in a position to provide me with some useful material. Perhaps I should finally remind Mr Larch-Symes that while I do indeed, as a former employee feel some special interest in Reuters, it is an interest completely negligible in comparison with the very real interest in the company's flotation shared by practically everybody else in Fleet Street.
T am very pleased to report that Mr 1 Ferdinand Mount, our former political correspondent who defected to Number Ten Downing Street a year ago, is returning to the Spectator in January as Literary Editor. Just as we were furious with Mrs Thatcher for taking him away from us, we now owe her our thanks for letting him come back. Anybody wanting to know more about Mr Mount, or indeed about anybody else, should turn to The Gossip Family Handbook by Andrew Barrow (Hamish Hamilton, £6.95) which was published this week. They will discover on page 57 that he has ties of blood or mar- riage with Sigmund Freud, Donald Maclean, George Melly, Lord Rothschild and Bridget d'Oyly Carte. The purpose of the book is to show that everybody is con- nected with everybody else, a fact obvious already to most thinking descendants of Adam and Eve but which nevertheless has a slightly depressing effect when it is laboriously spelt out in this way. One gets the gloomy feeling that there is nobody new under the sun. The best thing in the book is a photograph of the Spectator's cook, Jen- nifer Paterson, holding up a dead hare by its hind legs. The book also appears to tell us that the legendary Geoffrey Wheatcroft is in fact almost a nephew of Mr Charles Douglas-Home and, through him, rather closely connected with the Princess of Wales. This is not the sort of information one could obtain anywhere else.
Alexander Chancellor
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