Notebook
The other day, when I was visiting one of the slums of Calcutta, my guide pointed to a group of particularly wretched women and said: 'Those are Anglo-Indian.' I looked at them long and hard but could not detect anything `Anglo' about them at all. They seemed completely Indian to me. `How do you know they are Anglo- Indians?' I asked. 'They say they are,' replied my guide. I could not understand why they should make such a claim. They appeared to be among the poorest people in the slum, with no privileges to show for their European ancestry. But as we walked away, my guide added mockingly: 'They think they have Royal blood.' I subsequent- ly learnt that there are still many thousands of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta alone. They can be distinguished less often by their ap- pearance than by their refusal to speak In- dian languages and, if they are women, to wear the sari. Many of the Anglo-Indian women are prostitutues. When there is so much to admire in Britain's legacy to India, it is sad to reflect on these pathetic people, descendants of the bastard children of British colonists, whp still cling to the idea that they are somehow superior.
At a medical college in Alexandria the students are actually taught that 90 per cent of British men are homosexuals. I hear this on good authority from a friend in, Cairo, and I wonder how many other educational establishments in Egypt include this interesting item of information in their syllabuses. The answer could be the key to a curious experience I had in Aswan in Upper Egypt earlier this year. A Nubian boatman who was rowing me across the Nile decided to strike up a conversation. Having opened the batting with the usual Egyptian for- malities — 'Welcome. You German? Ger- many good' — and having changed this, on learning of his mistake, to 'England good', he announced with great certainty: In England man marries man.' When I protested that, although the Church of England was nowadays capable of prac- tically anything, homosexual marriages were still considered somewhat unusual, he insisted that he was right, claiming that married homosexual couples were in the habit of visiting Aswan. 1 wonder where these strange ideas about British men have sprung from? There doesn't appear to be any evidence that the British are more homosexually-inclined than most other Peoples, yet the whole world seems to believe they are. And in Aswan, when I was there, the only, people who looked like homosexuals were French.
Our campaign, if that is the word for it, against Camden Council's efforts to
change the name of Selous Street has end- ed, predictably, in failure. The Greater Lon- don Council, with which the final decision rested, has approved a proposal that it should be changed to Mandela Street, after Nelson Mandela 'in recognition of the black African leader's struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa'. Thus, at the whim of Mr Ken Livingstone and his colleagues, disappears the one modest Lon- don memorial to the Camden family of Selous, whose most famous member was Captain Frederick Selous, the African hunter and explorer who was Cecil Rhodes's guide. His name was adopted by the `Selous Scouts', Mr Ian Smith's anti-insurgent force in Rhodesia, and it was this that prin- cipally embarrassed the Anti-Apartheid Movement when they recently moved their office into the street. In vain was it pointed out to them that the street was in fact nam- ed after another member of the Selous family, a Victorian painter. They demanded a change and were swiftly granted it. It was an abuse of power which further strengthens the already overwhelming case for the abolition of the GLC.
When he was running against President Ford in the primaries for the Republican nomination, Ronald Reagan was constantly abusing Dr Kissinger for wetness. `Mr Ford and Dr Kissinger ask us to trust their leadership,' he said on one oc- casion in 1976. 'Well, I find that more and more difficult to do. Henry Kissinger's re- cent stewardship of US foreign policy has coincided precisely with the loss of US military supremacy.' Mr Reagan has a point. Henry Kissinger's achievements in- cluded the loss by America of Vietnam, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and the Panama Canal. So why has the President suddely appointed him head of his special Commission on Central America? It is unlikely to have been admiration for the success of his Middle East shuttle diplomacy. Perhaps it was admiration for his one major achievement in Latin America, the overthrow of President Allende in Chile and his replacement by the dictatorship of General Pinochet. In any event, President Reagan has now changed his tune about Dr Kissinger, describing him as 'virtually a legend'. This is probably the explanation. You can't leave a 'virtual legend' sitting around indefinitely with nothing to do, even if you do not like him. And there is no doubt that Dr Kissinger's career is a legend in at least one sense of the word — that defined by the Oxford Dic- tionary as 'an unauthentic story handed down by tradition and popularly regarded as historical'. There have always been powerful attempts to expose it by, among others, William Shawcross and, just lately, Seymour Hersch , whose book demolishing Dr Kissinger, The Price of Power, is a best- seller in Washington. But somehow the legend appears indestructible.
As suicide is no longer a crime in Britain, I suppose a judge is perfectly within his rights to commend it. It is after all a way of getting rid of people who are miserable and therefore unlikely to be contributing to the gaiety of the nation. But committing suicide, as the existence of EXIT proves, is not always very easy, and I think Judge Ber- trand Richards was unkind to bo so critical of failure. Transferring a criminal who had made several unsuccessful suicide attempts from a psychiatric home to prison, he said: 'I wish these people would show more effi- ciency about these overdoses, how much trouble they would save.' But then Judge Richards seems to have little time for anybody he finds messing around in an unorthodox manner. It was he who 18 mon- ths ago expressed the view that a girl who goes hitchhiking in the dark is more or less asking to be raped. His record confirms my opinion that it must be great fun to be a judge. Judges enjoy a freedom to express their personal opinions that is granted to nobody else.
It is now nearly two years since Sir James Goldsmith announced in the Times that he was offering 'an annual prize of £50,000 for the best investigative journalism into subversion in the media'. Since then we have heard nothing more about it. Why is this? Does he consider that the problem of 'subversion' in the media no longer exists? No, he doesn't think that, for only a few days ago he was again describing the magazine Private Eye as a 'cancer' in need of surgical attention. Perhaps he can no longer afford such a generous prize, but this explanation is also unconvincing because he has just got £85,000 from the magazine in libel damages and costs.
Alexander Chancellor
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