How did an immigrant to England get into the Home Secretary’s office?
News that various Nigerian cleaners, working on Home Office premises dealing with immigration, were themselves illegal immigrants was amusing enough. But people are always wandering around Home Office premises whom staff cannot be expected immediately to identify, no matter how hard staff might try.
First Nigerian cleaner: ‘Excuse me, sir. Do you work here?’ John Reid: ‘Aye.’ ‘For how long?’ ‘About a week. Just gettin’ t’noo the place.’ Second Nigerian cleaner: ‘What language is he speaking?’ First Nigerian: ‘English, but with a foreign accent. He obviously wasn’t born here. Do you have any means of identification, sir?’ Mr Reid: ‘Ah doo nay need it.’ Second Nigerian: ‘We’ve all got to have our passes, mister. But I won’t call security yet. You’re obviously one of us. We illegals must stick together. Then, in the end, they’ll let us stay. But we’ll not help a terrorist. You’re not one, are you? You say you’ve been here a week. Where did you work before that?’ Mr Reid: ‘At the Ministry of Defence.’ First Nigerian: ‘That means he’s been involved in bombing. He could be dangerous. How long were you there?’ Mr Reid: ‘About a year.’ Second Nigerian: ‘And before that?’ Mr Reid: ‘Department of Health.’ First Nigerian: ‘And for how long were you there?’ Mr Reid: ‘About a year.’ Second Nigerian: ‘Bit of a drifter, eh? How come you’ve been sacked so often? You can’t be a competent cleaner.’ Mr Reid: ‘Listen, Jimmy. I’ve had to clean up after one Cabinet minister after another — the latest being that Charles Clarke. Heard of him?’ First Nigerian: ‘Never heard of him. Is he an illegal too?’ Second Nigerian: ‘Clarke? I remember him. The fat guy with the ears. Kept on losing foreign criminals. Useless cleaner too. Blair had to deport him. No wonder this new guy’s frightened.’ First Nigerian (addressing Mr Reid authoritatively): ‘If you are deported too, do you have a well-founded fear of persecution in your country of origin?’ Mr Reid: ‘Absolutely. I’d have to live there. That bastard Brown would see to that if he gets Tony’s job. But I am to stop him.’ First Nigerian: ‘That sounds like a threat to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. You’re a crazy. What’s your religion?’ Mr Reid: ‘Blairite. In my country, there’s a Macfatwa against us. I’m not threatening anyone. Brown’s threatening me. Please don’t send me back.’ Second Nigerian: ‘Relax, man. We don’t like Brown either. He keeps on going to Africa to be photographed with our children. That’s not healthy. Also, by handing total control over interest rates and monetary policy to the Bank of England, he’s a crypto-Friedmanite, whereas I’m an unreconstructed Keynesian. Just you slip away, and good luck.’ Later a Home Office official, asked by the all-party Commons Home Affairs Committee how many former home secretaries were still in the country, replied, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ The British press has under-reported ‘Clearstream’ — the name of a Luxembourg financial institution which is the least important aspect of the present French political scandal but which, like ‘Watergate’, has become the accepted name for it. A couple of reasonable summings-up in the Times, one good, meaty dispatch from Paris in the Sunday Telegraph; not much else. Admittedly, it is complex, but such affairs normally are, on the face of it. They can be pared down to the essentials, if at some expense to the subtleties.
I would like, however, to draw attention to a coincidence: Clearstream comes on the 100th anniversary of the climax of the father of all French political affaires, the one by which all others must be judged: Dreyfus.
One afternoon 100 years ago next month, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was decorated in a courtyard of the Ecole Militaire in Paris with the Legion of Honour. He stood close to the place where, just over a decade before, he had been stripped of his rank, his sword broken, and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil’s Island in the West Indies for treason: selling military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. The officers who confronted him with his alleged treason all those years before had shown him a revolver, hoping that he might do the right thing.
Dreyfus was convicted on the strength of what became known as the bordereau; a ‘statement’ or ‘summary’ — a list to do with French military information, which a chambermaid, working for French intelligence, is said to have retrieved from a wastepaper basket in the German embassy. French intelligence decided it was in Dreyfus’s handwriting. Clearstream also begins with a list; sent anonymously to French judges. It contained the names of prominent people alleged to have opened illegal private bank accounts through Clearstream. One of them was Mr Sarkozy, the Minister of the Interior.
Le Monde last week quoted Didier Maus, professor of constitutional law at the Sorbonne, as saying that this list resembles ‘in a certain manner, the false bordereau in the Dreyfus Affair. That was enough to send him for five years to Devil’s Island.’ The professor was incorrect. The ‘Dreyfus’ bordereau was not ‘false’. It was just that Dreyfus did not write it. That was the work of another officer, Esterhazy; selling secrets to the Germans to pay for high living.
The Clearstream bordereau seems to have been a forgery. When he heard about it, Mr Villepin, then foreign minister, ordered an intelligence officer, General Rondot, to investigate it, especially the aspect concerning Mr Sarkozy, his presidential rival. General Rondot has now given press interviews. He says that Mr Villepin told him that Mr Chirac wanted it investigated too. The general denies being the forger. He heavily implied that that was Jean-Louis Gergorin, a defence expert who once employed the young Mr Villepin. Mr Gergorin denies it.
Mr Sarkozy basks in his status of victim; assuming that it will help him in the presidential election that is now just a year away. The affaire has already helped to put him well ahead of Mr Villepin in the opinion polls, though the student demonstrators who defeated Mr Villepin’s employment reform is a bigger reason for that.
A last coincidence: both affaires contain Frenchmen of Hungarian origin: Esterhazy and Sarkozy; one the culprit, the other keen to be the victim; the former, exposed as the traitor, fled to England, where he earned a living as a journalist for French newspapers and lived under the suitably bogus-sounding name of Count Jean-Marie de Voilemont; dying in 1923, buried in unglamorous Harpenden churchyard. Dreyfus, after service in the first world war, died in 1935. We await the outcome of Clearstream.
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