Another voice
Take his hat and his Levy
Auberon Waugh
Mr Graham Greene once wrote about his school days at Berkhamsted: 'Appalling cruelties could be practised without a second thought; one met for the first time characters, adult and adolescent, who bore about them the genuine quality of evil.'
Everybody who went to a British public school will remember such characters. I often wonder what happened to them in later life — the sadistic school prefect I knew so well whose only pleasure or purpose in life was to inflict terror and misery on those whom the system put at their mercy. I never meet them now but presumably these people survive, collecting power and responsibility, spreading misery in their own little corners.
Some, undoubtedly, go into the law, others into the armed forces — anywhere which offers the chance of administering foolish rules with as much cruelty and pedantry as possible. But the vast majority, I feel sure, disappear into the maw of government administration — the home and foreign services, where their particular activities can be hidden under the mantle of the appropriate Secretary, of State.
I only became aware of this huge force for evil within our administrative system at quite a late stage, during the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70. There I found officials of the former Commonwealth Office, newly merged with the Foreign Office and still containing every minor public school's output of dregs, punks and unemployables for the past forty years, cheerfully engaged in assisting a blockade which they knew was starving to death some two thousand civilians every day — mostly children — with whom they had no quarrel. On top of this, they were prepared to lie about it quite brazenly, assuring the press through our incomparable lobby system that the International Committee of the Red Cross figures were, hopelessly exaggerated, the World Council of Churches was biased and that any journalist who reported otherwise was corrupt and in the pay of the Biafran rebels. So they went on through two million deaths; the Labour Party supported them in Parliament and the rest of the country couldn't have given a damn either way.
It is only when one has come face to face with this particular kink in the administrative mentality that one begins to understand what hell it must be to live in Russia. But while it is easy — and rather soothing — to accept that Russian bureaucrats happily consign many hundreds of their fellow citizens to labour camps every year, it is much harder to accept that the same murderous instincts fester — and occasionally prevail — among our own beloved public
servants. Many years after the event,we learned of the forcible repatriation of over a million reluctant Sovjet citizens at the end of the war: how, on Foreign Office orders, these people were tricked and bludgeoned into cattle trucks and prison ships by British soldiers and sailors to execution and imprisonment in Stalin's Russia.
Even today, alone of any civilised nation, the British Foreign Office keeps up the pretence that Germany, not Russia, was responsible for the mass murder of Polish officers at Katyn Wood in 1940. Now the suppression of evidence of this scmt is a very serious matter. If any private citizen, for instance, were to protect a mass murderer and swear that the murders were committed by someone else, knowing this to be a lie, the law would take a very dim view of such behaviour. Yet generation after generation of Foreign Office spokesmen have done exactly this rvithout a flicker of remorse and it is this school-prefect tradition of infantile Realpolitik which explains, I feel sure, both the Foreign Office's indirect involvement in the mass murder of Cossacks, Ukrainians and White Russians after the last war and its much more immediate involvement in the mass murder of Biafran civilians in the Nigerian civil war (for which nobody has yet been brought to justice).
I tell all this partly as a general warning against the mentality which regards foreign affairs as a sort of horror peep-show, mildly enjoyable on the understanding that it could never happen here, and partly as a preamble to a real-life story which illustrates the spirit of the Helsinki agreement as it affects our own immigration procedures.
On the first point, I am convinced that the real danger of a Soviet-style regime in Britain does not come from the handful of Trots and troublemakers on the factory floor, or even from the handful of boneheaded bully-boys like Moss Evans on the National Executive of the Labour Party. It comes from the great corps of school prefects, largely apolitical but power maniacs and sadists to a man, which forms the permanent administration of the Civil
Spectator 28 May 1977 Service. It is just kept in check for the moment by what is left of a democratic system of government and by the fag-end of a free press. Meanwhile, all those Wykehamists and would-be Wykehamists from Cambridge and the redbrick universities are just waiting their moment to issue us with identity cards, internal passports, meat ration cards, zoned residential permits and foreign currency allocations for use ill tourist shops forbidden to ordinary citizens. So let us examine the spirit of Helsinki as it descends upon the Consular Section of the British Embassy in Moscow, whose entry clearance officer is called Joan Norman. I know about this case because it concerns the ex-wife of my colleague, David Levy, who has been Moscow correspondent of the Spectator for five years. His ex-wife; Nijole Levy, with whom he is on goo', terms, lives in the Lithuanian town ol Vilnius with theirthree-and-a-half-year-old, daughter called Ugne, who is the apple °,1 her father's eye. At one time Nijole settled with David in Canada, but decided that her Lithuanian patriotism was too strong; hence the divorce. Ugne has a Canadian passport. David now alternates between London and Moscow, from which it is not possible to visit his daughter in Vilnius without elaborate visas requiring at leas', forty-eight hours' notice. All he wants is inr his ex-wife to be able to bring hisdaugliteAr on visits to London from time to time, pal' for by himself. Not too much to ask, you might think, the new spirit of the Helsinki Agreement' promising a relaxation of travel restrictions across the Iron Curtain. As the English Prime Minister said at Helsinki: 'There is no, reason why in 1975 Europeans should not be allowed to travel abroad when and where they want and meet whom they want' who a r ew prepareda s good d e tnoo ul egt h Mrsf for Lt hee v yR and sdi ans' sdi ans' rt daughter come and go as they please. Buthie is not good enough for Joan Norman of t .0 British Embassy's Consular Section l Moscow. On 29 March 1977 she wrote abruptly to Mrs Levy in Vilnius: 'You have d applied for a visa to come to the united Kingdom for six months but the Secret of State is not satisfied that youinten, A to leave the United Kingdom at the end of t)iis period. I therefore refuse your applieati°11f If either Miss Norman or the Secretor!' Id State State had bothered to inquire, they vvntt have discovered there was not the slight,_'e'r possibility of Mrs Levy overstaying leave. So much for the British Gov,e ment's belief in free travel across the Curtain. The saddest footnote to the storoYi'cl supplied by Dr Andrei Sakharov, an . friend of Levy's who has worked with on many civil rights issues in the Sot; Union. When Levy told him this s illustrating the humanity of the so' f the authorities against the inhumanity t) ..,as British authorities, Sakharov 'no dumbfounded and could simply nlakjeoan reply. A bull's eye, surely, for Ms Norman and Mr Merlyn Rees.
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