Billy McLean
Sir: If, as Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote last week, it was sometimes difficult to know what Billy McLean was really up to, it was always evident that, officially or unofficial- ly, he was pursuing Britain's interests. He was also passionately devoted to the in- terests of the many Moslem countries which he visited. When, as he said to me in Teheran in the 1960s, a particular course of action would be 'good for Britain, and good for Iran', that was quite clearly the objective which he was always seeking.
The fall of the Shah was neither good for Britain nor for Iran, in Billy's view. While he would privately agree that the Shah had his faults, he correctly foresaw what would happen were he to be deposed, and was critical of the Spectator for suggesting that the Shah should go. (He later wrote articles for the Spectator on Somalia and the Yemen: 11 March and 8 July 1978.) Mr Leigh Fermor's description of Billy McLean's most engaging character is well illustrated by Wilfred Thesiger. In Desert, Marsh and Mountain, he relates that, when they were together in the Yemen in 1967 and Thesiger was hit by a splinter from a shell burst, Billy's reaction was to complain that his box of cigars had been soaked by blood from the wound in Thesiger's head. Simon Courtauld
Editor, The Field, Carmelite House, London EC4
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