Belgrano Tam
James Naughtie
The second anniversary of the Falklands invasion has passed; now we await the anniversary of Tam Dalyell's first question O the sinking of the General Belgrano. Like Fortress Falklands itself he goes on, i surer with every day that goes by that he is right and ready to pursue his campaign for an official inquiry as far into the future as he can see. His efforts to prove that the cruiser was sunk on 2 May 1982 as a deliberate act of bellicosity by Mrs Thatcher for essentially domestic political reasons (and because of her reluctance to see the embryo Peruvian Peace plan succeed) have made him some- thing of a cult figure in the Labour Party and well beyond, an object of hate in some quarters and a pain in the neck for the Prime Minister. So from wherever you stand it should be simple to understand bun: either Mr Valiant-for-Truth or Thatcher-hater extraordinary. But Tam do. es not let you off so lightly. He is fien- dishlY complicated. Through his own history there runs a thread of ambiguity. The Tory at Cam- brdge who turned Socialist after the Army; the Old Etonian who represents (and delights) the miners and car workers of Lothian; the rebel — against the Govern- ment and sometimes his own party who a _pillar of the Commons; the man of studied courtesy who accuses the Prime Minister of 'grave crimes' including Murder. The Establishment and Tam are always Partners in an intriguing dance: advancing towards each other gently, reaching out at each other, then retreating cl..uickly. Sometimes they are as one, and then again they drift away. ht • the mainspring of his political career was ts tune as Dick Crossman's PPS in the Six- ales when he learned the ways of Whitehall neverdeveloped a respect for many of its pro- _esses and strange characters which he has his lost. Indeed it is precisely because of nis respect for hierarchy and the ordered ways of government that his opposition is
so unremitting and fierce when he believes one of the high and mighty has betrayed the public trust. This helps to account for the apparently random collection of causes with which he has been associated: the fate of the turtles of Aldabra, the desirability of an opt-out system for removing kidneys for transplant after death, the future of Diego Garcia, the necessity of continuing animal experiments at Porton Down and, of course, looming over it all, his successful crusade against devolution in the form of the Scotland Act, putting his 'West Lothian Question' into the language (north of the border at least) as a kind of souped-up Schleswig-Holstein question, destined to torment Scots for years to come. The fact that, in the process, it brought down the Callaghan government gives it the authentic air of originality which clings to any Dalyell escapade.
Of course it helps that he looks the part. There's an ever-present sense of chaos about his appearance, his movements, his approach to the issue of the moment. Though he has a formidable filing system and an almost obsessive desire to recite chapter and verse for each allegation, there are great leaps and hops in his arguments which sometimes leave his listeners dizzy. He sees the Panorama furore over right- wing infiltration into the Conservative Par- ty, for example, as another piece of the mosaic whose centrepiece is the scene at pre-lunch drinks at Chequers on 2 May 1982, when Mrs Thatcher gave the order: 'Sink the Belgrano.' Mr Gummer has been set on the BBC, he suspects, because Panorama know too much about the Belgrano facts. Other events, unrelated to the central question in his listeners' minds, are effortlessly harnessed to the Great Theme. So it takes on a life of its own, as if it is sweeping Tam along in its wake and he can do nothing to resist. He rises regularly from his great mound of documents and papers scattered over his familiar place behind the front bench to put another stream of ques- tions, or to recap on the story so far (documented in a truly extraordinary col- lection of cuttings, papers, books, memoranda, transcripts and scraps of information). Then later in the evening you may catch sight of him dashing for a train to whisk him to a far-off public meeting (in one six-month period he addressed 47 such gatherings, with strikingly large audiences). In that sense he is the perfect backbencher: probing, sifting, challenging and casting a beady and sceptical eye over everything issued in the name of authority.
Which is he? Sober and meticulous advo- cate of a powerful case, or cranky Quixote, lost in a forest of windmills? No one who watches him regularly could doubt his painstaking honesty and the care with which he sets about his task. About the out- come, of course, there is much more room for doubt: if you go about your task with Tam's zeal and your compass setting is wrong you will end up a long way off course. But in his meanderings, though they carry him to some strange spots, he achieves a lot: already in the Belgrano saga, though his central thesis still suffers from lack of the clinching evidence, he has forced ministers to revise key details of the story, and has exposed much about the Falklands campaign which would otherwise have remained unknown, presumably for 30 years. A steady trickle of converts still flows towards him (including, it is said, some Tories who admit privately that he has a point) and it will be surprising if before the thing is over he has not embarrassed some more ministers, and produced some new surprises. What is certain is that he is not going to stop.
And always he will keep up his curious relationship with the Establishment. The other day, while singling out Lord Shackle- ton (an old opponent on some Falklands matter) as a significant voice of support for one of his claims, he told the Commons that his Lordship's support was given even more weight by the fact that he was a Knight of the Garter. Thus the rebel ap- pears for a moment to be still at one with the old Establishment. It is the ambiguity caught nicely in his constituency, where his stately home — The Binns — sits on a hill- top, looking down over the working-class areas to which so much of the Laird's energies are directed.
The enigma persists. And if you ask this campaigner and sceptic if he is happy to be called the Great Backbencher you will get what is the most surprising answer of all, and the one which is maybe the clue that ex- plains everything, his refusal to accept that the role of the outsider, in questioning and challenging, is in the end different from the insider's as he grapples with power. He says with that familiar sigh: 'I want to be a minister.' If he became one it would be fun.
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