POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Heath and the hijackers

PETER PATERSON

The end of the hijacking affair is not yet in sight as I write this column, and one now tends to believe the Palestine guerrillas when they *threaten 'unimaginable' reprisals: who knows, by the end of this week half the British cabinet could be sitting in captivity in

some desert hideaway, or the fedayeen might have blown up Big Ben. It is necessary, in

other words, to be extremely cautious before handing down a verdict on the behaviour of Mr Heath and his colleagues in their hand- ling of this crisis. Having entered that reser- vation it is fair to say—however grudgingly —that the Prime Minister kept his cool ad- mirably, that he demonstrated that a good player can produce useful cards even when dealt a dreadful hand, and that he accom- plished what had to be done with an absence of posturing and self-publicity which deafen- ingly rebukes his predecessor in office. Harold on the box calling on the nation to remember the hostages in their prayers and confiding that he had been speaking to Presi- dent Nixon and Mr Kosygin on the hot line would have been too much to bear.

How far Mr Heath himself called the shots, and how far strategy was dictated by Sir Alec Douglas-Home as Foreign Secretary, I do not pretend to know. It is too soon for members of the Cabinet to have let slip hints of their own courageous demeanour during those suspenseful days, or for doves or hawks to be identified. All I can offer as a bathetic footnote to history is the story of how arrangements were put in hand for Sir Alec to fly to Rome for a meeting of the Western European Union without being hi- jacked en route. It was decided that it would be unsafe for the Foreign Secretary to travel

by commercial airline, but the RAF was

unable at short notice to provide a suitable conveyance. With immense resourcefulness permission was then obtained to use an air- craft of the Queen's Flight: the one chosen was an Andover- which, so I was told, Sir Alec on foot could have raced to Rome. In the end, of course, he decided to stay at home, but the fact that such a journey was contemplated" even after the extent of the crisis was known, coupled with the firmly denied but persistent rumours that Sir Alec is not in good health, provides circumstantial evidence for the belief that this was Mr Heath's show rather than the Foreign Secre- tary's. Could it be that after the precipitate bungling over the South African arms busi- ness the Prime Minister has decided to take charge of foreign affairs himself?

Certainly Mr Michael Stewart, as Mr Wilson's Foreign Secretary, did little to de- monstrate that a Prime Minister anxious about his image can safely leave such an important area of policy for someone else to run. Indeed, one of his most embarrassing bygones, the invasion of Anguilla, is about to pop into the news once more with the publication some time later this month of the report of the Commonwealth Commission under the chairmanship of Sir Hugh Wood- ing into the ludicrous history of Stewart's War, as some people called it at the time (others reserved that title for the Nigerian civil war: each displayed Mr Stewart's Haig- like stubbornness, but only Biafra caused casualties on a Haig-like scale). The trouble is that the Commission will probably concen- trate on the future status of Anguilla as a reluctant member (or non-member) of the St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla federation without de- voting sufficient attention to the errors and shortcoming of the Foreign and Common- wealth Office and Mr Stewart: racialist Bri- tain could not be expected to swallow criticism by a former chief justice of Trini- dad of a parliamentary system which allowed the Foreign Secretary to go to war on the basis of a series of excuses and explanations which later turned out to be entirely untrue. Remember the stories of the Mafia taking over (which led to the expulsion of a harm- less missionary and an osteopath, both of American citizenship), the tales, never authenticated, of arson and murder and gun- running? Do you recall the dismissal of the British Commissioner Mr Anthony Lee, and Mr Stewart's insistence in Parliament that he was merely going on leave and would later return to his post? (In case later events have clouded memories, there was never any intention that Mr Lee should return, nor— despite the swift resignation of his successor, Mr Cumber—has he done so.) Mr. Ronald Webster, whose leadership of the islanders against what they regarded as the tyranny of Mr Bradshaw and his regime in St Kitts, aroused Mr Stewart to such impotent fury, remains very much the leader of his_people. If a British judge or a British Parliamentary commission had been appointed to look into this humiliating and unnecessary fiasco, Mr Stewart, now returned to the back benches, might well have been impeached, for to make one's country the laughing stock of the world is probably the only credible modern form of treason.

Sir Alec. of course, will have to cope with the Wooding report, which can hardly be published before Mr Joseph Godber, his Minister of State, returns on Saturday from his quick visit to the Caribbean. Mr God- bees task is to acquaint both Mr Webster and Mr Bradshaw with a guide to the report's contents: if it recommends that the status quo of this fiddling little federation must be preserved, Sir Alec is in deep trouble. A squad of London policemen and half a company of Royal Engineers remain on Anguilla, but they will hardly be sufficient to deal with the wrath of the islanders. If the commission recommends independence for Anguilla, the dour and brooding Mr

Bradshaw will not only express his dis- pleasure verbally, but, as I understand it, actually has the legal power to challenge and ignore the commission's findings.

However, and here is the link between the Palestinian hijacking of the vc 10 and the history of the Anguillan affair, an RAF Andover aircraft sits on the nearby island of Antigua, carefully camouflaged against hostile shotgun fire, ready to airlift British paratroops into Anguilla, as it previously airlifted Lord Caradon and Mr William Whitlock at moments of crisis. If a Carib- bean Rome is burning, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, we may count on it, will not cancel an Andover as it did last week in the case of the European, or Home Rome.

But there is a more important link between the two. Anguilla, and Biafra, and the affair of arms for South Africa are all illustrations of the trouble British foreign policy gets into when-it attempts an activist role. Mr Wilson's various Vietnam initiatives and the last at- tempt to reach an accommodation with Mr Ian Smith over the future of Rhodesia con- firm the point:• all such attempts have ended in failure, often larded with humiliation. There was probably a moment in the Rhode- sian saga, very early on, when an Anguilla- type operation could have been effective: but when that moment passed with Mr Wilson's renouncement of the use of force, only impotence and frustration remained. In Nigeria, again, principle had to be subordin- ated to a Foreign Office view of events which had more to do with an inherited orderly view of the past than with present- day realities, and the upshot of that one was to give Britain a reputation for a callous disregard of the right of minority nations.

It almost seems that this country could afford a foreign policy while it still had an empire to dismantle, for the returns, in good- will and hard trade, of that exercise were obvious. Since then we have adopted an extraordinary mix- of independence and a reliance on the United Nations to pull our irons out of the fire—combined with a deep resentment of the United Nations.

Why Mr Heath's handling of the hi- jacking affair looked good was because Britain was doing what nearly all foreign affairs experts, including successive Foreign Secretaries and Prime Ministers, deplore: we were reacting to events. The theory is that a country which allows itself to be blown by the winds of the world cannot possibly have a happy foreign relations policy. But getting out and doing something so often ends in disaster that there must be some merit in -doing nothing, or at any rate, doing only the minimum necessary to show that we are still a sovereign power determined,, as far as pos- sible, to protect our voyaging citizens, play our part in helping the developing nations, use our good offices in other people's quar- rels and generally not overstretch our pre- sent resources by pining for a world role we have long since retired from.

Mr Heath will have taught us all a valu- able lesson if he emerges from these last miserable days with the ad hoc alliance of nations which have suffered from the atten- tions of the hijackers intact and united, with the hostages freed, or on their way to being freed, and with the more extreme guerrilla groups in an Arab doghouse. For he will have taught us, perhaps unwittingly, that the object of a British foreign policy in these dangerous days is indeed to react to events —but to react with style.