ANOTHER VOICE
Now perhaps we can have a Royal Commission on the Gibraltar shootings
AUBERON WAUGH
The Broadcasting Act, by which Inde- pendent Television franchises were last week redistributed as nannyishly as ever, according to criteria which nobody outside the Independent Television Commission can even pretend to understand, was described in Thursday's Daily Telegraph as `one of the most signal acts of folly of the last years of the Thatcher government.'
No doubt this is true, but the biggest blight cast by Lady Thatcher's shadow over the political scene is unquestionably on the European issue. It has always been the case that every bloody fool in Britain has been prepared to make angry, blimpish noises about national sovereignty at the drop of a hat. On the principle that those who lie with dogs will rise with fleas, those who lunched or dined with Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) in Downing Street during the last two years of her sojourn there seem to have risen from the table convinced that they had somehow become part of this mystical force called national sovereignty. Those of us who ate elsewhere were never under any illusion of having the slightest share in it nor, in this context, did it have any applica- tion outside the bossiness of one woman.
Yet those who ate that bread and drank that wine are still of the belief they have some relationship with the mystical source of the nation's will. Add to this the awk- ward fact that every bloody fool in the Con- servative Party is baying for a chance to jump on the national sovereignty bandwag- on, to shed his blood and lay down his life, if necessary, for the proposition that British is Best — and no need to wonder that nice Mr Major is running scared. These Knights of the Old Downing Street Table threaten to make a serious nuisance of themselves, swining up Britain's chances of establishing a sound industrial and trading base for the next two or three decades.
Charles Moore summed up the Knights' position very neatly on Friday:
The British [i.e. Knights'] sticking points are as follows. The first is the exclusion in any treaty of the word 'federal' . .. The other British thus-fars-and-no-furthers concern EEC control of defence policy, foreign policy and internal policy in matters such as immi- gration. Britain will not accept a European defence that supersedes Nato .. . It is when one thinks of the weighing of the scales, how- ever, that one is dismayed. The fact is that all the other 11 member countries are in favour, to greater and lesser degrees, of a federal Europe . ..
Only Britain, it would appear, has the intelligence to see the dangers of closer association. Or perhaps it is only the British who have the incalculable privilege of Lady Thatcher's residence among them. Never mind if the rest of the world can see that after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, Nato has no further useful role, while the existence of a European defence force becomes ever more imperative. Never mind that having lost its global justification, the United States can now be seen as hov- ering on the brink of terminal insanity — as witnessed by its approach to the Columbus quincentenary, the extreme narrowness of the vote for Judge Clarence Thomas and the inability of a single American publisher even to bid for my autobiography.
In other words, the Knights represent a serious problem. 1 do not think they should be tackled on the European issue, for the reasons I have intimated. Let us try a more oblique — some would say crab-like approach and return to the operation of the Broadcasting Act.
When Lady Thatcher's friend, Bruce Gyngell, lost his franchise for TV-am to a rival who over-bid him by more than £20 million (145 per cent) this was exactly what she appeared to have in mind: one purvey- or of moronic rubbish bought out by anoth- er and the Government slightly richer as a result. Her letter to her friend Bruce Gyn- gell, however (apparently he employed Lady Thatcher's daughter on TV-am), sug- gests that other considerations than market forces were already on her mind: `I am only too painfully aware I was responsible for the legislation. When I see how some of the other licences have been awarded I am mystified you did not receive yours, and heartbroken.'
It is true that other successful bids are harder to explain, just as unopposed bids may be hard to justify. But as an exercise in government-patronage-without-looking- like-government-patronage it at least suc- ceeded in getting rid of Thames Television by what looks like a kosher over-bid from Carlton. • I say that it 'looks like' a kosher over-bid from Carlton because it also begins to look as if the only purpose behind the whole futile exercise was to honour Tory promises to punish Thames for its documentary 'Death on the Rock', about the Gibraltar shootings.
If Thames's fate is seen as an act of revenge by the Knights, they must realise that two can play at that game. All four rejected television companies — whose franchises still have 15 months to run — will presumably be tempted to take a some- what jaundiced view of Conservative efforts to be re-elected in the run-up to the elec- tion, while Thames, the biggest company of them all, will have the additional impetus of urging a Labour government to set up a Royal Commission of Enquiry into what exactly did happen on the Rock on 6 March 1988, or the extent to which the Prime Min- ister was personally involved, and other matters arising.
The Government's account, which has never been tested in this country, is that an SAS unit was sent to arrest three IRA sus- pects in Gibraltar, rather than to execute them without trial, which would have amounted to assassination or State murder. The Government's account continues that, having challenged the suspects, the SAS men then shot them dead in the mistaken belief that they were armed, and in contact by a non-existent wireless with a non-exis- tent cache of explosives in the vicinity.
If, as was widely rumoured at the time, a SAS liaison post was set up in Downing Street throughout the period, are we to suppose that Mrs Thatcher was in personal command of the arrests? Why did two wit- nesses aver that no attempt had been made to arrest or caution the victims? Who per- suaded Mr Murdoch's Sunday Times to print an untrue and libellous attack on one of the witnesses which had the effect of dis- crediting her evidence, and why was that newspaper prepared to do so? Why did Murdoch's newspapers support Mrs Thatcher so slavishly long after most people could see she had become an elec- toral and national disaster? Why was Mur- doch, a foreigner, granted the Sky TV fran- chise despite already owning such gigantic slice of the British Press? Is it seemly and proper that Murdoch's publish- ing firm, HarperCollins, should now be publicly paying Lady Thatcher £3 million for her memoirs, when every other publish- er approached has declined to do so? These are the questions to which the RoYal Commission should address itself — and the ones we will continue to ask, until some i franchise system for weekly papers s invented which prevents us from doing s° — or until the Knights of Lady Thatcher decide to hand in their spurs and call it a day.
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