Political commentary
Scapegoat and spivmaster
Ferdinand Mount
September is an underrated month, a good time to patrol the garden and wonder why the lawn, even when dappled with late sun, does not look quite like the picture on the seedsman's catalogue. In years past, when rummaging in the garden shed or throwing clippings on the rubbish heap, I have at this season noticed a neat, dark, bright-eyed man of medium height doing much the same on the other side of the garden wall. We used to exchange polite smiles. That was about the limit of our acquaintance. Typical of the social distance maintained by English neighbours, except that my former neighbour, Mr Louis Walker, is South African.
His citizenship has not, however, prevented him from being cast as Britain's Scapegoat of the Year. Indeed the general rule is, if you cannot blame someone who is dead, then blame a foreigner. The buck, passed with such dazzling rapidity from Downing Street to the Commonwealth Relations Office and then on to Shell Centre and Britannic House, has finally come to rest on the desk of the general manager of the joint company managing Shell and BP's interests in southern Africa at the time, to wit, Mr Walker.
Of all the politicans and senior civil servants and oil men all over the world who have been concerned with oil sanctions against Rhodesia, Mr Walker stands in lonely and extraordinary eminence as the only man to be specifically and repeatedly blamed in the mammoth report on sanctions-busting presented to the Foreign Secretary by Mr Tom Bingham Q.C. Dr Kaunda flies into hysterics; the Prime Minister and Dr Owen fly to Kano to soothe his brow with compresses of British money; the UN and the Labour Party Conference prepare to froth with indignation. And all this, we are led to believe, can be traced back to Mr Walker's failure to pass on everything he knew. It is a remarkable indictment of a single individual.
Mr Walker, the report claims in its final conclusions, should have told his superiors in London in detail and at every oppor tunity how oil was getting through to Rhodesia. 'This ignorance led HMG and the top management of the Groups unwit tingly to make statements and give assurances which they would not have done with full knowledge of the facts.'
Sir Eric Drake of BP and Sir Frank McFadzean of Shell, Lord Thomson of Monifieth, then Commonwealth Secretary, nay, Sir Harold Wilson himself — all, it seems, are as blameless as the day is long. They were hoodwinked or kept in the dark. No wonder Mr Bingham's learned colleagues gasp in admiration and shower on him the ultimate compliment 'By God, he's stuck to his brief.' The lad will go far. Yet if you look at the actual evidence in the report, the picture is somewhat different.
Direct supplies of oil to Rhodesia were cut off the moment that clear instructions were received in London within a few days of the Sanctions Order coming into effect on 17 December 1965. Mr Walker himself checked that the valve connecting the Shell Mozambique tanks to the Beira pipeline was locked. He instructed his depot managers not to sell to any trader with Rhodesian number plates, personally visiting the depots in northern Transvaal to emphasise to his managers 'the dangers to the directors in London if the company was found to have contravened the order.' Several regular customers were blacklisted because they were known to have crossed the border into Rhodesia. Mr Walker himself actually crossed over into Rhodesia to investigate the chain of supply but was recognised by a former employee of Shell South Africa and was ushered out of the country by the police. These do not seem to be the actions of a man who is merely going through the motions of observing a sanctions order. Indeed oilmen inside Rhodesia complained that Walker was being 'overassiduous' in observing sanctions.
Mr Bingham gives Mr Walker some credit for his behaviour in the first six months of oil sanctions. But the report then claims that towards the end of 1966 Mr Walker's attitude towards sanctions changed. Instead of 'striving officiously' to make sure that no oil got through to Rhodesia, he merely attempted to make sure that the letter of the law was observed, although he did tell both the Ministry of Power in London and the British Embassy in Pretoria that he was sure a great deal of oil was going to Rhodesia from Lorenzo Marques through South African customers, probably just by changing the cards on the rail-trucks: Indeed, you couldn't not know it. There were television programmes and newspaper articles about the traffic. As for later arrangements involving a swap of oil with Total, the French company which was prepared to sell direct to Freight Services (the South African company which sold the oil on to Rhodesia), the British government was informed and the arrangement approved by George Thomson in a meeting with the oil companies. Somewhere at the end of 1971, the swap arrangement came to an end and the British oil companies began to supply Freight Services directly. Again, it is Mr Walker who is blamed for not telling London about the end of the swap, although many others knew and others should have asked. But throughout it is clear that both the oilmen and the politicians in London were entirely happy to be told as little as possible so long as they were not in danger of personal embarrassment. The Total swap might be 'pretty thin' to quote Sir Frank MacFadzean, but as long as it was 'legally sound' no questions.would be asked.
But this is to mention only half Mr Walker's difficulty. Under South African law not only was it illegal to pass on any information about oil supplies; it was illegal to impose conditions on people buying your oil. Besides, the entire white population of South Africa was rooting for Rhodesia. It was virtually impossible to obey two conflicting legal codes and two conflicting loyalties. As it happens, ironically, Mr Walker is a man of liberal opinions known for acts of kindness towards his non-white fellow-citizens. But even if he had been a paid-up member of the Broederbond, he could not possibly have resolved the conflict.
• Working for a multi-national company is not all servants and swimming-pools. You have two governments to satisfy as well as the normal commercial imperatives to hold or improve your share of the market. One of the paradoxical virtues of the Bingham report is that it demonstrates how far from the truth is the conventional left-wing picture of the all-powerful multinational, able to dictate to and even subvert governments. The oilmen lived in constant fear of nationalisation, as well as of prosecution for either selling or refusing to sell the oil to the wrong people. They knew perfectly well that the only way in which they could be more or less sure that none of their oil was going to Rhodesia was to close down their entire operation in the region and for the British government to blockade South Africa. This the British government, beset by economic calamities, could not begin to afford to contemplate even if it had wished to.
It did not require special inside knowledge to see that sanctions would fail unless South Africa was blockaded and that to use the machinery of law to enforce an unenforceable policy was to ensure national humiliation and to create a structure of organised hypocrisy. Almost every rightwing Tory MP — Wall, Turton, Amery, Hugh Fraser, Freddie Bennett — made the point over and over again during the long debates on Rhodesia through November and December of 1965—Again and again, Sir Harold Wilson replied that oil sanctions would work and work quickly, whatever 'a few spivs' might attempt — he did not mention that he himself was to be the Spivmaster. And so the Great Hypocrisy has run its course. And 'what all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the d-d fools said would happen has come to pass.' But then Lord Melbourne would never have dreamed of sanctions in the first place.
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