Dead with embarrassment

AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS

`Jack was embarrassed, never hero more, And as he knew not what to say, he swore.'

Lord Byron, The Island.

Gentleman Jack Gowon, the dapper and debonair military supremo of Federal Nigella, was said to have been 'embarrassed' this week when one of his junior officers caught an apparently innocent lbo youth under the very eyes of Norwegian, American, French and British journalists, had him tied up, and shot him dead before the cameras of the Indepen- dent Television News. The feelings of the Ibo youth were not recorded, but it was under- standable that Jolly Jack should be embar- rassed. The news of the shooting happened for one thing to come out on the same day as his announcement that he had invited no fewer than five independent international observers, including Lord Hunt, to observe the gentle- manly Federal advance into the Ibo heartland, and such episodes can get a unit a bad name. The officer responsible has now also been shot en television—not so much, it seems, for shooting prisoners of war as for being stupid enough to act naturally in front of cameras —and Beau Gowon's embarrassment may now be assumed to some extent to be assuaged.

Nevertheless, the amount of 'embarrassment' caused by the present conflict (minimal though it may be compared, let us say, to the amount likely to be experienced by some individuals when the books are finally opened) has been considerable, and General Gowon himself has not been guiltless. The Monday before, when Mr Thomson and Lord Shepherd and the cao's other trained thugs were preparing for Tuesday's debate a cynical filibuster about continuing the supply of arms in order to deter the good General from making the `final push,' he himself appeared in a film on Twenty-Four Hours, announcing that the final push had in fact started three days before, and quietly indi- cating his watch to show the exact time it had begun.

The reaction of the Commonwealth Re- lations Office and our High Commission in Lagos was obviously similar to that of the Nigerian High Command to the televised 'Look at Death' episode. The trouble with Jacky Gowon,' as one old Lagos hand told the Observer—their African expert Colin Legum was fortunately away in Israel—is that he can't help but blurt out the truth in front of a camera.'

The embarrassment, again, was not caused by the fact that ministers were telling lies in the House of Lords and the. House of Commons, any more than there would be any embarrass- ment in Lagos at junior officers murdering prisoners of war. What caused the embarrass- ment was that Beau Gowon had ingenuously shown them to be telling lies, and hasty tele- phone calls to Lagos during the debate, followed by an assurance that the General had not in- tended to say 'the final push' but 'the final pre-

parations for the final push' were greeted with yells of derisive abuse. But the sacrifice was made—not in this case the execution of Beau Gowon, but the gagging of parliament—and the embarrassment of the Civil Servants and of their

ill-briefed and despicable PR men in parliament

was soon dispelled. By October, when parlia- ment reassembles, Biafra, or so the Civil Ser-

vants pathetically hope, will have been stamped flat with the heel of the neo-colonialist boot, and fitted back into the neat pattern of the old Federation, and no one at the CRO need ever be embarrassed again.

The concept of 'embarrassment' has become such a cliché in British politics, like people's trousers falling down in the traditional farce, that we are sometimes in danger of missing the full delicacy of the idea. We may laugh at Lord Shepherd, the retired textile manu- facturer from Singapore, self-confessedly too nervous for his own safety to enter Biafran territory and ingenuously retailing the propa- ganda material provided for him by the British High Commission in Lagos. We may spare a sad smile for the good-hearted Lord Hunt, con- queror of Everest, defending Colonel Benjamin Adekunle—`A great deal has been made to his detriment of his colourful personality and out- rageous remarks' (about how he liked killing Ibos). 'Colonel Benji (sic) has enjoyed and en-

couraged this.' We may have a bit of a cackle at this, but it is really like laughing at the village idiot, at the demented, or at the exaggerated grimaces of some stock villain in Victorian melodrama.

The village idiot, the demented, the Victorian villain, and no doubt the Lords Shepherd and Hunt, all believe that they are behaving normally. Our laughter is cruel, springing from the comparison we make be- tween the behaviour they believe to be normal and what we know in fact to be normal. They remain unaware of the truth, and our laughter grows more and more uncontrollable every time

the idiot breaks the egg in his trousers pocket or the minister repeats the same old lie. The true

comedians, like our High Commissioner in Lagos, or the men at the Commonwealth Rela- tions Office, are all too well aware of the truth: their `embarrassment' is the essence of their comic talent. When their trousers fall down, they are the first to clap a hand over their mouths in elaborate anguish and shamefacedly pull them up again. Unlike the unsophisticated buffoon, they are aware all the time of the audience that is watching them, that what they are doing behind the screen is 'naughty,' and it is their genteel horror when the screen falls down that gives each new piece of public bungling its added piquancy.

Among them one would expect to find that master of the comedy of embarrassment, the

Prime Minister: but according to sources close

to him he is on this occasion acting the role of the simple buffoon, unable or unwilling even to

grasp the problem since at the moment it does not seem to be losing him any votes. But the comedy in any case continues: there is em- barrassment as the invasion goes on, despite

ministerial promises, with artillery, small arms and armoured troop carriers paid for out of our

income tax: there is embarrassment that the only Ibos who can be produced after fourteen months of war to give the lie to charges of

genocide are illiterates or stray- quislings: but fortunately no one in Whitehall is ever going to die of embarrassment : not on camera/ anyway.