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      The Last Hero

      WESTMINSTER HALL in London, the ancient heart of the Houses of Parliament, is preparing to honour a visiting head of state, in a ceremony which happens only once or twice in a lifetime. The last such guest of honour was General de Gaulle in 1960; this time, in July 1996, it is President Nelson Mandela. The comparison is apt, for both were solitary, lost leaders who came to be seen as saviours of their country. But Mandela’s transformation is much more surprising than de Gaulle’s. In the past, many of the politicians in the audience had regarded him as their enemy, who should never be permitted to lead his country. Many Conservative Members of Parliament had condemned him as a terrorist; the former Prime Minister Lady Thatcher, who is sitting near the front, had said nine years before that anyone who thought the African National Congress was ever going to form the government of South Africa was ‘living in cloud-cuckoo land’. Now cloud-cuckoo land has arrived in Westminster Hall. But the ceremonials in this medieval hall have legitimised many awkward shifts of loyalty over the centuries, whether from Richard II to Henry IV in 1400 or from Charles I to Oliver Cromwell in 1649. And now all recriminations are drowned in a fanfare of trumpets.

      It is like a scene from grand opera, with Beefeaters lining the steps and helmeted guardsmen at the back of the hall. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, arrives in his robes of state. Then, at last, the tall, lean figure of Nelson Mandela appears and walks shakily down the grand staircase, holding the hand of the Speaker of the House, Betty Boothroyd: she says afterwards it was the most memorable five minutes of her life. The Labour peer sitting in front of me allows tears to flow down his cheek. The band of the Grenadier Guards plays ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, for decades the hymn of South Africa’s black revolutionaries. The Lord Chancellor makes a modest speech, recalling how this hall has witnessed the slow evolution of democracy, ever since the Magna Carta in 1215, and how Britons and South Africans share the democratic right to one person, one vote. Then he warmly introduces the former revolutionary, who now looks as benign as an old-fashioned English gentleman.

      Mandela speaks slowly, with his usual formal emphasis. Although most guests cannot hear him through the echoing acoustics, it is a tough speech which does not please Lady Thatcher, as she says afterwards. He looks back two hundred years, to when Britain first colonised South Africa and seized the land of his forebears. He reminds his audience how the ANC first petitioned the British parliament eight decades ago, in protest against being left to the mercy of the white rulers of the new Union of South Africa. But now, he says, he comes as a friend of Britain, to the country of allies like William Wilberforce, Fenner Brockway, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston. He goes on to refer to the horrors of racism, whether in South Africa or in Nazi Germany – ‘How did we allow these to happen?’ – and the appalling massacres and miseries in other parts of Africa; but he ends by looking ahead to the closing of the circle, to Britain and South Africa joining hands to construct a humane Africa.

      This is the historic Mandela: the last of the succession of revolutionary leaders in Asia and Africa who fought for their freedom, were imprisoned and reviled, and were eventually recognised as heads of state. But the Afrikaner nationalists were much more ruthless enemies, and he now shows more magnanimity than his predecessors, giving hope both to his own people and to others that they can bridge their own racial chasms. He has become a universal hero at the end of the twentieth century. In a time of vote-counters, spin-doctors and focus groups, he conjures up an earlier age of liberators, war leaders and revolutionaries. To conservative traditionalists he evokes memories of great men who personified their own country; to the liberal left, battered by lost causes, he brings new hope that righteous crusades can still prevail; his three decades in jail cut him off from the surge of materialism and consumerism that swept through the Western world.

      As Mandela goes through the pompous routines of a state visit, he even brings new life to the British monarchy itself, under siege with its own troubles. Some of the audience go straight from Westminster Hall to the Dorchester Hotel, where he is giving a banquet for the Queen. He arrives with her, looking both more regal and more at ease than the monarch as he lopes between the guests. At the end of the lunch he gives another brief speech, reminding the Queen that he’s just a country boy, thanking her for opening all doors to British society and for letting him walk in her garden early in the morning. The Queen’s relaxation in his company is obvious as they talk. ‘She’s got a lot in common with him,’ one courtier explains. ‘You see, they’ve both spent a lot of time in prison.’

      In the evening another Mandela is presented to the young generation: the showbiz idol and friend of pop stars. He is the guest of Prince Charles, together with most of the royal family, for a concert attended by

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