LITMIR.BIZ

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day and night of intoxicating freedom followed. The death of empire in Britain had never witnessed scenes like this – but then, despite empire, we had at least been spared dictatorship.

      The overthrow of half a century of dictatorship in Portugal was completely bloodless. Which could not be said of what happened next in Portugal’s colonies. Angry Portuguese settlers in Mozambique and Angola drove their tractors into ravines, smashed key capital equipment and ruined their factories and homes. Nevertheless, their return from the African colonies to their homeland would represent little short of a modern miracle – a small European state reabsorbing the equivalent of 10 per cent of its population without serious consequence. But while Portugal seeped back into being a comfortable corner of Europe, Angola and Mozambique erupted into two of the bleeding sores that would define Africa’s emerging disorder in the 1980s and 1990s.

      When I returned, Britain was in the throes of the build-up to the referendum on whether or not to remain a member of the European Community. In a sense a kind of revolution was taking place here too. The Tories under Ted Heath had taken Britain into Europe a couple of years earlier, and Labour had promised a vote as a means to resolve their own ambivalence and division on the issue. Many saw the referendum as a post-imperial struggle for the soul of Britain. Should we slide off into the transatlantic alliance and take up our position as Uncle Sam’s fifty-first state, or embrace the heart of Europe and become part of the European continent? Truth to tell, I had decided to vote ‘no’, on the basis that I saw Europe as a rich man’s club that was bound to end up screwing the Third World.

      I was more involved than I pretended. My friend Ed Boyle, the political editor of LBC and one of the most gifted journalists I ever worked with, had agreed to put together some radio ads for the ‘no’ campaign. I guess he did it more to make trouble and to even out what he regarded as an unbalanced campaign than out of any very strong belief. He was a real original, mad as a hatter and the creator of brilliant, funny and informative journalism. His trouble was that he was too brilliant, too funny, too bright for his editors; he was therefore denied the profile and standing he richly deserved. Knowing that I was pretty strongly against EC membership at the time, he asked me to help out on the ads.

      The fifty-first state argument held no sway for me. It was the love of Uganda and an awareness of how the North intersected with and affected the South that combined to convince me that Europe would thrive to the detriment of the emerging markets and nations of the South. I wanted out of this kind of a Europe with a passion. Michael Foot, at that time Secretary of State for Employment, was my comfortable leader in the cause, and the ‘no’ campaign enabled me to meet him for the first time, in what was to become a friendship that still endures. My uncomfortable leader was Enoch Powell, who was further right even than Michael was left, and against whom I had demonstrated at university. But he and Michael shared a love of Parliament and sovereignty, one of the causes which bound them both to the ‘no’ campaign.

      The campaign itself was a complete shambles. We started with a substantial lead in the opinion polls, which we then proceeded to fritter away. Ed and I were so unpoliced that our radio ads only featured the ‘no’ views that reflected our own – references to the Third World and other ways of arranging a new Europe predominated. But the referendum itself, which took place on 6 June 1975, was nevertheless a defining moment in the emergence of post-imperial Britain. In voting to remain in Europe, which the British people did by a margin of two to one, many of us thought we had at least buried the Little Englander vote for all time – how wrong we proved to be.

      Alas, we never actually embraced the Europe for which we had voted. Nor were we entirely to shake off our status as America’s fifty-first state. We wanted to be for Europe, but not of it. And that condition dogs us to this day. My own position was to evolve gently from outright hostility then, to an ardent desire now to be much more a part of Europe than any British referendum has ever dared contemplate. But it has taken me three decades to travel so complex a journey.

      It was only a month after the referendum, in July 1975, that my foreign news editor at LBC bellowed across the newsroom, ‘Anyone ever been to Uganda?’ One hand went up, and it was mine. ‘We’ve got a free seat on Callaghan’s plane,’ he said. ‘Get your bag and go.’

      It seemed that the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, had been involved in some madcap dialogue with the by-now leader of Uganda Idi Amin over a white British lecturer, Denis Hills, who’d published unflattering references to the Ugandan dictator in a book called The White Pumpkin. Among other things, he’d called him a village tyrant’. Tyrant he had indeed become, aided and abetted by the British government. Amin had seized power in a military coup on 25 January 1971, while the democratically elected President Milton Obote was in Singapore attending a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. Obote’s use of secret police and informers, and his intimidation and worse of his political opponents, had rendered him unpopular both inside and outside Uganda. Above all, Britain was concerned at the rise of ‘African socialism’, as espoused by Obote and by Tanzania’s Julius Nyrere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda.

      The arrival, albeit by military coup, of the seemingly more pliant, British-trained erstwhile Sergeant Major Idi Amin was greeted as something of a relief. Amin can perhaps be seen as an early volunteer for Western-supported regime change’, with all its harrowing consequences. Within a year of the coup he’d appointed himself Field Marshal and ‘President for Life’, expelled sixty thousand Asians, and started killing his opponents. The Utopian Uganda of my late adolescence was fast evaporating. Amin soon took on more self-styled epithets, including ‘Big Daddy’ and ‘Conqueror of the British Empire’.

      Idi Amin was already renowned for humiliating the few whites still in Uganda. Denis Hills was languishing in Luzira prison, the notorious block in which Amin, and Obote before him, both kept and disposed of their opponents. Amin had had Hills sentenced to death for sedition, and had announced that unless the Queen apologised for his behaviour and Jim Callaghan came personally to rescue him, Hills would be summarily executed.

      Looking back today, the idea that only three decades ago some African dictator could summon the Foreign Minister from one of the G8 nations to rescue a solitary eccentric from the hangman’s noose beggars belief. Even then the trip had a distinct whiff of the absurd about it. Only a few months earlier Amin had had some of the remaining whites in Uganda carry him in a great sedan chair through the centre of Kampala.

      The trip was inevitably to provoke in me a strong wave of nostalgia. On 10 July 1975 the RAF VC10 touched down at Entebbe, on an airfield looking only slightly more decayed than it had on my first landing. From the aircraft I could see that the grass was still long and unkempt, but that there were many more troops and guns about. The old terminal building had shed its last remnants of whitewash. The heavenly aroma of Africa wafted into the plane as the door opened. Here I was, back in my beloved Uganda, almost eight years to the day after I had left her. There really did seem to be some divine pattern to it all. Chance had delivered me ‘home’, even if only for a matter of hours.

      There was no Amin at the airport. Instead we were hustled onto a bus at gunpoint by sweaty young soldiers and driven at speed to Kampala. We passed the gorgeous bougainvillea and mown lawns of State House, where President Obote had lived during my time here. Our destination was Amin’s official residence in the capital, the ‘Command Post’.

      By the time we reached the bustling suburbs of Kampala it was noon, the sun was high and the light outside was fierce to our unaccustomed English eyes. The Asian shops had become less tidy, less well-stocked African outlets. Amin’s wholesale ejection of the Asians three years earlier had taken its commercial toll. The smell, the sweaty greenness, the puddles, the red-brown murum roads told me that this was unmistakably Africa, unmistakably Uganda. The jacarandas were in full blue bloom, bananas dangled in ripe bunches, everywhere was lusciously productive.

      There were perhaps twenty journalists aboard our bus, not one of whom apart from me had ever set foot in the country before. Suddenly, as we neared the end of the road leading to the Command Post, I caught sight of a dishevelled white man being marched along by two guards. It was obviously Denis Hills. He was dressed in the fly-buttonless, stained remnant of the tropical suit he must have been taken to jail in. I told the bus driver I needed a pee

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