Notebook
Mr Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, is in a remarkably grim and bitter Mood. I met him this week at a party, where he was surrounded mainly by sympathisers to whom he imparted the blackest pessimism about the future of his country. I had assumed to begin with that he intended his remarks to be private, and it was only when he asked me particularly not to quote him on a specific point that I realised he was addressing me as a journalist. Bishop Muzorewa, he said, was like 'wet putty'. He Just waited for the British to tell him what to do and then did it. He was no match for Messrs Nkomo and Mugabe, who, according to Mr Smith, were much cleverer and more experienced than 'our blacks'. Most Strikingly of all, Mr Smith predicted with absolute confidence that the Patriotic Front Would win any election held now in hodesia. The Patriotic Front would walk it,' he said. This was because they would appear as the victors in the London talks. iritain, of course, had betrayed Rhodesia. He had come to London believing that the lAritish government wanted to recognise the kluzorewa government, but he had found they did not. This was not Mrs Thatcher's fault, he said, but that of the people who surrounded her. Lord Carrington had prevented him from seeing Mrs Thatcher. Lord Carrington he described as a racialist. Sir Ian Gilmour was a worse racialist, for he hated the whites. So Mr Smith went on. He appeared to have little hope of rescuing his country from what he sees as disaster, though he is here to try. I asked him about the role of General Walls, the commander of Rhodesia's armed forces who has joined the London talks. General Walls, said Smith, was 'my creation'. He was not a Politician but a soldier. Mr Smith may be over-pessimistic about the electoral prospects of the Patriotic Front. But his disillusionment is understandable. After successfully defending the interests of Rhodesia's Whites for so long, he is suffering deeply to s.ee these interests frivolously sacrificed, so appears to him, by the perfidy of the 89t1sh and the weakness of his own prime minister — a process which he is now only allowed to observe from the sidelines. But .t.te.preserves much dignity in his bitterness. It is impossible not to respect him.
The guerrilla leaders may be cleverer than our blacks', but their followers continue to commit unspeakable atrocities not only m Rhodesia but in Zambia. There is the case of the Spengler family, for example. David SPengler was a white Rhodesian who had emigrated in 1958 to Zambia where last spring he was still running a copper mine with Zambian government assistance. He was 37, married to a 33-year-old coloured woman, and had a five-year-old adopted coloured daughter. Last April, a jeep full of Nkomo's terrorists drove up to their house at the mine, which is near Lusaka. They found Spengler's wife in the front garden and started to rape her. When Spengler came round from the back of the house, accompanied by his coloured chief mechanic, the terrorists seized him and forced him to watch while the raping continued. They then machine-gunned first the wife, then the little girl and finally Mr Spengler. Their bodies were so mutilated and riddled with bullets as to be unrecognisable. The mechanic; who witnessed the whole affair, reported it to the Zambian authorities who appear to have made no effort to investigate it and have expressed no regret. Mr Nkomo has also remained silent.
It is strange how Lord Lucan — either his ghost or the man himself, if he is still alive — refuses to go away. This week has seen not only the publication of Richard Ingrams's book `Goldenballs' (reviewed by me on another page), which is his account of his prolonged legaf conflict with Sir James Goldsmith flowing directly from the Lucan murder five years ago. It has also included another 'sighting' of him in Australia. This time an unemployed Porn called Ken Knight was actually arrested in the town of Goondiwindi because the local police found the resemblance so striking. This incident once again brought to light the appalling snobbery which, Mr Ingrams surinises in his book, was a source of much mystery both to Lady Lucan and to the tate Dominic Elwes, whose exclusion „frOn:ir th.e `Lucan circle' , because of his cooperation with the press is alleged to have been responsible for his suicide. Lady Lucan, whom after all her husband wanted to murder, was shown a photograph of the unfortunate Ken by the Daily Mail. 'That's not my husband,' she said. 'My husband is a real aristocrat, he looks like a Lord.' She still clings, therefore, to her pride in the supposed nobility of a man whose behaviour towards her was the very opposite of noble. Furthermore, there are plenty of real Lords about who look not a jot more aristocratic than Ken. Lord Lucan was (or is), as Mr Ingrams put it, 'a rather dim old Etonian peer'.
In his review of Mr Ingrams's'book in Now! magazine, Sir James wrote something to the effect that Mr Ingrams is much better when he is in the realm of fantasy than when he is dealing with facts. I am not sure I do not agree. There is a splendid story in Mr Ingrams's book which I could not include in my review because of the strict space limitation imposed by the literary editor. Sir James, claimed Ingrams, had 'a particular horror of rubber bands'. 'Only recently he had been about to take off for Buenos Aires when he saw a rubber band lying on the floor of the aeroplane's first-class compartment. Goldsmith at once marched off the plane, closely followed by a group of Basque shepherds who, seeing that he was an important man, decided to follow his example.' Any sensible person would obviously decide that this story is rubbish. It is inconceivable that a group of Basque shepherds would fly first class to Argentina. But this is 'nevertheless the best story in the book.
This has been, for once, rather a good week for news. It began with the settlement at Times Newspapers which, for all the reservations expressed in our leading article, is very good news indeed. Even if the unions have received far more than their desserts, the great thing is that The Times is back. Fleet Street has been looking rootless in its absence. The second piece of really good news is that all foreign exchange controls have been lifted. While it is obvious that the Daily Telegraph's headline — 'Swiss bank accounts and gold bars available to all' —is a had taste joke, the measure has a real atmosphere of freedom about it. It does not matter that most of us have no money to deposit in a Swiss bank or the £73,000 required to buy just a single gold bar. The mere fact that nobody will stamp our passports if we take £5 out of the country and that 500 to 600 Bank of England inquisitors will get the boot gives one a feeling that spring is in the air. The danger, I suppose, is that enormous sums of money might start leaving the country in people's suitcases. But with interest rates as high as they are, this is unlikely to happen until the next election when Labour most probably will return to power.
Alexander Chancellor
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