Paul Foot

When the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was closed down on 5 July 1991, a million people throughout the world lost their deposits. Many of the losers were from the Third World; small businessmen who had struggled to make a living in countries other than their own, and who had been impressed by BCCI’s multilingual staff and its often-trumpeted concern for the starving millions.

Mordecai Vanunu is starting his seventh year in solitary confinement in an Israeli jail. He is convicted of treason and espionage and his sentence is 18 years. The few members of his family who are allowed to see him have doubts about whether his mind will last that long. Already there are signs that the remarkable coherence and determination which he showed during the first years of his ordeal are on the wane. If he does go mad, the authorities in Israel will be delighted. They have always presented Vanunu to the world as a misfit, a wayward semi-loon who, in the interests of his country, is best kept locked up.

Did Shelley have sex with Claire Clairmont? I first heard this central question debated with great solemnity at a meeting of the Byron Society in Albemarle Street way back in 1978. I went with three fellow Shelleyans, Geoffrey Matthews, Claire Tomalin and Judith Chernaik, to hear Marion Stocking talk about Claire. Marion Stocking’s beautifully-edited Journals of Claire Clairmont had just come out, and she knew more about Claire than all the brains of the Byron Society put together. This did not stop those brains from working away at the Central Question – the sexual relations of Shelley and Claire. The Byron-worshippers were torn between those who were quite certain that anyone who had had sex with Byron (as Claire unquestionably had) could never settle for anything inferior, and those who regarded Claire as an impudent trollop who had dared to seduce the great genius, and then pester him about the consequences. On and on the debate rumbled, until Beatrice Haas, then in her late seventies, rose to rebuke the academics. ‘If I had been with Shelley at Byron’s villa at Este in the spring of 1818,’ she said, ‘I jolly well would have slept with him.’’

‘If today,’ writes Eamonn McCann, ‘the Lord Chief Justice were appointed as a one-person tribunal to inquire into a major political problem affecting Ireland, there would be a rattle of empty laughter throughout the land.’ That, he says, is a ‘measure of how far the British judiciary has fallen in esteem over the last twenty years’. There was absolutely no laughter twenty years ago when Lord Chief Justice Widgery was appointed to investigate the killings by the British Army of 13 demonstrators on the streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972. Most people in Derry probably regarded the appointment of the very top judge as a sign of respect. They were impatient with sceptical references to the fact that Widgery was a former Army officer, not to say a Freemason, that he arrived in Derry in an Army helicopter and stayed in Army barracks. He was, to all appearances, a kindly old gentleman, well-versed in the law, listening courteously to the civilian witnesses who flocked to tell him their story. The analysis and narrative in this, Eamonn McCann’s second book, is interweaved with interviews with relatives of the Bloody Sunday dead. But the book’s central thrust is a clinical and almost embarrassing demolition of Lord Justice Widgery’s report.

When did the Irangate scandal start? The official answer is late 1985. The Tower Commission report, a slovenly document which does not even boast an index, starts its story in that year. Col Oliver North, the man who, according to the received version, thought up the idea of selling arms to secure the release of American hostages in Beirut, tells us: ‘My own operational involvement began … on the afternoon of 17 November 1985.’ The BBC’s Panorama journalist Gavin Hewitt, who is not an admirer of the Colonel, seems to back him up at least in this important detail. ‘Oliver North,’ he assures us, ‘hadn’t been party initially to the arms deals with the Iranians.’ So there were ‘arms deals with the Iranians’ even before North was involved. Or were there? A closer reading of North’s apologia gets us a little closer to the truth.