‘How does it feel to be free, Mr Hills?’ I asked.
‘Better than being dead,’ he replied, ‘which I should have been at eight o’clock this morning if Mr Callaghan hadn’t come for me.’ He seemed to have some teeth missing, but despite his run-down appearance was apparently in one piece.
‘What’s happening now?’ I asked.
‘I’m being taken to be handed over.’
Amin’s Command Post was ostensibly a simple, square-built 1930s-style suburban house with spectacular views over Kampala. The white stucco walls sporting a green mould here and there were assaulted by vivid splashes of red, pink and purple bougainvillea. But when we got closer there was a distinct air of menace about the place, radio aerials protruding out of windows, wires hanging about, and sandbagged gun emplacements peering from the flat roof. Although there were guns everywhere, and paranoid figures looking at us suspiciously, there was no formal security cordon. I was able to approach cautiously and to enter, rejoining the other reporters. Callaghan and Amin were out on the lawn at the back. No sign yet of Hills, but Amin was already thanking the Foreign Secretary for coming, booming his words of satisfaction. I recorded the lot.
For almost the only time in my reporting life, my cousin Peter was one of the other correspondents on the trip, reporting for ITN. I took him to one side. ‘Peter, I’ve got everything, interviewed Hills, done the lot.’
‘But Hills hasn’t appeared yet,’ he said.
‘Oh yes he has, and I’ve got his first interview as a free man. Trouble is, Callaghan’s people want us straight back on the bus and off to Entebbe and the take-off. But I know where the international telephone exchange is here, and I could phone this stuff through to London and get a scoop on everyone else – including you.’
‘Go on,’ said Peter, ‘take a risk. They may leave without you, but we won’t be able even to phone until we get to the departure lounge at Entebbe, so you’ll be at least an hour or even two ahead of anyone.’
I ran back out on to the road, flashed some pound notes and got a lift to the exchange half a mile away. This was the self-same building from which whilst on VSO I had been able to phone home. Somehow I managed to cajole them into giving me a line to London. I got everything fed from my Uher, using crude crocodile clips to connect the tape machine directly to the phone line. I also recorded a description of Hills’s release. Twenty minutes later I was out on the street trying to get a taxi back to the Command Post, but no one dared go anywhere near the place, especially with a muzungu, a white man.
I decided the best solution was to head for Entebbe Airport directly in a service taxi, in the hope of reaching the plane before the bus did, or at least before take-off. So with a clutch of breastfeeding mothers, two goats, and at least five or six live chickens flapping about with tied feet, I set off in battered old Peugeot 606 station wagon. The trouble was that our journey was constantly interrupted by the need to disgorge a mother, a goat, a chicken, or sometimes all three at once. Then another lot of human and animal cargo would board the taxi to inflict further stops on us.
As bits of Uganda flashed past, I considered the place’s weird predicament. Here was a country that Britain had had charge of until just over a decade before. Yet Uganda had been prepared in no way for independence. What cynicism could deliver a thuggish, paranoid Sergeant Major to lead its armed forces? The colonisers had believed in an imported white officer class until almost the day of handover. The country’s institutions were remorselessly British in their make-up, and took no account of sophisticated local practice. Britain effectively prepared Uganda for failure. It’s a telling insight into the British way of doing things, which was to be repeated in every corner of Africa that was ever pink.
After what seemed like hours we turned into the airport road. Proceeding in the opposite direction was our empty bus, returning to Kampala. I had nowhere near enough money to buy a ticket to London, I had no visa, the British High Commission had taken our passports upon landing, and I suddenly had visions of taking up Denis Hills’s vacated death cell at Luzira prison. For sure, honest Jim Callaghan would not make a second rescue flight.
We swung round the high pampas grasses on to the airfield, and there was the plane, still on the ground. My cousin Peter was gesticulating wildly from halfway up the steps. ‘Come on, we’re going in seconds!’ he shouted above the engine roar. Inside the cabin, there was Callaghan, in his tropical hat, looking red and impatient. Hills was separated off, crumpled up in a seat well back, and then came the journalists. They looked grim-faced and angry with me.
I asked Peter what the problem was. ‘Bloody phones are down to Kampala,’ he said. ‘No one got to file a sodding thing. You’ve got yourself an epic’
What a start, I thought. One year a journalist, and I’ve got a scoop of mythic proportions: ‘British Foreign Secretary Saves White Man’s Life in Africa!’ I settled complacently into my seat. Our ten-hour flight, with a stop-off in phoneless Tripoli, should keep me well ahead of the game, I thought.
Fortunately the lines from Brize Norton, the Oxfordshire military air base where we landed, were working. ‘Well?’ I asked the foreign editor when my turn for the phonebox came and I got through.
‘Well what?’
‘My scoop.’
‘What scoop?’
‘Haven’t you run my Denis Hills story?’ I shouted.
‘No.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Yours was the only source. We knew UPI, AP and Reuters were all on the flight with you, so we waited for them, and when they failed to file we decided you’d got it wrong.’
‘You idiot!’ I screamed. ‘I had the tape of Hills saying he was free, I had bloody Callaghan saying he was thankful, Amin booming away, what else did you want?’
‘A second source, Jon. Now if you don’t mind, I can see the first Reuters snap coming through, so I can let your stuff run.’ With that he rang off.
‘What’s the trouble?’ asked Peter as I came out of the phonebox.
‘They didn’t run it,’ I said mournfully. ‘They couldn’t get a second source to confirm it.’
‘Are they running it now?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes’.
‘Well, don’t worry, you’ve still got a beat.’
And sure enough, LBC and my report were used as the source for that afternoon’s Evening Standard front page. It was an early tutorial in the ways of journalism.
It was a much bigger tutorial on the true condition of Great Britain. Amin, the jumped-up non-commissioned officer, had succeeded in humiliating the Foreign Secretary of his erstwhile imperial rulers. Britain was still finding her post-colonial feet, still unsure whether a Foreign Secretary should do this sort of thing. She had played an unwitting role in bringing Amin to power and keeping him there. The coup against Milton Obote had been seen as a benign and potentially beneficial development. The wholesale deportation of tens of thousands of people because of their Asian ethnicity was simply accepted. It might be argued that the office of the British Foreign Secretary seemed to have put more effort into saving one eccentric white man from execution than into preventing the abuse meted out to sixty thousand Ugandan Asians. Despite the furious immigration debate in Britain, those Asians were to prove Uganda’s crippling loss and Britain’s huge economic gain.
That autumn of 1975, imperial Britain’s home-grown crisis was taking serious hold on both sides of the Irish Sea. On 3 October a Dutch businessman, Dr Tiede Herrema, was kidnapped by the IRA as he drove his Mercedes to work at Ferenka Ltd, the huge tyre factory in Limerick of which he was managing director. The kidnappers threatened to kill him unless Republican prisoners were released from jails in the Republic of Ireland. Ireland was in the throes of trying to leave her nineteenth-century backwardness and become a fully paid-up member of Europe, and the kidnap was a body blow, particularly