Читать книгу Confessions of a Ghostwriter - Andrew Crofts - Страница 23

The man from the embassy insisted that it would be worth my while coming to London to meet his Minister of Information. He wouldn’t tell me which embassy he was from or why this minister wanted to talk to me, but he managed to make me curious to find out more. The Minister was going to be staying at the Grosvenor House, one of the biggest and grandest hotels in Park Lane. I was scheduled to join him in the lounge for morning coffee.

The Minister and his officials were holding court around a large coffee table in front of a flaming log fire. His children, who were also staying as part of the entourage, drifted back and forth behind the sofas with family messages from the rooms upstairs as he cautiously revealed details of his mission. He had two books that he wanted written: the autobiography of President Hosni Mubarak and the autobiography of Mrs Mubarak, who had been at the President’s side throughout his years in power as well as his time before that as Egypt’s Air Chief Marshal and then Vice President.

I had a number of projects on the go at the time and didn’t think that I would have the capacity to take on the President’s life story with all the political sensitivities and complications that would be bound to bog everything down. I was also pretty sure that he and I would find it hard to form a good working relationship. I didn’t know all that much about him personally at that stage but I knew enough about military rulers in general to be able to guess that we would not have much in common. I did think, however, that Mrs Mubarak’s view on life in power would be interesting. She was half Welsh and half Egyptian, her parents having met while her father was a medical student in Wales, where her mother was a nurse. She had been with her husband on the podium in 1981 when President Sadat was assassinated beside them, at which moment she was catapulted into the role of First Lady of Egypt.

Suddenly everything was a rush and I was instructed to be on the next flight to Cairo. I’d never been to Egypt, even though it was the scene of my parents’ first meeting during the Second World War. I owe my very existence to the hostess of a dinner party in Alexandria who decided to seat the young infantry Captain and the Wren (as members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service were known) next to one another that evening.

‘I don’t have a visa,’ I warned the embassy official.

‘Don’t worry,’ I was assured by my new friend, ‘everything will be taken care of when you arrive.’

Upon touchdown men in dark glasses and ear-pieces met me off the plane and I was whisked through separate channels at the airport and into a waiting Mercedes, which forced its way at speed through the clogged streets of the city, its siren wailing threateningly.

‘Don’t be scared,’ the man in the front passenger street grinned, ‘he is a highly trained police driver.’

‘I expect they said the same thing to Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed that night in Paris,’ my wife said when I rang her later.

The driver certainly was very skilful and all through the ride I was uncomfortably aware of the glowering resentment emanating from the pedestrians forced to jump out of our way and the cars forced to pull over. It seemed like I had accidentally allowed myself to be recruited to the bullies’ gang in this hot, angry, overcrowded urban playground.

The hotel I had been put in was a fortress beside the Nile. Filled with cool air and wide open spaces it was a million miles from the heat and the crowds and the smells outside.

It was a couple of days before Mrs Mubarak was ready to receive me. More men with mobile phones and dark glasses arrived at the hotel in another limousine and as we drew closer to the palace the armed guards waved us through one layer of security after another, until we eventually arrived in a secluded courtyard outside a private front door, where a butler and the Minister of Information were waiting to usher me the final few yards.

The Minister seemed to have lost all the expansive self-confidence that he had shown when holding court at the Grosvenor House as he nervously briefed me on how I should behave in the presence of his First Lady. Tea was laid out in an elegant salon, served by a team of waiters in white jackets and black bow ties. Mrs Mubarak arrived as if borne on a fragrant cloud of graciousness and made conversation with all the non-committal charm of a woman who has been socialising at diplomatic levels for all of her adult life, groomed in much the same immaculate international style as Imelda Marcos.

The scion of a South American dictator’s family, who had reached the zenith of their powers in the sixties, was once trying to paint a picture for me of his mother and the other women in the family at that time. ‘They all wanted to look the same,’ he explained. ‘They all wanted to look like Jackie Kennedy.’ So many of our greatest visual historical references are created by the momentary whims of great fashion designers and hairdressers.

Inside Mrs Mubarak’s gilded salon it was impossible to imagine that we were still in the same hot and angry city that I had been exploring for the previous two days. She didn’t hesitate to give spontaneous answers to the stream of questions that I had, despite the fact that the Minister was squirming with discomfort next to me on the slippery silk of the sofa. There was so much that I wanted to know. It seemed like a story that a lot of women married to ambitious men might well be able to identify with, while at the same time giving a glimpse of what life was like behind palace walls for the edification of the billions who would always remain locked outside.

A few months later the green shoots of the Arab Spring started to break through and Mrs Mubarak and her husband would prove to be two of its most conspicuous casualties. From the palace he and their sons were put first under house arrest before being taken to a prison and then on to a courtroom. It was not at all certain that they would be allowed to live through the process. Eight months later neighbouring Libya’s transparently evil and increasingly demented ruler, Gaddafi, was stabbed to death by his people, his sons and other followers also executed, the full horror of their crimes exposed to the world, followed by the full horror of what would come after their falls.

In Egypt accusations flew that the Mubarak family had salted tens of billions of dollars away in places like Switzerland and the UK and that the President had failed to stop the killing of peaceful protestors. Tales of torture and oppression billowed out from the inferno of accusations. The world hailed the Egyptian ‘revolution’ as the most successful and democratic of processes. There was a general feeling of euphoria and hope that the whole area might be on the verge of new levels of personal freedom. Democratic elections followed but two years later there was a backlash. Terrible bloodshed erupted in Cairo once more and Hosni Mubarak was freed from jail with some talking of a return to power. It would have been interesting to have got to know the family better before their spectacular fall from grace.