Grace Livingstone’s letter about Richard Gott (6 November) brings back the memory of Richard roaring like a red-bearded lion and reducing a British ambassador to a pallid cringe. It was the first, terrible days following Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973. All over Santiago, desperate fugitives were scaling foreign embassy walls to find sanctuary from the death squads. But the British embassy, almost alone, refused to take them in. The ambassador was thrilled with the putsch. He told assembled British journalists: “Our business chaps here have been having a really difficult time, you know.”
Nevertheless, they had managed to sell British fighter jets to Pinochet’s forces that led the attack on President Salvador Allende’s offices. The ambassador’s wife added brightly: “It was so marvellous to see our Hawker Hunters circling up there.”
The rest of us sat there in stunned silence. But then Richard stood up. The walls seemed to bulge as his rage, shame and accusation blasted out, at the ambassador personally and at what appeared to be British policy. It lasted a long time. When Richard finished, His Excellency was very pale and the faces of his staff were rigid with hatred. Outside, the slaughter went on. But Richard had at least indelibly marked one of the lowest points to which British postwar diplomacy ever sank.
Neal Ascherson
London
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