Scratcher’s connections work again

I was rather sickened to read that Mark Thatcher got a suspended sentence and a fine (yes, a six-figure one, but all the same …) for involvement in trying to start off a military coup on Equatorial Guinea. He says he didn’t know that the deal was actually for a coup, thinking he was financing an air ambulance. He’s been out on bail (his Ma, Margaret the ex-Prime Minister, put up the six-figure sum last September, and looks set to pay up this time too).

Am I the only one who fails to find this story of his convincing? If you’re financing an air ambulance, you obviously deal with either a country’s health service, or with a medical insurance company, or a businessman who makes it plain that this is a bit of philanthropy or a bit of charitable PR, or even the head of the medical wing of the military. Didn’t he get the specifications for this helicopter or aircraft?

The Independent has a lengthy report, The Thatcher Dossier, in its current (Friday 14th Jan) edition. The authors observed that “a banner hanging from a building opposite [Cape Town High Court] read ‘Save Me, Mummy’, while a small group of protestors standing at the entrance shouted: ‘Shame, shame, shame'”. (It looks like Maggie won’t put up the “large splodge of wonga (cash)” his buddy said he’d need to get out of jail in Zimbabwe, though.) The article also notes that Thatcher has a long history of shady deals.

See also an article by George Monbiot, Adventure Playground, which discusses the attitudes of some of Thatcher’s upper-class chums towards Africa and its people:

Mann [this is Simon Mann, recently jailed in Zimbabwe over the same affair] and Thatcher (Harrow, too thick for anywhere else) belong to a class which still believes it has a God-given right to oversee the lives of the Africans. Among Margaret Thatcher’s friends with homes on the slopes of Table Mountain was John Aspinall (Rugby, Oxford, Royal Marines), the gambling millionaire, zoo-keeper and remnant of that species of upper-class British fascist that used to keep the Duke of Windsor company. Aspinall believed that most of the human population should be culled by means of “beneficial genocide”. He argued that “Medical research should be funded into abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and birth control” and described his third wife as “a perfect example of the primate female, ready to serve the dominant male and make his life agreeable.” Aspinall worked with Mangosuthu Buthelezi to undermine the African National Congress. He argued that South Africa should be split into 30 bantustans.