Close encounters with the world's rich a...

Submerging in a sea of credit as South A...

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Close encounters with the world's rich and powerful

My most recent encounter with power came last month when I was able to spend several convivial hours with the British Labour leader, Tony Blair, and his impressive wife, Cherie, first on a private flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town and later over a long and entertaining lunch in one of South Africa's loveliest residences.

It is perhaps a commentary on the times that a right-wing hawk like me can find so much common ground with the leader of one of the world's oldest socialist parties. But if my good friend Paul Johnson, the British historian, intellectual and champion of freedom and free markets, can be a Blairite I think I'm in pretty good company.

Tony Blair and I were not talking on the record, but I can say that I found him refreshingly free from tired collectivist dogma and possessed of a keen sense of humour (quite rare among left-wingers) while his approach on a wide range of matters was not what is known as politically correct.

The Blairs have been compared to the Clintons, but hey are streets ahead of that tacky couple from Arkansas. While he might share with Clinton a certain flexibility of political principle, Blair's character is without blemish. In addition, he struck me as modest and sincere, not quite how one perceives Clinton..

As we flew to Cape Town we talked about the visit to South Africa by the late Senator Robert Kennedy when he delivered the academic freedom speech at UCT. Joel Mervis, then editor of the Sunday Times, on which I was a reporter, had dispatched me to Paris on the evening of Friday, June 4 1966 to interview Kennedy, file the piece from the airport and then fly back to Johannesburg with the senator on the Saturday evening.

Also on the plane to Johannesburg that night was Tertius Myburgh, who years later succeeded Mervis on this newspaper. Kennedy invited Myburgh and I to have a chat with him about his UCT address. He pulled out a copy of a speech he had recently delivered at the University of Mississippi. I recall him remarking that the racial problems were similar and he asked us to help him to tailor the Mississippi speech for a South African audience which, of course, Tertius and I were flattered and delighted to do.

In his address in Cape Town to the Commonwealth Press Union conference Blair quoted from the 1966 Kennedy speech, remarking that it was the sign of the times that today no sensible politician would dare ask for journalistic help in putting together a speech.

President Mandela failed to deliver his long-scheduled address to the conference, much to the chagrin of the hundreds of delegates from all over the Commonwealth who had come eagerly anticipating this event. That a few days later he was able to find time for some retired tennis professionals when he left the press of a quarter of the world's population bitterly disappointed and with a large hole in their programme can hardly be described as useful public relations. Someone in his office deserves to be belted.

Mandela himself has a keen sense of public relations. He makes people feel good. When I first met him shortly after his release he had just spoken to a business group and was leaving the auditorium. I found myself walking alongside him so I took his hand and introduced myself, mumbling my name and remarking that he would not know me but that it was a privilege to meet him and so on. "Ah," he replied, quick as a flash, "of course I know you. He who does not know the name Mulholland has not lived". I walked on air for the rest of the day. Madiba could charm the birds out of the trees. It's sad he left the Commonwealth journos in the lurch.

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