Page 425 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

422 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

of oil economics Barber had been closeted with the shah and Amuzegar
discussing high finance, including the possibility of the Persian government’s
increasing its holdings of sterling in London. Whether anything more was

discussed, such as an outright loan by the shah to the British government, was
not immediately apparent. Barber was evasive afterwards about the topics of
conversation, and the shah denied to a newspaper correspondent ten days later
that he had promised the chancellor a direct loan of $ i ,000 million. While there

was doubtless substance to his denial, nevertheless before many weeks had
passed the sum of $500 million had been made available to the British govern­
ment, the first tranche, so it was said, of a larger loan. It came much too late to
restore Edward Heath’s political fortunes. Unnerved by the intransigence of
the coalminers, he called a general election on the issue of ‘Who governs

Britain?’ - a question which must have provoked a high degree of mirth in
Riyad and Tehran. The election brought defeat for Heath and the eclipse of his
political career. Yet, if he had cared to reflect upon it at all objectively, he
might have seen that he had himself sown the seeds of that defeat in his first few

months in office, when he and his Cabinet failed to back the Western oil
companies in their stand against OPEC at Tehran in January 1971, and at the
same time allowed themselves to be persuaded by their advisers in the Foreign
Office to retract their undertakings about the maintenance of a British presence
in the Gulf- electing instead to strike ‘asuq bargain’ with those who, for their

own purposes, wanted the British to leave. Less than two years after the British
withdrawal came the Arab oil offensive of October 1973, which exacerbated
the effects of the coalminers’ strike in Britain and in turn brought nemesis
down upon Heath’s own head.

It is hard to see any injustice in the outcome. For in their years in office, and
more especially in their final months, Heath and Home, together with the
officials who stood in the shadows and advised them, dragged rhe name of
British foreign policy in the dust. Despite all their highly publicized protesta­
tions of adherence to the ideal of a united Europe, theirs was not an England
which, in the weeks between October 1973 and February 1974, saved herself

by her exertions and Europe by her example. Blinkered self-interest was what
largely motivated British foreign policy in the critical years of the Heath
administration - as it had, for the most part, animated the foreign policy of the
Wilson administration which had preceded and now was to succeed it. Never,

perhaps, in British history has the reputation of Britain in the world been
brought so low as it has been in the last dozen years or so. The conduct of e
nation’s affairs abroad and at home has been marked by futility, duPj c’ty an
*
cowardice; the political air is rank; and the lion and unicorn have yie e p ac

on the arms of the kingdom to the weasel and the natterjack.

It would serve little purpose to rehearse in any detail here the ebb
relations between the Western industrial nations and the Middle