Then last week in a fascinating defence of Peter Mandelson she wrote that he was wrong to re-open the

Then last week, in a fascinating defence of Peter Mandelson, she wrote that he was “wrong to re-open the wounds of Pinochet”. And she memorably described him as “a groupie for greatness”, adoring the opportunity to talk to Henry Kissinger or Lee Kuan Yew or a host of other towering figures. Friends say that the hand of Johnson can be detected in these pieces.Literary activities aside, Carla lives in a flurry of rows and vendettas. When the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a vulgar attack in the Daily Mail on Stephen Fry – who is needless to say yet another of her friends – Lady Powell announced that she had ordered a ton of manure to be dumped on the offending hack’s doorstep. And as one of her long-suffering friends says, “She’s the only person I know who can spend 20 minutes on the telephone telling you she’s never going to speak to you again.”It is obviously not true that Carla is to blame for Peter’s difficulties in any direct sense, and in any case there’s nothing new about men living beyond their means, or the phenomenon of the progressive politician (if such Mandy is) seduced by high life. Asquith was softened, corrupted even, by wining, dining and the company of rich women. And Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a cottager, likewise fell into what the Labour politician Hugh Dalton called the “aristocratic embrace” in the form of Lady Londonderry.But there can be no doubt that Mandelson was star-struck.

He quivered with passion – social rather than erotic – at the sight of the gaudy, temperamental Carla, and he thrilled at the thought of living near her – even though he couldn’t actually afford it.Thackeray and Trollope would have understood that easily enough, though would they have put a character like Paul Johnson in a novel, claiming that “one reason Britain has not had a civil war for 350 years is that the top people of all parties meet round the same dinner table”? Paul’s friend Peter might squirm at those words today – as he might, with an added spasm of embarrassment, at his other friend Carla’s demand, expressed not long ago, for a return to higher standards in public life: “I want to fall in love with England all over again. And for that to happen, you must get your good looks back.” Capisce, Peter?. THE ANNUAL release of 30-year-old official documents at the Public Record Office gives some of us the chance to revisit the walk-on roles we played in our nation’s story It can be chastening. Leafing last week through the 1968 files on the Nigerian Civil War, I was intrigued to find myself and five fellow-reporters characterised by a bemused British diplomat as a horde of drunken refugees from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. If he is to be believed (and I am not sure he can be), only his intervention saved us from incarceration, or worse, at the hands of ruthless natives.
The improbable setting for this saga of men behaving appallingly was Niamey, the capital of Niger (population 9 million). In July 1968 it was the venue for peace talks between General Yakubu Gowon, the leader of the Nigerian Federal Government, and General Odemugwu Ojukwu, who had taken the former Eastern Region out of the federation the previous year to form Biafra.As a result of the war, and a Nigerian blockade, hundreds of thousands of Biafrans were starving.

Since spring of that year, newspaper and TV pictures of children close to death had touched the world’s hearts. There was tremendous pressure for a cease-fire, an arms embargo and a relief effort. Biafra became one of the great causes of the Sixties.Britain, as the former colonial power and Nigeria’s main arms supplier, was in a sensitive position. Many newspapers and politicians were urging the prime minister, Harold Wilson, to end arms supplies. It was a contentious political issue, complicated by Britain’s pounds 300m trade interests in Nigeria Mr Wilson had to be seen to be doing something.