Gavin Evans investigates the Monday Club’s history of support for apartheid and racism
The voice on the line was unmistakably English, but the words were not. “Hoe gaan dit met jou?” it asked. I replied in startled Afrikaans that things were going fine, thanks.
A rusty minute followed until my attempt at linguistic conviviality was beached and the voice informed me in its plummy native tongue: “Martin Pritchard, Tory Monday Club – couldn’t mistake the accent on my answering machine. Lived in Pretoria for 11 years – best time of my life. Think of it as my first home.”
I explained I was researching a story on the club, and soon press officer Pritchard was on a roll, volunteering that the last South African to address them was from the South African Conservative Party. Then he remembered his brief. “Our problem is we have people take things out of context. We’ve had lots of bad press, so we’re very cautious.”
Until then my knowledge of this bunch was restricted to pickings from the gravy train of club-trumpeting Tory MPs who paraded through South Africa in the bad old days, forever broadcasting Pretoria’s praises and wallowing in the swill of their apartheid expense accounts.
South African Conservative Party representative Henk van der Graaff had told me his lot still enjoyed “pretty excellent relations with the Monday Club: every time we’ve gone we’ve been very warmly welcomed – Dr Treurnicht, Clive Derby-Lewis, SP Barnard, Boet van den Heever”.
I began asking Pritchard questions along this line but he hesitated, saying he needed to check whether my name came up in their files. A week later his tone suggested he’d got wind that my sympathies lay elsewhere and after that my calls were ignored.
I also drew a blank from other club luminaries like vice-chair Andrew Hunter, MP, the dial-a-quote former friend of Pretoria, whose exasperated secretary announced: “He told me to say he’s only a figurehead.” Even the loquacious, apartheid-cheering John Carlisle had “nothing to say on the subject”.
A new approach was needed: it was time to sign up.
After securing the co-operation of an untainted friend for correspondence purposes, one “Dave Coen” was created – a former South African soldier in “import/export” who longed for the return of white rule, felt there was no place for blacks in Britain and, of course, so sad about Rhodesia.
Membership secretary Denis Walker (a one- time Cabinet minister in Ian Smith’s government) took the bait, announcing that his wife was South African, that the club “monitors what is going on in South Africa very carefully indeed” and boasting of his friendship with Andries Treurnicht. “Got to know him well. Good chap. Spoke to him a week before he died.”
“Coen” then received a deluge of invitations to club functions at the House of Lords, starting with one celebrating the Romanian monarchist cause, and was exposed to the competing strands of the Tory right: Enoch Powellite racists who joined after their mentor’s Rivers of Blood speech; withering Colonel Blimps, forever fighting the good fight against the Huns; limp- wristed libertarians; disgruntled former spooks and arms traders; tight-lipped Anglo-Catholic clergymen; and a falange of pimply Tory boys, fresh from their “Hang Nelson Mandela” student days.
Until recently the glue binding them was white rule in Africa. Former Northern Ireland minister Peter Bottomley, MP, who grew up in Cape Town, told me his anti- apartheid attitude made him a “minority of one” within the club.
“There’s a strong anti-black element and this is a reason for their preoccupation with white rule there, and you also have to bear in mind that some members had close links with the apartheid security and intelligence services. There was also a constant stream travelling there. John Carlisle jokingly referred to himself as the MP for Bloemfontein West.”
My particular favourite was one Derrick Laud, a foppish, camp, huntin’, fishin’ and shootin’ type who used his base as an extremely active Monday Club member who specialised in opposing black immigration to build up his London-based consultancy and to lead right-wing Tory MPs on fact- finding missions to South Africa in the late apartheid days.
Laud, who just happened to be black and of Jamaican descent (and charmingly known as “Golly” by his Tory chums), was eventually disqualified as a Tory candidate amid embarrassing revelations about his background.
But while these types represented the outer fringe of the pinstriped far right, it would be wrong to assume their views and links lacked resonance within mainstream Tory, blue-rinse middle England. For instance, the diaries of that ultimate establishment insider, Lord Woodrow Wyatt, reveal the queen mother to have been a vociferous supporter of the apartheid government and of PW Botha in particular.
Recently released government records of the correspondence of Lord Montgomery show that the scourge of the desert fox was even worse – backing the Verwoerdian project four-square and advocating that Britain transform its colonies into apartheid-style bastions. Such ideas still resonate among the backwoodsmen of the shires, but the club seemed intent on leaving them behind.
At the end of the Margaret Thatcher era it was taken over by an even more extremist cabal, with close ties to British and foreign neo-fascist groups. The new president was Viscount Massereene, who happily admitted to being a racist, while El Salvador death squad leader Roberto d’Aubuison became a patron until his death.
South Africa became complicated at this point. Some, like Hunter (who acknowledged receiving briefings from the South African National Intelligence Service and security police, and backing from a military intelligence front group) retained connections with Pretoria’s hardmen; others preferred even spicier dishes.
In 1989 Treurnicht schmoozed them during a British tour and a year later Derby-Lewis addressed the club and was given an enthusiastic welcome by several MPs. But for many, particularly those who had lived through the war, this dalliance in fascist waters was a step too far. Membership plummeted and funding evaporated.
As its former vice-chair, Sir Teddy Taylor, MP, explained: “I joined because I thought there was a need to stand up for right-wing causes, but resigned because I felt they had got some unusual people in as members. They were getting out of control.”
Eventually, after five years of uninterrupted decline, the club was forced to return to its more traditional Tory diet – no to Europe, Ireland and black immigration; yes to the monarchy, the birch and the hangman – and several Tory MPs renewed their links.
This prompted a less hostile attitude to the press with the result that my next round of calls met with a positive response.
The chair, Lord Sudeley – a deceptively vague 59-year-old who wears magnificent tweed suits, fresh from the wardrobe of Remains of the Day appeasers – was keen to talk.
“We retain great interest in South Africa and Rhodesia – that’s what really kept the club going, more than anything else, but now its all gawn. Obviously Rhodesia’s gawn and South Africa’s gawn. The attitude is one of pessimism. It takes, what, 40 years to build up a great economy and you can let it go in five. Fragmentation and all that.”
Recalling his meetings with Treurnicht and Derby-Lewis, he lamented “we only get observers and such forth nowadays”, and recommended I speak to Walker who “knows all about South Africa – been there 35 times”.
But Walker was wary: “Rings a bell, this Gavin Evans. Why?” But my accent soothed him and he was soon rattling off about what a fine chap Treurnicht was, before, unprompted, he raised the subject of Derby- Lewis’s role in Chris Hani’s assassination. “Now that was astounding. What do you think of Derby-Lewis?”
“He’s a murderer,” I replied, trying to muffle the venom I felt. Walker was ready with his counter: “But he didn’t pull the trigger. Personally, when I first heard it, I didn’t believe it and some of the people I spoke to didn’t believe it either.” He trailed off sadly. “People do stupid things.”
When it comes to fundamentals, the club’s instincts on Southern Africa seem unchanged after its four decades in existence. Publications editor Barry Lenz pontificated in the club’s newsletter about British liberals who “looked forward with eager anticipation to the oppression of the white minority in South Africa under a vicious and bloodthirsty ANC [African National Congress] dictatorship”, and, with Ian Smith as an honorary member, the passion for “Rhodesia” is undiminished.
Motivating a fund-raising drive for “dispossessed Rhodesians”, Sudeley wrote: “It is with regret we were not able to stop the handover of Rhodesia. The collapse of a one-time self-sufficient nation was inevitable.”
Walker, however, said such missions were no longer the club’s prime raison d’tre: “We obviously concern ourselves with South Africa and Rhodesia, but the main interest today is Europe.”
Sudeley says this will spur a Monday Club renaissance: “It was so difficult with the Thatcher government because she was providing what the membership wanted, but now with a Labour government, it’s bound to strengthen our position.” As yet, however, there is no evidence for this. Instead with William Hague’s insistent lurch to the little Englander right on Europe, the club has been outflanked.
Even its abiding passion for the lost cause of white rule in Southern Africa lacks a handle other than support for the heirs of good old Smithie. Beyond the counsels of the queen mum, the British apartheid game is finally up – for the record, at least.
As Pritchard once whispered to me: “We’ve had some guests from the South African right, but we’d rather you didn’t mention it – a bit sensitive these days.”