Jason Cowley

Man of the year: William Shawcross

New Statesman, December 15th 2003

In the late summer of 1968, a tall, self-assured young man recently down from Oxford turned up at the offices of the Sunday Times on Gray's Inn Road in London. He was William Shawcross, the son of Hartley Shawcross, the former Labour minister and chief British prosecutor at Nuremberg, and he was looking for a smooth, accelerated route into journalism. The young Shawcross was ambitious and articulate; he had an aristocratic hauteur befitting an old Etonian and had acquired something of a glamorous reputation while at Oxford, among both men and women. Like in many of his class and background, he was restless for adventure. Privilege had liberated him into great expectations. He knew what he wanted but was unsure how to achieve it.

"He had left Oxford with a well-polished degree," recalls the journalist Bruce Page, who was then a senior executive on the Sunday Times. "His father wanted him to work at the Foreign Office, and no doubt pulled a million's tritags; but William wanted to be a journalist. Back then, because of NUJ rules, you could not go straight on to a national newspaper from university. I thought this rule was stupid and had been campaigning against it. I also wanted to give William a chance. Enoch Powell had just sued the Sunday Times for libel, after the paper accused him of spreading racial hatred, and I was in charge of collecting defence evidence. I thought it would be a good idea to speak to some Pakistanis and other ethnic minorities, in pubs and elsewhere, to find out if they had been racially abused as a result of Powell's speech. So 1 hired William and his then girlfriend, Caroline Ritchie, who had a perfect cut-glass accent, to do some freelance research. I knew that the Pakistanis would trust them. They were very diligent and collected a lot of stuff which helped in repulsing Powell."

But the doors of the Sunday Times remained locked to Shawcross, so he went off to write a book on Alexander Dubcek, the fallen leader of Czechoslovakia who was something of a hero to the anti-Soviet left--a work that the writer Richard Gott remembers even today as "profound and important". Soon afterwards Shawcross returned to the Sunday Times, the doors opened for him, and he progressed quickly to become a foreign correspondent, reporting with bravery and distinction from south-east Asia.

From the beginning Shawcross, who in 1971 married the writer Marina Warner, was interested in US power and the role and influence of that power in the world. He was a liberal internationalist; he wanted the United Nations to be strong so that it could act as a check and balance to US power, and to spread human rights and democracy. As a reporter, he witnessed the catastrophe in Vietnam, lie understood how south-east Asia had the potential to become a laboratory for world destruction, and he wrote from Cambodia during the rise of the Khmer Rouge. He particularly despised the cynicism of Henry Kissinger. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the destruction or Cambodia (1979), in which he highlighted the secret US bombing of Cambodia, is a fierce indictment of both Richard Nixon and Kissinger, whom he blamed for the American invasion of peaceful, agrarian Cambodia, the removal of Prince Sihanouk and, later, the murderous excesses of the Khmer Rouge. "Cambodia was not a mistake," he wrote. "It was a crime."

Page remembers how Shawcross became disaffected from the Sunday, Times when the then editor, Harry Evans, agreed to edit Kissinger's memoirs. "Kissinger is subliterate and William, like many others, thought that Harry, who is a good writer, was wrong to lend a war criminal like Kissinger such grace."

In a later book, The Quality of Mercy (1984), Shawcross returned to the subject of Cambodia, writing of how, because we are preoccupied by the Second World War and the conflicts of the recent past, we too often ignore the atrocities of our own time, unable and unwilling to act until it is too late. (The civil war in Bosnia and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 are more recent examples of what he sees as a wilful blindness to present atrocity.)

"I was very influenced by William's reporting," remembers Margaret Drabble, whose novel The Gates of Ivory features a Shawcross-like journalist who travels to Cambodia in search of the truth about that stricken country, only to be destroyed by a reality he had refused to believe. "The Quality of Mercy," she says, "was an important influence on my fiction. When ever I used to meet William, I always found him engaging, quick-witted and very interesting. I've only met him once since his conversion. It's very depressing what's happened to him."

The conversion to which Drabble refers is not religious, but political. Like his father--whose eventual alienation from the Labour Party earned him the sobriquet Sir Shortly Floorcross--Shawcross has journeyed from youthful rebellion to late middle-age reaction. Once a model progressive, he is today a fellow-traveller of US imperialism, a committed Eurosceptic, a powerful advocate of pre-emptive war and an apologist for monarchy and inherited privilege who, following the success of his television series about the royal family, is being paid £1m to write the authorised biography of the Queen Mother.

To read his latest book, Allies: the United States, Britain, Europe and the war in Iraq (Atlantic Books), is to be startled by the crude simplicity of so much of his thinking especially when you consider that as recently as 2000, when he published Deliver Us From Evil, a study of post-cold war conflicts in East Timor, Somalia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Kosovo, he was still capable of commenting on world events with great subtlety. Shawcross is a polemicist; he seeks culprits and attributes blame. Even so, the tone of his new book is wearisomely strident, bellicose, accusatory. If you are not for the Allies, you are automatically against them. There is no place in between, no place for doubt or scepticism. The enemies--France, Germany, Palestine, militant Islam--are clear and distinct.

Shawcross is a robust Manichaean: he divides the world between our light and their darkness, between good and evil. He never pauses to question his own prejudices--about Israel, whose illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza he never mentions; about American imperialism, which he now considers to be at worst benign; or about Islam and the Arab states, where he ignores the divisions between modernisers and reactionaries, reformers and fundamentalists. Nor does he doubt that liberal democracy will one day soon emerge from the rubble of Iraq's cities, that the death and destruction of recent times are a prelude not to greater anarchy, but to true freedom from tyranny. Shawcross, it seems, knows what he knows, and no one can persuade him otherwise.

The home of the Shawcross family, an Elizabethan mansion called Friston Place, is at East Dean in East Sussex. It is there, with his third wife, the society heiress Olga Polizzi (of the Forte dynasty), that Shawcross regularly entertains Christopher Hitchens, John le Carre, assorted Saatchis, Richard Perle, the restaurateur Oliver Peyton, Tory grandees and other right wing establishment figures. "I remember going to Friston for a lunch party old Hartley was hosting for Margaret Thatcher," says his friend and Sussex neighbour; the writer and academic Robert Skidelsky. "Thatcher was on her way to Glyndebourne, and I remember that every time she wanted to make a point, she stamped her foot on the ground. And every time she stamped her foot, she unwittingly pressed a bell under the table, which sent the servants rushing into the room. William was there that day, and he is very good in that kind of company, because he's so charming. But I don't think he's serious in his work about the things I'm serious about, especially the search for truth ... You begin by rebelling against pomp and power and end up by identifying with them."

Others are less generous. "Shawcross is a vintage product of the Eton/Oxford/Foreign Office elite," says John Pilger. "His coming hagiography on the Queen Mother is entirely understandable, as is his hagiography of Rupert Murdoch, whose rapacious power he admires. He was once thought by some to be a progressive, which was useful social currency then; we now understand better the kind of liberalism that wears a mask for great power."

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