Home Thoughts from Abroad

By David Smith
June 2022

Seen from a distance, and Argentina is 7,000 miles away, that’s some distance, I confess to having had little idea just how fragile my “old country” could be, in the midst of scandals engulfing what I have always thought of as the Twin Towers of British rule, Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. Seen from afar, those scandals embrace other tombstones of our supposed, and esteemed, way of life.

“We Argentines think of the UK as the place that always lives by the rules, something we never do,” a friend said to me the other day, having devoured headlines about the Royal family and Boris Johnson in La Nacion, the country’s up-market daily. “But Britain now looks like a sad joke. Does anyone back home in your country obey the law?”

I didn’t dare tell him that the scandals extend to the Police, Parliament, the Post Office, and that’s before you look at the nakedly mercantile relationship with Russian oligarchs. Or that the future King is questioned about dealings with a Saudi Arabian mogul, let alone his brother’s close friendship with the late, serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

This friend routinely complains about the antics of the foul-mouthed Police in the beautiful, tree-lined neighborhood of Buenos Aires where he lives. Then I ponder Police officers in London’s Met provably using obscene language about the women they work with. All very Argentine. But no longer just Argentine. Basta, I think. Enough. But the drip-drip of something rotten in the state of….I leave you to fill in the blank.

What’s indelible, so far away, and at that great distance, is my sense of just how close the UK is to that which I have seen down the years elsewhere, as a foreign correspondent. Here in Latin America, for sure, but also in the United States, in the Middle East, in Africa. And, please be patient with me, because I lived there as it collapsed, even in the former Soviet Union. Corruption, with a capital C.

Living here, corruption is a daily fact of life, whether it’s the Police seeking bribes at street level, or politicians having bagmen carry millions of dollars, yes in cash, to safe hiding-places. My favorite one was the politician’s assistant who hurled nine million dollars, yes in bags, over the wall of a convent outside Buenos Aires, for the nuns to look after. He worked for the husband and wife team who held the Presidency from 2003 till 2015.

The wife, now the country’s Vice-President, goes to court regularly on charges of embezzlement and money laundering, insisting on her innocence and then conveniently pursuing “reform” of the Judiciary that often leads to the removal of judges who question her alibis on her ownership of multiple homes, hotels, and businesses.

“What’s indelible, so far away, and at that great distance, is my sense of just how close the UK is to that which I have seen down the years elsewhere, as a foreign correspondent.”

Then I think of my years in Washington DC, watching the political class take vast sums of money for their re-election campaigns, from business interests which then sought legislation favorable to them, and almost always got what they wanted (and what they paid for). Business as usual, they said in Washington. Corruption the word almost anywhere else. Let’s just agree: “something rotten.”

Ah, I hear you saying, nothing so serious, nothing on that scale, in the UK. Really? From a distance, you can read of political parties receiving game-changing sums of money from Russian oligarchs, in the halcyon days when Londongrad was the place to be. Folks with peerages, and a seat in the House of Lords, who have written big cheques too. And then there was a VIP lane, for friends of those in power, who wished to cash in on the billions spent by government on equipment for pandemic response.

And the idea of a politician circumventing the courts through the exercise of power, as we’ve seen here in Buenos Aires with the current Vice-President, for years? Surely not? Well, let’s just consider how Downing Street has made it sound like the Prime Minister breaking the law doesn’t matter, fine or no fine. Or ponder the way the government’s own investigation into “bring your own booze” parties ends up in the hands of the leader, for him to decide whether to accept findings. He said he does, then promptly ignores them, indeed venturing out to insist he did nothing wrong.

From this distance, not my place to conjecture what this has done to public trust. What I do know is what I have seen elsewhere. Deep disbelief, at street level, of what the ruling hierarchy says and does. One law for them, and another for us, the conclusion reached by a majority. I saw it in Moscow, and Vladivostok, and Siberia. I have seen it down the years in Winchester, Virginia, and Walla Walla, Washington, and Hell, Michigan (yes, there is a town named Hell in Michigan).

And forgive me a final home thought from abroad. My old country seems to lack any higher authority to offer the kind of sober counsel the ruling class so sorely needs. Having worked with Her Majesty, when she made trips abroad in another age, think the 70s and 80s, I can so admire her single-minded dedication to the role and the preservation of the House of Windsor.

But the Head of State concentrated, before the Jubilee, on the title that will be given to her daughter-in-law at the time of her passing. That seemed to be of paramount concern, number one on the agenda, at a moment when her own family was bedeviled by allegations of pedophilia, or peddling titles for money, and her Prime Minister was playing footloose with the truth.

My decades in journalism have taught me. Let the facts speak for themselves. Something is rotten in the state of….and I’m not thinking of Argentina.