Dear Bell Pottinger, do something good for a change
About a year ago news began to leak that all was not well inside the offices of Bell Pottinger, the London public relations firm that advised the Gupta family until recently. Sir Tim Bell, the firm’s founder, it was said, had fallen out with James Henderson, its CEO. Bell had many South African friends. Henderson not so much.
But efforts by leading South Africans to talk to Henderson through Bell failed because the CEO wasn’t listening to him.
In the corridors of Bell Pottinger at 330 High Holborn, the firm’s work with the Guptas had, for obvious reasons, become deeply unpopular.
Associates from as far away as Australia complained that the Gupta work was hampering their ability to secure clients. Henderson still wasn’t listening.
At the time, when I asked the head of the Gupta account, Victoria Geoghegan, whether any of this was true, she strongly denied it. And when, about last September or October, someone told me that Bell Pottinger was considering closing the account, Geoghegan was quick to snap back: “That just isn’t going to happen.”
And she seemed to be right. Henderson promoted her to MD level and made her a partner. Were my sources mad?
No. They were just early. Or Henderson was painfully slow. And when he finally bowed to the inevitable and issued a genuinely abject apology to South Africans on Thursday for the damage his firm had done to race relations in Africa’s most promising democracy, it must have been because he had learned, or seen, something truly shocking.
In a way, the Bell Pottinger apology is just another brick falling out of the edifice of state capture by the Zumas and the Guptas. But we mustn’t underestimate what a big brick it is. For a while there, Geoghegan and her team were intimately involved with the strategy of capture. They would have visited the Saxonwold Shebeen. Whom did they meet there? What were they asked to do, and by whom?
Assuming you keep your job, James, Thursday’s apology has to be just the beginning. Yes, we accept the apology but now we want the detail please. You’ve hired a good international law firm, Herbert Smith Freehills, to audit the work you did, and the effect you had, in and on South Africa. Peter Leon, brother of the former opposition leader Tony, is chair of its Africa practice right here in Johannesburg. We assume you’ll publish a full and unredacted version of its final report
But what we’d really like, James, is to talk to you directly. Don’t be scared. Our parliament is gathering itself to conduct an inquiry into state capture (this is the effort by your former clients and our president, and his other cronies and acolytes, to literally steal our economy and our democracy). If our parliament invites you to give evidence, James, it would be enormously helpful if you were to come down to Cape Town. It’s nice this time of the year anyway.
Try also to remember, as the process that you have begun with your apology moves forward, what Britain and South Africa mean to each other. We are not, with respect, Tajikistan. We are South Africa. Our cricket team is playing a test match against yours at Lord’s. We may even let you win this one. Go and watch if you have time.
You may be lucky and see Temba Bavuma make a gritty century or bowl his devilish little inswingers. You might be lucky enough to watch Hashim Amla in full wristy flight, or Kagiso Rabada bounce Ben Stokes. You’d be watching the South Africa we all want to help create and which your former clients are trying to destroy by setting the races here against each other.
The thing about South Africa, James, is that we’ve seen off worse than the Guptas and state capture. We saw off apartheid and all the pain and threat and intimidation associated with it. With your help, and I am not exaggerating, we could begin to right our ship once again.
It was an old Cambridge man, Jan Smuts, who said South Africa was a place in which neither the best nor the worst ever happened. Let’s at least try to keep it that way. Things here are pretty bad right now. We’re in recession. Our debt has been downgraded to junk. Our government is frightened of its own shadow, incapable of leadership or, even surrender. The agony of the poor and unemployed is indescribable. Youth unemployment is basically 50%.
But you can help. Anything you can do to shine light into the shadows into which much of our government has retreated would be an enormous service to a country that deserves better.