Beginning her career as a journalist writing about tanks (bulk liquid transportation, not the bang bang kind) for Tank World magazine, Mills quickly fled to the Observer. She became Features Editor of the Daily Telegraph aged twenty-six (the youngest they’d ever had) and then moved to the Sunday Times where she did the paper’s main interview every week. Soon after, July 2001, she became editor of the News Review – the paper’s weekly comment, analysis and features section.
This interview with Benazir Bhutto was one of her weekly encounters and sums up how Bhutto’s glittering early career as a beacon to other women politicians turned tawdry as the corruption allegations kept on coming.
Benazir Bhutto was once the very model of a Third World leader. The scion of a political dynasty, the Oxford-educated beauty with democratic ideals seemed the answer to Pakistan’s prayers. In 1988 she became the first woman to head a Muslim nation and the first to give birth while in office. She embodied a new, more optimistic, era.
But a decade is a long time in politics. These days Bhutto is mired in a corruption scandal that looks set to finish her career for good. In April, she was convicted of embezzling more than £1 billion. Tomorrow, her lawyers will go to the supreme court of Pakistan in a final appeal. If they fail, she faces five years in jail, a £5.2m fine, disqualification from holding public office and confiscation of all her property – Pakistan’s high society is already gleefully awaiting the ‘sale of the century’.
At present, Bhutto is in the throes of moving into a rented flat in South Kensington – ‘It is all boxes, chaos, impossible,’ she says – so we arrange to meet at her sister’s place nearby. I arrive early and after a cursory greeting am left alone in a grand sitting room – mahogany furniture, cream silk curtains across three big windows. There are two large photographs. One is an official portrait of Benazir the prime minister with an inscription, ‘To my darling Sunny’. (Bit formal for a sister?) The other is of their father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan’s People’s Party (PPP), who was hanged by President Zia in 1979. ‘My sister,’ Bhutto confesses later, ‘would like me to give up politics’ – considering their two brothers were murdered and the fate of their father, I am not surprised.
Suddenly, the door bell rings. I expect Bhutto but discover two lawyers who have come to monitor what she says. Finally, she arrives in an elegant whirl of red and white (white cashmere jersey, silk skirt covered with red roses, crimson lipstick) and large black sunglasses. Her skin glows and her hair shines; not bad for a 46-year-old woman on the verge of losing everything.
Bhutto immediately denies all charges of corruption. She is, she claims, the victim of an elaborate conspiracy conducted by ‘the theocrats of Pakistan’ – she pronounces it ‘Park-is-tarn’. ‘There is a dangerous clique in the military and the judiciary, which includes the prime minister Nawaz Sharif, which wants to turn Pakistan into a theocratic state, modelled on the Taliban. They have thrown more and more mud at me hoping it will stick.’ She repeatedly insists – to approving nods from the lawyers – that all charges are politically motivated. ‘They have not one shred of evidence. Dictators in Pakistan abuse the judicial process to eliminate popular leaders, it happened to my father. Now they want to eliminate me.’
Since democracy was restored in Pakistan in 1988 (when Bhutto and the PPP were elected) power has alternated between it and the Muslim League. Pakistani politics is a dirty and violent business – Bhutto’s husband, Asif Zardari, has been in prison for three years accused of corruption and murdering one of her brothers. I feel sure there are no clean hands here, but having read the independent view provided by Sir John Morris QC, the former British attorney-general, it certainly seems that Bhutto’s trial has been unfair in some respects. It cannot be right, for instance, that she was convicted by the son of the man who ordered her father’s execution.
Yet whatever the wrongs she has suffered during the legal proceedings, in a society like Pakistan where corruption is endemic (in a recent survey it was found to be even worse than that well-known kleptocracy, Nigeria) it is hard to believe that Bhutto and her husband (once the minister for investment) are as innocent as they claim. He was, after all, dubbed ‘Mr 10%’ in her first term in office and ‘Mr 40%’ in her second (she claims this was ‘a slur on an innocent man by my political enemies’). And the splendour of the couple’s many homes (palatial pads in Karachi and Islamabad, a private zoo, not to mention a disputed multi-million mansion in Surrey) have led some to question the loot’s origin.
Bhutto is adamant that her money is ‘family money, we have been wealthy for centuries’. But in a country where the majority live on the poverty line, such wealth inevitably arouses suspicions.
She is still by no means short of cash. Surreally, she says she has just been gazumped on a ‘beautiful house in Osterley with lots of space for my mother (who has Alzheimer’s), a big garden, lots of bedrooms, dining room, living room, study.’ Such houses are not cheap – nor are rented flats in Queen’s Gate. Can she put her hand on her heart and swear that neither she nor her husband ever took kickbacks?
‘Yes, I can,’ she says, ‘because my husband never asked me once. He could have come to me and said ‘I want you to do this, I want you to do that’, but he never did. People say he could have done it behind my back – ‘I say, show me the proof. People are innocent until proven guilty.’Despite her insistent tone and initial conviction, this sounds like a rather halfhearted denial. Indisputable, however, is the appallingly high personal cost Bhutto has paid for her time in power. She has not seen her husband – ‘we care for each other deeply’ – since a prison visit in April. And for the past two and a half years her three children (aged 11, 9 and 6) have been living in Dubai ‘for their own safety’ where she could see them only intermittently. They were supposed to be back in Dubai last month, but she has installed them in schools here while she fights her appeal.
‘Like most working women,’ she begins – with what I soon realise is phony humility – ‘I often wonder whether my job has robbed my children of what was their right. But I feel that if I had not been what I am, I would not have been happy and, as an unhappy mother, my children would have grown up neurotic. Now they don’t have my time, but they do have the attention of a woman who is satisfied that she is working for a higher cause. In that sense I am a better person and a better mother.’
She says she is happy ‘to have this period together with them in England’ and for the first time I don’t feel like I am being spun a line. ‘The best thing is I am here when the tooth fairy has to visit . . . the fairy often forgets when I am not there. The most fulfilling relationship is that of a mother because children love you unconditionally.’ For a moment, she looks sad. In her high-octane whirl, there can’t have been much space for normal family life.
‘What they have done to my family is inhuman, it has caused me immense mental agony,’ she says. There is a pause. Then the official Bhutto is back on message. ‘But I am not going to let them succeed. I am going to fight,’ she says briskly. ‘Obviously the price is too high when you lose your brothers and your father but I had a task to do.’
She continues in this vein for a while before saying more wistfully: ‘You know, Eleanor, being back in England, seeing friends from my time at Oxford makes me think how extraordinary my own life has been. Their lives have had stability; husbands, wives, children, jobs. Whereas I have achieved great heights of fame, but have paid dearly. I only entered politics out of duty when my father was in prison. I thought it was temporary, that I would be a diplomat again when he was released. But he wasn’t.’
There is no stopping her now. ‘All my life I have been looking for an exit route. But the more I tried to get out of politics, the more it embraced me. In 1997, I thought, enough: I have small children, my mother is sick, I will tend to my personal affairs. But then my party said, “There is no one else who can lead us, you must fight on.” I have been prime minister twice, to do it a third time holds little charm, but my people would vote me back tomorrow.’
This spiel is vintage Bhutto. Nothing is her fault, forces have acted upon her; the corruption charges are a political conspiracy; she is a politician only out of ‘duty’. It is a touching portrait, but I just don’t buy it. She is just not the ‘poor little me’ type. I have never met such an imperious woman; Blair’s babes fade into insignificance in comparison. She is just too smooth, the setting too opulent, the ‘I am a woman of the people’ line just a bit rich coming from such a privileged mouth. As an undergraduate – she was president of the Oxford Union – she drove a yellow MG, hung out in the south of France and worked closely with Peter Mandelson on student politics.
Her ‘good friend Peter,’ the king of spin himself, would be proud of the way Bhutto is trying to whitewash herself now. But, tellingly, her old pal has not been rallying to the cause. ‘No, I haven’t seen him’, says Bhutto, ‘I feel inhibited to see old friends who are now powerful men because I don’t want it to be misconstrued.’ Our own iron lady has – perhaps unsurprisingly – been much more helpful. ‘Margaret Thatcher has been very kind to me, she understands how it is to be a woman in a man’s world. I visit her sometimes for advice and support, she is very good at that.’ General Pinochet, Benazir Bhutto – what interesting affairs Thatcher’s tea parties are becoming. And how sad that Bhutto, who began by flying the flag for a new generation, should wind up in their has-beens club.