Peter Hain has behaved towards Gibraltar like a self-righteous despot who still believes that he has the God-given right to decide what is in the best interests of the people of Gibraltar without having had the courtesy or the decency to inform himself beforehand of what the facts about Gibraltar really are, preferring instead to accept the Spanish version which is that Gibraltar thrives from criminal activity and illicit business, a view he says in his book was shared by the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. The initiative he and Straw took over Gibraltar in 2001 was void of any consideration whatsoever for the wishes of the people of Gibraltar, believing that if the UK had been able to steamroll a deal over Northern Ireland it should be relatively easy to do the same over Gibraltar, thereby putting the interests of the UK first in respect of the relationship that Tony Blair wanted to build with Jose Maria Aznar within the European Community in an effort at neutralising the Franco-German influence within the EU. That is, making Gibraltar and its people the sacrificial lamb in the altar of political expediency where UK policy over the European Union was concerned. His views, as expressed in the book, of the benefits that the Gibraltarians would obtain as a result, he quotes as examples the retention of British nationality and the removal by Spain of telecommunication restrictions, demonstrate the total absence of any sort of understanding of the facts or of the position of the people of Gibraltar and their rights as a colonial people.

British nationality we already had and no-one could take that away from us, either through the joint sovereignty deal with Spain or any other way. Restrictions, such as those to do with telecommunications were then already the subject of litigation at the European Court and were later lifted by Spain without a joint sovereignty agreement because they knew that sooner or later the European Court would rule against them. The point being that Gibraltarians are a people in their own right, striving for decolonisation through the application of the principle of self-determination which is applicable to every colonial situation, a forward looking community with the objective of obtaining its rightful place in the community of free nations, not a backward looking people cocooned in wanting to remain colonials forevermore, as Hain depicts us in his book.

A person with his background in the Labour Movement should have recognised as much. Instead, he has the audacity to depict Gibraltarians as neo-colonials and schizophrenic, and then goes on to talk about securing full British sovereignty for the military base as part of the deal notwithstanding that Spain is a full member of NATO, what can be more colonial and self-serving than that.

Be that as it may, he comes across as a person who has no desire to disguise his actions or those of other protagonists of that sad episode. His assertion that Peter Caruana was the one to give him the idea of a shared sovereignty deal by his private remarks to him in support of an Andorra style solution and the way he relates the events that followed, saying that Peter Caruana put forward conditions in an attempt at joining those same negotiations might be somewhat uncomfortable for Peter Caruana to have to assume at this stage of his political trajectory but do not sound or appear to be the “crazy and absurd” untruths that Peter Caruana says they are. The fact that nine years later Caruana said exactly the same thing in Seville, of his own free will, without even being probed by newsmen, gives credence to what Hain says in his book.

Hain has no need to lie, he is not covering up anything, he is unrepentant believing that it would have been, and still is, the “brave” thing for a political leader to do. For Hain being brave means to extend guarantees to his electorate before the election that he is rock solid where sovereignty is concerned and then do a complete u-turn when in office and do the opposite.

This is what Peter Hain describes as “leading from the front”, what James Gaggero was encouraging, and what Hain says Peter Caruana was up to, except that he got cold feet because of reaction in Gibraltar led by Joe Bossano, and instead he pulled out at the last minute. By his own criteria, as explained in his book, Peter Hain is not a politician to be trusted, of that there is no doubt, but that does in no way mean that he is lying about Peter Caruana’s role in all this. The sequence he relates concur in many ways with what some people in Gibraltar perceived was happening at the time.

Caruana can continue denying it all until the cows come home but everything he has done after the “done deal” was aborted, reads like a copy of the Hain script, except that the road leading to some sort of Andorra style deal was a different one, with Caruana’s double-talk and rhetoric creating sufficient doubts to confuse some of his supporters. Until now, that is!