The British have always excelled at comedy. We also have a superb reputation for boutique military undercover operations, sneaking under the radar with British understatement and secrecy. Sadly, the botched SAS excursion into Benghazi turned out to be an unfortunate hybrid of the two — a farce worthy of Dad’s Army.
After the soldiers and diplomats were placed under house arrest and had their phone confiscated, Richard Northern, Britain’s Ambassador to Libya, had to make an embarrassing phone call to an opposition spokesman. Even worse, Libyan state television got hold of it and aired the unverified recording. The unfortunate Mr Northern must have felt like Captain Mainwaring trying to justify an erratic advance by the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard.
It’s an unenviable task, having to ask for your SAS deployment back without admitting to what it was in the first place. Northern took the interesting angle of suggesting that the SAS personnel were just trying “to find if there was a hotel”, a bit like checking the Mr & Mrs Smith website before taking a weekend break in a war zone.
The rebel spokesman then points out that the nature of the travel inquiry was a touch heavy-handed: “Actually, they made a big mistake with coming with a helicopter I think in open area.”
Northern’s reply was one of Oscar-winning bafflement: “Oh, did they? I didn’t know they were coming.” Really? The real Captain Mainwaring, of course, would never have made such an admission of ignorance. He was far too proud. When Mainwaring was presented with facts he ought to have already known, his stock response was exquisite. “Just checking to see if you’d spotted that.”