Major crisis

I remember President Jimmy Carter well. His presidency was ended by the Iran hostage crisis which lasted from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981. As a young Daily Telegraph reporter finding my feet as a foreign correspondent, I pretty much doorstepped the besieged US embassy in Tehran every single day. I witnessed daily demonstrations: “Marg bar Shah, marg bar Carter (death to the Shah, death to Carter).” But there was never any chance Americans would hand back the cancer-stricken Shah, who had initially sought refuge in the US.

I did things that I wouldn’t do now. When Carter sent in Delta Force to rescue the American hostages, I hired a little plane and flew out to “Desert One” where a US helicopter and a C130 had crashed, leading to Carter’s rescue mission being aborted. As a final act of humiliation, the Iranians kept the plane flying the American hostages to freedom waiting on the runway until the precise moment when Ronald Reagan took over from Carter as US president. Had it not been for the Iran crisis, it’s just possible Carter might have been re-elected.

Trouble brewing

Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s niece, Tulip Siddiq, a minister in Keir Starmer’s government, is in trouble. Bangladesh’s anti-corruption commission has been slinging a lot of mud at her, and this is not helping her reputation. So far, there is no evidence that either Wazed or Siddiq embezzled any funds from the over $10-billion Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant deal in 2013 with Vladimir Putin (with whom they were photographed), but The Times reported: “Tulip Siddiq questioned by officials over £4bn fraud allegations: Labour minister quizzed over accusations that she helped Sheikh Hasina, the deposed prime minister of Bangladesh, to broker a corrupt deal with Russia.” The Times pointed out that Siddiq, 42, “is responsible for tackling corruption in the UK’s financial markets.”

The Daily Mail, which has been terrier like in targeting Siddiq, highlighted her living arrangements: “Treasury minister Tulip Siddiq apologises after breaking MP rules by failing to declare income from a London rental property for more than a year.” Although Starmer has expressed his “confidence” in Siddiq but prime ministers can be notoriously fickle.

Favourite shade

The Cipla boss, Yusuf Hamied, remembers September 28, 1956, in Cambridge, when his fellow undergraduate at Christ’s, Swaran Singh, got married. “Manmohan Singh and I were the two witnesses.” The former prime minister had admitted that his whole economic thinking had been shaped by his time in Cambridge. He took First after reading economics as an undergraduate at St John’s College, Cambridge, from 1955-57 — the College today has scholarships for Indian students instituted in his name. His Cambridge days were “in some ways the happiest time of my life and the period when I learnt the most,” he said. He did his PhD at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1960-62.

“Well, I studied economics at Cambridge,” Singh once told me, “It was the very famous Cambridge economist, AC Pigou, who said that when we study economics our impulse is not the philosopher’s impulse — ‘knowledge for the sake of knowledge’ — but for the healing that knowledge will help to bring. I have an opportunity to use my knowledge to soften the harsh edges of extreme poverty in India. That is a privilege for me.”

When Cambridge conferred an honorary degree on him, he had said, “The colour light blue is one of my favourites and is often seen on my head. My memories of my days in Cambridge are deep. I was taught by teachers like Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Maurice Dobb and Professor R.C.O. Matthews. I have vivid recollections of the economist Pierro Sraffa working at the Marshall Library. In many important ways, the University of Cambridge made me.”

Honourable mentions

The New Year Honours’ List has a couple of people worth picking out for special mention — the historian, Nandini Das, and the poet, Imtiaz Dharker, have both been given OBEs (Officers of the Order of the British Empire). Das, who is professor of early modern literature and culture at Oxford University and tutorial fellow at Exeter College, was shortlisted for the prestigious Wolfson History Prize for her book, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire. Her OBE is “for services to Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and to Public Engagement.”

Dharker, who gets her OBE “for services to the arts,” said: “In a time when discourse, especially political discourse, is devalued across the world, poetry has a powerful role to play. It’s a kind of national language, the language of being human, whatever tongue it is in.”