Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [58]
Governor Crook was running a place with just ten thousand inhabitants: a large, part-English village. A Time magazine reporter in George Town, Grand Cayman, at around the same time advised readers that if you did not have the proper cab fare, your driver would tell you not to worry—you could just pay him the next time you happen to see him. A history published in the Cayman Financial Review claims that mosquitoes would swarm densely enough to suffocate cows.
“This is no tropical paradise,” Crook continued.
I could enlarge, in terms of a magnificent but mosquito-ridden beach; of a fairly new but rather ill-designed and sadly-neglected house; of a pleasant but very untidy little town; of swamp clearance schemes which generate smells strong enough to kill a horse; of an office which will one day ere long collapse in a shower of termite-ridden dust.
This is certainly an odd appointment for a Diplomatic Service Officer. How many of my colleagues, like myself, contemplating the inanities of some Head of State, have said to themselves “If only the fool would do so and so, how easy it would be.” But have they really thought how it feels to be the fool in question? . . . I might invite my colleagues to try running a Parliament in the best Westminster tradition, in which one Member leaves, and as a result throws the entire Finance Committee into confusion for want of a quorum, because he has to drive the school bus—which he owns.
Sir, I hope I may be forgiven if underlying this despatch so far is a note of perhaps unbecoming levity.
The governor’s long letter yields a picture of an amiable and decent enough upper-class British colonial type, trying his best to understand and cope in a strange, fast-moving new environment. In a speech in 1973, Crook told banks to remember that they were not the island’s only inhabitants: People lived there too. “If you don’t think about that,” he said, “you might as well buy an aircraft carrier and operate from that.”15
But on politics, and the strange relationship between Britain and its little quasi-colony, his tone hardens. “Caymanians don’t want independence,” Crook wrote. “They don’t want internal self-government either—they are very unwilling to trust each other with effective power . . . hence they are delighted to have a Governor around; apart from anything else he’s very handy for taking unpopular decisions.”
Governor Crook also put his finger on a crucial subtlety of the relationship that underpins the entire edifice of offshore finance: the fact that Britain has effective control, while pretending not to be in control. “They realise that if the Governor is seen to have effective power then the others appear to be essentially cyphers. The elected politicians among them find this bad for their image,” Crook wrote. “What they want is to make the Constitution look as if it obliges the Governor to do what they want, even though they know it doesn’t. I think we are in the world of semantics here. The more Caymanians we can put in positions of power, the better; they will act as lightning conductors for political dissent.”
Very little of substance has changed since then, as a senior Caymanian politician, who asked not to be quoted, explained to me on a visit in 2009. “The UK wants to have a significant degree of control over the jurisdiction, but at the same time it does not want to be seen to have that control,” he said. “Like any boss, it wants influence without responsibility; they can turn around when things go wrong and say ‘it’s all your fault’—but in the meantime they are pulling all the strings. The governor can bring an agent of the crown to come here and do whatever they want,” he said. “The hand has always been behind the scenes, in the shadows: it has not shown its face.” Keeping the reality hidden from Caymanians