One shot still echoes around the world

They say you always remember where you were when you heard the bad news, even if you rarely remember the actual date.
But Thursday, 3 June 1982 was already shaping up into a memorable evening for me. I was at a ball I had helped organise at the Savoy and had spent dinner discussing the on-going Falklands war – especially Prince Andrew’s role in it – with the Duke and Duchess of Kent. Then I danced with the Duchess.
As I escorted her back to our table a messenger arrived from the office and at that moment glitzy trivia (and name-dropping) ended as a new chapter of world history opened.
Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, had been gunned down leaving a diplomatic banquet at the Dorchester. His bodyguard had chased the gunman along busy Park Lane (it was just after 11pm) and, incredibly, shot him in the back of the head. Two accomplices were in custody. Shlomo was in hospital, but the bullet had passed right through his brain…
I knew him fairly well – I’d met him at receptions and been entertained by him at his home, his embassy and his club – and I liked him a lot. Educated in Washington and London he was an intellectual giant, a quick-witted, urbane and brilliant public speaker and also a fine teller of amusing tales who seemed to like little better than to relax, glass in hand, swapping yarns with a few friends. The burden of never being able to move outside the door without a team of bodyguards failed to daunt his constantly high spirits. He would take “the lads” jogging with him each morning in the streets north of Regents Park. All that protection didn’t help him in the end, though.
The assassin’s bullet took more than 20 years to kill him. It blinded and almost totally paralysed him. After a couple of years he was in a virtual coma, but he didn’t die until March 2003.
A potential peacemaker, he deserved – some said he was destined for – the best and the highest jobs but his memorial, now, is likely to be only as a sidebar in history books. For Shlomo’s shooting changed the modern world.
In the middle of 1982, while most of the rest of us looked towards the South Atlantic, Israel had contrived a temporary cease-fire with the PLO. Prime minister Menachem Begin interpreted this as applying to all Palestinian groups, including the dissident Abu Nidal faction, which was behind the attack in London that night. Begin described the shooting as “a direct attack on our state”, ordering immediate air strikes on PLO ammunition sites and training camps in and around Beirut. Yasser Arafat retaliated with 24-hour artillery and rocket fire on unarmed Israeli villages and kibbutz settlements.
On Sunday June 6, Israel’s defence forces invaded Lebanon, and laid siege to the capital, eventually forcing out Arafat and his supporters. The shooting hadn’t made many big headlines – after all it wasn’t, at the time, an actual killing, merely “an assassination attempt”. However the incident had already developed into a full-scale war and the Middle East has barely enjoyed three consecutive days of peace thereafter.
In one of his few lucid moments during his last 21 years – all of them spent in hospital – he told a friend: “If those who planned it [the war started in his name] had also foreseen the scope of the adventure they would have spared the lives of hundreds of our best sons… We are tired of wars. The nation wants peace.”
But, by then, nobody was listening.
In his native Jerusalem, where seven generations of his family had been born, Shlomo died, aged 73 - according to doctors as a direct consequence of his wounds. Only after all those years did his “attempted murder” finally become an “assassination” – and that single shot reverberates around the world, even today.
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