Joanna Lumley

01/02/2010

The Gurkhas were fighting a losing battle until Britain’s sexiest pensioner joined their fight. She tells us what happened next…

By Adam Forrest

AOL users might be signing in under the assumption that their breathy “you have email” greeting is a digitally created approximation of warm, womanly elegance. But no – it’s a recording of Joanna Lumley. Who else? Luxuriously posh and achingly sincere, it was these honeyed tones that melted government ministers into submission over the Gurkhas, the same way the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny left those smitten woodland creatures conquered among the flowers.

She insists it was a louder, less seductive noise – the voice of the great British public – that won Nepalese veterans the right to citizenship in the UK, but even seasoned campaigners at the Gurkha Welfare Trust will tell you that the nation and its leaders only began listening once Lumley began speaking out with mellifluous passion. The actress is graceful in victory, claiming it was not too difficult to tap into the immense reservoir of goodwill toward a group of men who had served Britain so loyally. “It was such a blazing wrong, and we knew it could be righted,” she recalls.

 “The support we got from across the country – from the very grand to the very humble, from the old to the young, from newly arrived immigrants to people who had been here from before the Norman conquest – it was remarkable. Everyone was saying, ‘For pity’s sake, let’s back the Gurkhas’.”

The government U-turn, which finally allowed former Gurkha soldiers who had served before 1997 to settle in the UK alongside more recent veterans from Nepal, followed a series of meetings Lumley had with opposition leaders, cabinet ministers and finally Gordon Brown. In topsy-turvy scenes reminiscent of The Thick of It, she seemed to force immigration minister Phil Woolas into a climb-down after following him around TV studio corridors. What did she do to turn the man regularly described as border control’s ‘Mr tough guy’ into jelly?

“Well, I didn’t twist his arm!” she laughs, describing the day she accosted the politician after a press conference. “I did feel sorry for him. All the hacks were there saying to me, ‘There’s the minister Joanna!’ So I said, ‘Mr Woolas can I talk to you?’ By which time he’d been whooshed away.

“But we followed him, and the lawyers and I followed him in, and we had a real old haggle about what he might do for us. So all I was doing was prompting him, but it looked as though I was bullying him! But we made friends afterwards. I invited him round for supper later and we all had a very jolly evening together.”

And what about her meetings with the Prime Minister? “I felt from talking to him, he hadn’t really been briefed properly on it. He had figures on his desk with thousands and millions of Gurkhas all arriving needing life support, begging and in wheelchairs. I said, ‘Will you be gracious enough to let our side brief you properly on what we know to be the facts?’ The government were finally very generous and open-handed.”

If this makes apparently serious matters of state sound a little too Absolutely Fabulous, Lumley makes clear her battle for citizenship is part of a longer struggle on behalf of the veterans and their families. Living in some of the poorest parts of the Himalayas, the older Gurkhas are denied an army pension unless they served for 15 years.

The Gurkha Welfare Trust is now campaigning to help raise £10m to maintain monthly welfare pensions and expand community projects by constructing more clean water pipes and ravine bridges in the mountain villages.

“It’s bare subsistence living, and the charity pension just keeps you from starving and dying,” Lumley explains. “You think of the Himalayas and you think ‘God, how fresh, how clean – what could be lovelier?’ But the truth is that sometimes the rivers have run through villages further up, so by the time it comes down it’s basically an open sewer.

“It’s ghastly. So unless you can find a spring, pipe it and protect it, you can’t get clean water. They’re just so desperately poor – and it would be wonderful if these old boys who were prepared to lay their lives down without a murmur, that we could thank them in this way.”

No starry-eyed romantic about rural poverty, Lumley nonetheless has a preciously-held connection with the remote mountain region. She was born in the Himalayas, in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, and her father was a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles. And yet she had never been to Kathmandu – the Nepalese capital – until she visited to celebrate the triumph in gaining Gurkhas citizenship last summer.

“I was a kind of hippy in the ‘60s and everyone seemed to be going out to Kathmandu, but I never got there. It’s a fabled name, like Samarkand or something. Even the very word is remote and thrilling. So to go there, to the country where all my father’s favourite people had been from, was an immense privilege. To meet all these stupendously bright, kind, tough and humorous people… to be feted the way we were was overwhelming.

“We were completed blitzed. It made me feel extraordinary. To think of one’s own tawdry life, compared with these tough people, well…”

For once she is lost for words, moved beyond her usual poise. Is seems churlish to ask, but does she think it’s worrying how much influence a celebrity can have on government policy? “Well, I was a recognisable face – which the press like because they feel their readers can identify with that – but I hadn’t just been parachuted into it. It’s been a big part of my life because my father was a soldier with the gurkhas all his life.

“I am a celebrity, as you put it, but in this case I wasn’t. I can’t list all the grand and famous names from the rock world who said, ‘Do you want our help?’ But we felt the Gurkhas themselves were the stars, and we didn’t need the big celebrities.”

Lumley, now 63, is still acting. She has a fruity part in the forthcoming series of Mistresses. Yet she’s clearly much more excited about a recent trip through the East African countries of the Nile Valley for a BBC documentary. She lets forth another euphoric cascade of words, describing the people of Ethiopia as “staggeringly beautiful and charming and generous.”

“You imagine a sandy, barren place – it is true in the eastern edge but up north there are fabulously lush hills. There are terraces, swept streets and a sense of vigorous recovery.

“It’s really exciting. I’m hoping families can watch it – I don’t want young people to think you can’t do anything in
this world. You can always do something.”

www.debtofhonour.org

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Are the Gurkhas heading home already?

The complexity of last year’s citizenship battle left a great deal of confusion over the number of Gurkhas now arriving in the UK.

Almost 12 months ago, worried government officials briefed newspapers that “by some calculations” up to 50,000 could apply to come to the UK – and blanket citizenship rights could leave the taxpayer with a £3bn bill. Although such concerns have proved unfounded, military charities are now warning that some of the Gurkhas setting up in the UK are beginning to fall through the cracks.

There is an MoD advice and resettlement office in Nepal (around 12,000 are thought to be considering applying for British citizenship over the next three years), but some Gurkhas have been left derelict, with little money and nowhere to go. Hugh Milroy, director of Veterans Aid, a homeless charity for former soldiers in London, revealed that some had turned up on his doorstep hungry.

“I’m a huge supporter of the Gurkhas and I hope I don’t see more cases like this,” he said. “We’re not trying to scaremonger. We’re trying to make it clear that these guys should be aware – through the resettlement programme in Nepal – what they face when they arrive.”

Milroy also told The Big Issue that he’d helped his first Gurkha return to Nepal once life in the UK had proved all too much. “He didn’t appreciate how complex life in this country can be. Trying to get into the benefit system, trying to get housing, is very difficult.”

But Lumley insists such instances are exceptional, and fears of Gurkhas overwhelming the welfare state unnecessary: “It’s been overheated. There’s bound to be cases of somebody arriving who doesn’t know where to go. But the Gurkha way of life is very different from our own. They are very family based, community based.

“Most who have come here have made plans on who to stay with. They’re not after handouts – they all want to work. There are so few arriving, and most have gone about it conscientiously and responsibly.”   

AF