[IF H is for hero, then P is…]

Scan page 10

IF H is for hero, then P is quite definitely for Pope. Quite how the Pope came into it is not quite clear. One minute it was all our lads, the next, the screens and papers were filled by a white haired con-man smiling from the back of a converted Range Rover.

For so long the Pope's visit had been off that it came as a shock to realise that the Gatwick tarmac was actually being scrubbed down so that he could abase himself on British soil without catching any of those British diseases.

Television stations locked themselves in a time warp of golden banners and chanting clergy. It was a Royal Wedding repeat without the token woman and lasting almost a week longer.

The radio was worse still. The Pope's stage mafia voice rolled its way through platitudes scattering the programme schedules like confetti in his wake.

"My greatest fear" said one professional PopeFatcher, "was he would drop a bombshell by Bertioning the word ceasefire, but all he spoke of was == hononrable peace."

Fo: *o ders there migh:

tilde: "E" because the Ministry of Defence cut off all but the baresti news from the successful attacks on Goose Green and Darwin.

Whether this brief blackout was for military operational reasons or not it proved very convenient for the media who were permitted to switch their attention to the Pope without interference from the other side of the world.

The Mail on Sunday, for example, one of nature's hawks over the Falklands war, turned its front page over to a picture of the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury kneeling side by side presumably praying. (The Archbishop of Canterbury always looks as if his conversation with the almighty are more in the nature of a briefing session from the Tory Party rather than anything so humiliating as prayer).

The headline was simply 'Our Father ... " and the text described it as, "A moment when more than four centuries of bitter division began to yield to the forces of reconciliation."

Other papers "discovered" that there was anti-Catholic prejudice in Britain. The Observer called it *the one great prejudice in British society which even the most tolerant still regard as respectable" , a statement which would astound politically conscious women, blacks, gays, just for starters.

GA This Pope-wooing was in part an attempt to keep His Holiness the Cope (as one BBC reporter called him) as near to neutral as possible over the South Atlantic war.

But that was only part of It was a way of paying homage to his sphere of influence in Britain. If the Pope can meet the Queen without an understanding on who should curtsey to whom that was proof of British tolerance and of Papal deference.

But the break from war, towards the rhetoric of peace was brief. Within days we were back to the Falklands, the Kawasaki scramble bikes, and Colonel H - the latest hero to find his fame posthumously.

he ill know of cours We sit told Indi ivory day. It. is one of the things that distinguishes British poople from: Argentinian people.