Peros Banhos on the Chagos archipelago looks like your basic tropical island paradise: turquoise waters and golden sands, waves lapping on a palm-fringed beach. But step off the strip of sand into the wall of green behind, and you’re enveloped by mosquitoes. The old well you were counting on for water is a shallow puddle. And the silver fish between your feet dart past a net, despite not having seen one in 50 years.
The jungle has grown over the old British colonial buildings, and the jungle is a harsh place. Four Chagos Islanders have been here more than a week, along with the man who brought them, Adam Holloway – former MP, ex-Guards officer, an adventurer seemingly from an earlier era. This is not, as the Foreign Office briefed journalists, ‘a political stunt’. It is not merely a protest against the plan for Britain to hand the territory to Mauritius. The Chagossians are coming home.
It was early January when Adam told me about his plan to accomplish this. I was surprised, but not shocked. We became friends 20 years ago, when I was reporting from Afghanistan and he asked for help getting to Helmand to see the war for himself. The Tory whips’ office was horrified. He went anyway, showing the relaxed attitude to authority that stopped him climbing the greasy pole to high office, but which has carried him into the Chagos exclusion zone.
Misley declares that he will die before leaving Chagos. He would have to be dragged away in handcuffs
I agreed to help and travelled with him. The whole thing was done in complete secrecy, buying a boat in Thailand, loading on provisions in Sri Lanka, and then a five-day passage across the Indian Ocean. The electronics were switched off as the boat made the final approach to the Chagos archipelago so the British patrol boat would not see us.
He originally planned this venture to protect the ‘critical’ American base at Diego Garcia. It was, he thought, a ‘catastrophically stupid mistake’ to hand this territory to Mauritius, which, if not openly allied with China, is certainly under Chinese influence. The base might not be able to continue its operations. He understood that putting people on the outer islands – ‘changing the facts on the ground’ – would make it far more difficult for the deal to go through.
He had got involved, then, because of the ‘insanity of giving billions to corrupt politicians in Mauritius rather than spending it on our own defences’. But after he met the Chagossians, it became ‘a very personal thing’, an effort to make amends for what Britain did half a century ago in expelling the islanders, sending them to live 1,300 miles away in Mauritius. ‘We’ve got to right this historical wrong, and it starts today.’
So Adam is striding around Peros Banhos, wearing a white shirt and discount nylon shorts from Lidl. I left the island after a few days, but he stayed on, feeling responsible for the men he brought to one of the most remote places on Earth. ‘SHARK!’ I hear him shout as we speak on WhatsApp. It’s a warning to Misley Mandarin, elected as First Minister of the Chagossian diaspora, who’s knee-deep in water trying to catch a fish.
Misley resigned as a bus-driving instructor at Transport for London to spearhead the settlement. He is fiercely patriotic towards Britain, despite the crimes committed against his people by past governments and what the current government is doing to them. He proudly shows off photos from when he served in the British Army as a cook. His official declarations as First Minister usually end with a shout of ‘God save the King’.
He told me he felt ‘a sense of relief’ when he stepped on to the beach at Peros Banhos. He was finally home. He has no wish for the Chagos Islands to become a colony of Mauritius. He has only bitter memories of his time there as a child, made to sit at the back of the class in school, the Chagossians living in slums near the port. ‘My daughter was born in Manchester,’ he said. ‘My grandkid will be born on this island. And I want [them both] to stay British. We are British Chagossians. We are from this island, and we are here to stay.’
This week, the four Chagossians have been scraping moss from headstones and repainting the large cross in the Peros Banhos graveyard. They want to find the graves of their ancestors and restore them. Adam also has a plan to match DNA taken from the cemetery with samples from living Chagossians. He hopes this will refute, once and for all, the shameful official lie told in the 1960s that there was no native population on the island, only guest workers. It was a lie that led to the Chagossians’ expulsion.
Misley declares he will die before leaving Chagos. I believe him. At the very least, he will have to be dragged away in handcuffs. He has charisma and might be the man to lead hundreds, or thousands, of Chagossians to risk the hardship of breaking ground on their ancestral home. As well as being First Minister, he will be something of a tribal chieftain. Like his great-grand-father – who had that role – he may be expected to have four wives, even six, he says. There is an urgent need to repopulate the islands.
The settlement party are sleeping under canvas (Adam’s one comfort is his favourite pair of red silk pyjamas from home). They are living on coconuts and instant noodles. They will have to start catching fish if the settlement is to survive in the long term. The most pressing problem is water. They are looking around the island for other wells, using colonial-era maps from Kew Gardens. In the meantime they are drinking rainwater.
All this is being broadcast from the island using Starlink and an iPhone. Mainly, they appear on GB News. Since leaving parliament, Adam has defected to Reform, and Nigel Farage has made the Chagos issue his own.
Adam jokingly called the settlement expedition ‘Operation Certain Death’. It’s not that – but, as he says after a week in the fetid heat, ‘it’s not a laugh. It is extremely uncomfortable being here.’ As I write this, a launch from the British Indian Ocean Territory patrol is sitting just off the coral reef, watching them. The last time they came ashore, it was to serve eviction notices. No one can say what their intentions are now.
As in the 1960s, the fate of the Chagossians depends on decisions made in Whitehall. Everyone now recognises the injustice of what happened 50 years ago. Surely Sir Keir Starmer would not order the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands to be wrenched from their homeland a second time?
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