Tell Tale: World leaders’ wheels

But saluting was the last thing they did. Inside the terminal were the remaining 106 mainly Israeli passengers of an Air France flight from Tel Aviv that had been hijacked a week earlier by Palestinian and German terrorists. The approaching Mercedes wasn’t a rare 600 Pullman bearing their President, but a humble stretched W115 diesel. It had probably started life as an Israeli ‘sherut’ eight-seat shared taxi, but had been painted black and flown to Entebbe in the back of a C130 transport aircraft along with 100 members of the Sayeret Matkal, one of Israel’s special forces units sent to rescue the hostages.

From a distance and at night, the workaday W115 saloon looked a lot like the flagship W100 Große, and the Israelis figured that the deference shown to the Merc and its motorcade would allow them to get right up to the sentry post before the shooting started. They were right. Ninety minutes later all bar four of the hostages had been rescued safely, with the loss of one Israeli soldier, and the terrorists were dead. History doesn’t record what happened to their W115 Trojan Horse, but I doubt they bothered to fly it home.

The cars in which heads of state are conveyed are as laden with symbolism as their titles, palaces and uniforms. A motorcade projects power and demands respect, and back then a 600 Pullman like Amin’s was the default choice of despots and dictators. You left your impoverished voteless subjects in no doubt that you’d overthrown the last guy and seized control of the oil revenues when the convoy it led swept past, leaving them choking on your dust.

The Pullman ferried world leaders with every conceivable title, including Colonel Gaddafi, Marshal Tito, Chairman Mao, Emperor Hirohito and the Pope. Many of its customers, including North Korea’s various Kims, led nominally socialist regimes yet had no problem treating themselves to the pinnacle of degenerate Western car culture at the proletariat’s expense. And Mercedes plainly didn’t have a corporate social responsibility department back then.

But if you depend on voters for your power, or lead a country with a car industry, your choice of ride isn’t entirely free, and you may end up with something rather less stately than the big black Merc of the guy next door. Look at poor Emmanuel Macron. While the German Chancellor swaps between S-Class, 7 Series and A8, the French President has to make do with a domestically produced medium-sized crossover.

His new stretched, armoured DS 7 Crossback Élysée was revealed last month, with its 300bhp plug-in hybrid powertrain and individual rear seats. Short of a Bugatti it’s the fanciest car France makes, albeit in tiny numbers. But it’s still quite a comedown from the Chapron-bodied Citroën SM Présidentielle, commissioned by Georges Pompidou in 1972 and arguably the most stylish state car ever made. Who wouldn’t love a four-door, four-seat convertible powered by a Maserati engine and fashioned from a glamorous two-door GT by the same carrosserie that gave us the DS Décapotable? The Élysée Palace retains two of them, but security (and probably reliability) meant they were retired in 1995, bar an outing in 2004 when the Queen, who made the inaugural journey in the Présidentielle in 1972, returned for another state visit.

So Macron gets something that would look more at home on the school run. But we’ve known that open cars and high-profile targets don’t mix since the Great War was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in an Austrian-built Gräf und Stift Double Phaeton on June 28, 1914. The car had actually saved the Archduke earlier that day when a bomb thrown at it bounced off its flimsy hood and detonated under the car behind. But an unplanned visit to the injured in hospital later that day brought the demise of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and war to Europe. Chauffeur Leopold Lojka took a wrong turn and as he struggled to find reverse in the awkward early gearbox, assassin Gavrilo Princip, who just happened to be on the same street, took his chance with his pistol.

Contrary to urban myth, the Gräf und Stift was not cursed, and did not kill umpteen future owners, but instead was almost immediately (and slightly ghoulishly) put into a museum, where it has resided ever since. But it is true that its registration plate was Alll-118. With the ‘L’s rendered in lower-case, it could be read as A (for armistice) 11-11-18: the car in which war was sparked also foretelling the moment it would end.

The open Lincoln in which JFK was assassinated also ended up in a museum: the Henry Ford in Detroit, where it can still be seen. As a state limousine it rivalled the SM Présidentielle for glamour, but it seems incredible that after the great young hope of American democracy was extinguished on its back seat it wasn’t quietly crushed, but instead was given an armoured roof and put back into service. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter were all forced to sit where their predecessor had been shot.

At least the Secret Service learnt its lesson: perhaps rather too well, judging by Joe Biden’s eight-tonne ‘Beast’, built on GMC’s heavy-duty TopKick truck platform, and the 21-car motorcade which surrounded it as he drove to the COP26 climate change summit in Scotland last month.

State limousines and their entourage might be designed to send a message, but this is now the wrong message. Heavy armour and EVs aren’t incompatible: you can already buy a bulletproof Tesla, and the British Army is experimenting with hybrid and electric versions of its Foxhound and Jackal battlefield vehicles. Maybe Macron’s humble but hybrid DS 7 is actually the model other world leaders should follow. The first politician to retrofit an EV powertrain to a 600 Pullman gets my vote.