DIARY
CHARLES MOORE In the argument about Gibraltar, Bally- gawley, shoot-to-kill policies and so on, opinion seems to divide between those liberals and Nationalists who protest at every curtailment of human rights, particu- larly when they are curtailed by a Tory government, and those who say that we are at war with the IRA and so nothing should be done to hamper the successful prosecu- tion of that war. I hope that there is a third view, one that favours emergency mea- sures, but resists arbitrary power. In this view it is either naïve or mischievous to object to the Diplock courts in Northern Ireland. Where intimidation is common- place, jury trial becomes impossible. Liberties cannot be always and everywhere the same, regardless of circumstances. But this view would also censure killings of the sort which appear to have taken place in Gibraltar. The Government denies that there is a policy of shoot-to-kill and then flies into a passion when journalists point out that the Gibraltar killings look uncom- monly like such a policy and try to find out more about them. Government is entitled, in emergency, to introduce special rules which limit normal rights, but it cannot be trusted to go above and beyond rules. One tawdry feature of the recent killings by the British army is that they are being used as evidence that we are winning the 'war' against terrorism. We are not. The IRA profit from political uncertainty, and of this there is plenty. Despite generally more efficient security, terrorist killing has in- creased in the past three years. This is because of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and because our Government's military toughness seems to be almost precisely matched by its political confusion.
Because we in England are so unalert to Irish political nuances, the IRA won a small victory last week. The BBC and others reported that the booby-trap killing of the two neighbours who investigated an empty flat in Londonderry was particularly terrible because it involved the killing of the innocent, and was also a bad mistake by the IRA. The two were innocent, of course, but so are the security forces when doing their duty (or when off it). It is terrorists who are determined to drive a moral wedge between the armed services and civilians. As for the 'mistake', the IRA would naturally have preferred to have killed soldiers or police, but they will have known the risk of killing civilians and taken it happily enough. There was outrage among Roman Catholics at the deaths, but at a level which the IRA can easily accommodate by 'apologising' and steering clear of that sort of thing for a few months. They do not, after all, need to be loved. They need only to show who is boss. It is good to hear, by the way, that after 13 long months of waiting, the result of the police enquiry into the convictions of the `Guildford bombers' is expected soon. It would be better if one felt it likely that their clear innocence would be proclaimed at last.
On page 15, Frank Johnson pays tribute to Sam White, our Paris correspon- dent, who died this week. Sam's life was a vivid embodiment of the extraordinary vicissitudes of the history of the 20th century. He was born a Jew in the Ukraine, where he escaped a White Rus- sian pogrom because his family lived out- side the ghetto. He fled to Rumania, then Argentina and finally Australia. There he fell in love with the daughter of John Wren, the Mayor Daley of Melbourne, about whose corruption one of the most famous Australian novels, Power Without Glory, was written. Facing Wren's dis- approval, Sam eloped with her to England, where she died not long after. He came to Paris on the day of the liberation and returned there as Lord Beaverbrook's cor- respondent three years later. He thought of himself as an Australian but left instruc- tions that he be cremated in England. His huge range of experience was marked in the lines of his fine, big, humorous head, and I think he was very proud of having come through so much. Sam told me once that he would never reveal his real name (his daughter Sarah says she cannot re- member it, but it had '20 ks and 30 ws'): he had made himself Sam White and did not want to be anything else. He invented an ancient tradition that The Spectator always paid for him to fly to London for our annual party. When he did not come this year, I feared the end could not be far off. C- `Ghastly! So like the Guardian masthead.' It used to make me happy to see Sam sitting drinking in our garden, and a little envious too: 'The oldest hath borne most. We that are young/Shall never see so much nor live so long.'
0 n Tuesday, I lunched with Jill Mor- rell, whose boyfriend, John McCarthy, has been a hostage in the Lebanon since the spring of 1986. Miss Morrell has fought bravely to keep John McCarthy's plight in the public mind, but she has had to contend with two formidable difficulties. The first is that there is nothing much for the newspapers to write about hostages when there is no news of them. The second is the Foreign Office. Its employees always counselled her to say nothing to the public. After a bit she began to realise that this was not because they were acting delicately behind the scenes, but because they wanted the hostage question forgotten. Now, thank goodness, there seems to be some sign of a change of heart. The special envoy to Iran, Mr David Reddaway, appears actually to care about the matter, and the Iranians themselves are now more disposed to co-operate. But if John McCar- thy is released the chief moral credit should surely go to Miss Morrell. With fright- eningly little help, she has kept hope alive.
Do not go to The Last Temptation of Christ. I endured the full two hours and 42 minutes this week. I think that the film is blasphemous, but this is almost by the way, since it is so hopelessly incoherent that it will surely be ineffective. My resentment is against a film which has tricked itself into controversy and hence public interest. Once the argument starts, it is difficult to believe that there is not something worth seeing, however distasteful. So let me try to assure anyone thinking of going that there is absolutely nothing of the faintest interest in the whole show except for several moments of farce, such as when a lion lumbers up to Christ in the desert and says, 'Congratulations, Jesus' in a Yankee accent, or when Christ suddenly tugs his heart out of his body and holds it up, dripping, like Dr Christian Barnard sud- denly stuck without his surgical instru- ments. Do not book early, to avoid dis- appointment.
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