14 MAY 1983, Page 5

Notebook

This, according to Mr Michael Foot (and also, for that matter, according to Mr Jo Grimond on the opposite page), is a 'cut-

and-run' election. Mr Foot repeats the ex- pression endlessly, mechanically. Within

the last few days we must have heard it from his lips at least a hundred times. But why? What does it mean? Cutting and run- ning is what ships' captains do when they are in a panic. Instead of weighing anchor in an orderly manner, they just cut the cable and sail away from danger as fast as they can. This hardly seems to be what Mrs Thatcher is doing. Enjoying a comfortable majority in Parliament and a sustained lead in the opinion polls, she has had no cause to Panic at all. She has simply used her prime ministerial prerogative to choose a date for the election on which she feels most likely to win. The decision was neither 'resolute' nor cowardly, merely opportunistic. If she wins, it will have been justified. Defence of it on any other grounds sounds no more convincing to the electorate than Mr Foot's empty jibes about cutting and running. And the one thing which Mrs Thatcher must, for her own peace of mind, be careful to avoid IS any attempt to depict her choice of elec- tion date as yet another example of her famous 'resolution'. It just can't be done. Soon, however, we will be spared any fur- ther discussion of the timing of the election. Even Mr Foot must by now realise that any further references to cutting and running Will cause the entire electorate to cut and run in the direction of the conservatives. He Will also have a much better chance of win- ning if he starts saying things in which he actually believes. This week the Sunday Times uttered its last word (or so we hope) on the subject of the 'Hitler Diaries'. This was a front- Pa.ge statement apologising to its readers. It was a statement so ludicrous that it deserves to be subjected to a little scrutiny. Its open- ing sentence was a marvel in itself. 'Serious journalism' , it said, 'is a high-risk enter- prise., Really? Why so? There seems to be an implied distinction here between serious and unserious journalism. Unserious jour- nalism, which I take to mean publishing stories hastily and without checking them, clearly involves risk — the risk, above all, .of looking foolish and of having to fork out large sums in libel damages. Serious jour- nalism, which I take to mean publishing nothing without careful verification, is ci signed to involve as little risk as possible. from he risks run by 'serious' journalists result their efforts to get the story right — and themselves to danger in battle, cand things like that. 'Not for the first time,' o rinntinued the statement in the Sunday les, 'the Sunday Times took a high risk by its involvement with the so-called Hitler diaries.' What sort of high risk? The sort one does not associate with serious jour- nalism: the risk, out of greed for circula- tion, of getting egg all over its face and possibly losing a lot of money if the diaries turned out to be forgeries. 'For the first time, very regrettably, the risk proved to be a mistake.' For the first time? That is a statement worthy of Adolf. Nevertheless, the Sunday Times offered 'a sincere apology' to its readers. This apology however, was followed immediately by the following extraordinary passage: 'By our own lights we did not act irresponsibly. When major but hazardous stories seem to be appearing, a newspaper can either dismiss them without inquiry or pursue in- vestigations to see if they are true. No one would dispute that the emergence of authentic diaries written by Adolf Hitler would be an event of public interest and historic importance.' There is a lot to digest here. First of all, there is the Sunday Times's poignant admission that by its 'own lights' it did not behave irresponsibly. What lights are these? As it says, they are the Sun- day Times's lights, not anybody else's. No other serious newspaper in the world got itself into this fix. The Sunday Times's ex- cuse is that the diaries were authenticated by Lord Dacre. This is not a bad excuse at all, but it is still not good enough. The Sun- day Times prides itself on its exhaustive in- vestigations. In this case, the word of Lord Dacre after a half-day perusal of the documents, plus the assurances of Stern magazine, were considered an adequate basis for a front-page banner headline: 'The secrets of Hitler's war'. But there were no secrets, not even in the forged diaries. The value of such diaries, as nobody on Times Newspapers seems to have ap- preciated, would lie not only in their ge- nuineness but also in their contents. Here again the Sunday Times may shelter with some justification behind the enthusiasm of Lord Dacre. But did nobody on the paper insist on reading the diaries himself before claiming that they contained 'the secrets of Hitler's war'? When the head of the West German Federal Archives, Hans Blooms, was finally able to examine them, he told his wife: 'I don't care whether they are real or forged. They are so boring, so total- ly meaningless, it hardly makes any dif- ference.' The possibility that they might be boring did not occur to the Sunday Times. It was content to accept Lord Dacre's and Stern's guarantees of their importance; and worse than that, it was prepared to base its own serialisation not on the diaries themselves, but on Stern's own edited and written-up version of th.em. This is high-risk journalism all right, but certainly not serious. In the meantime, Times Newspapers have chosen to blame everything on Lord Dacre, who has indeed caused them enormous embarrassment. Last Sunday the Sunday Times quoted from 'an article he has written reviewing his unfortunate role in the affair.' Where was this article? Who had published it? It ap- pears that Lord Dacre did write a long piece which the Sunday Times decided not to publish, partly on the grounds that it disagreed with some of its contents. He is now writing a shorter version which The Times may publish this Saturday if it likes it. Poor Lord Dacre, He has a lot to answer for. But it really isn't all his fault.

My daughters, who attend Saint Paul's Girls' School in London, bring back a copy of the school magazine to show me the following contribution by Alan Coren, editor of Punch: 'Insofar as they cater to minority clumps of like-minded oddities more interested in the doings, tastes, and views of their peer-community than in the world beyond that community, all magazines are school magazines. The Spec- tator, for example, comes from a tiny prep- school full of indolent well-fed smar- ties ... ' He goes on to compare Private Eye to 'an extremely dodgy shire academy for dim racists', the New Statesman to 'a run-down former grammar converted to a Street Workshop for the offspring of disen- chanted one-parent Third World vegans', and so on. Well, I suppose it is difficult to be amusing all the time, and I only reproduce this rubbish in the expectation that it may be of some slight interest to members of my 'peer-community'. Con- cluding in the same humorous vein, Mr Coren describes himself as 'a sort of spiritual son of John Rae and Heather Brigstocke,' the heads of Westminster School and Saint Paul's Girls' School. This is a disturbing claim to make, even in jest.

Alexander Chancellor