DIARY
Most people seem to have stopped worrying about it already. But it is worth asking what should be done about papers such as the News of the World after they do something particularly wicked, as the News of the World did to Mr Archer. One answer is: don't buy it. But this kind of story is wicked exactly because it makes you want to read it. I must have been one of thousands who do not normally take the News of the World, but who went out and bought it. I have never been persuaded by those liberals who make a great show of claiming that pornography is no problem because it is so boring. Pornography is a problem precisely because it is often not boring. One of the purposes of civilisation is to stop us surrendering to the worst in ourselves. Included in the worst is the natural human desire to read about harm befalling Mr Archer. So what should civi- lisation do about the News of the World? The most useless suggestion, made every time a pop paper transgresses, is that the editor should be sacked. It assumes that these editors' employers disapprove of what the papers have been up to. Also, there is a limitless supply of desperate characters prepared to edit low newspap- ers. If one of them has to be sacrificed as a show of respectability, an interchangeable figure will be put in his place. By their choice of occupation, these editors have placed themselves outside respectability. I have just come across V. S. Pritchett writing, in his long essay 'London Per- ceived' (recently reissued): 'After a life- time of travel in Europe, Asia and Amer- ica, I am convinced that to be respectable is one of the pinnacles of universal human desire, felt as strongly in the heart of the Persian nomad as it is in New York, Chicago, Valparaiso, or Tooting Bee.' In my early twenties, I worked on the Sun — although only as the number three political reporter, a post of limited importance to the circulation figures — and I had a greater craving for respectability than at any time before or since. Mr Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of the News of the World and of my present paper (the Times), is so enigmatic that it is impossible to say whether he wants to be thought respectable or not. But I suspect that respectability is desired by his leading manager in this country, Mr Bruce Matth- ews. I have never met him. But he seems to be a tremendous swell: belonging to com- mittees; addressing conferences of inves- tors and advertisers; dining out in polite society. So long as his News of the World goes on doing the sort of thing it did to poor Archer, Mr Matthews resembles one of those 19th-century pillars of socie- ty, depicted in Shaw and Ibsen, part of whose grandeur is derived from unsafe FRANK JOHNSON cargo ships or houses of ill-repute. If the grand world were serious about conde- mning the sins of the mass press, Mr Matthews, and the similar figures whose responsibilities include such papers, would be shunned by that world. They should be. That would have more effect than sacking any number of editors. But they won't be.
The other day, a book was reissued which must be especially significant for many of us in our early forties who became interested in politics in our early twenties: Age of Austerity (Oxford, £4.95), edited by Michael Sissons and Philip French, a collection of essays about the 1945-51 Labour governments, first pub- lished in 1963. I had become interested in politics the previous year. The subject's immediate predecessors among my in- terests were model railways, girls, soccer, boxing, opera and ballet in that order. Some of these interests have been retained and indulged in with the others. Others have been discarded. The immediate prob- lem about understanding politics was to find out what had happened in that most unknown of times, the day before yester- day. The book reinforced the impression that the leading politicians of 1962-63 (Macmillan, Butler, etc) were negligible compared with Attlee, Bevin, Bevan, Dal- ton, Cripps, and Morrison. A similarly diminished view of the present, compared with the past, had been received when I had developed my interest in soccer, box- ing, opera and ballet, although it had not happened in the case of model railways and girls. These days, I believe that 1945-51 was no different from subsequent periods of Labour rule: a profligate Chancellor (Dalton) proving so disastrous that his work had to be undone by a skinflint Chancellor (Cripps), and so on. (In 1974- 79, Mr Healey played both Chancellors.) The famous controls, far from being neces- sary because of the aftermath of the war, were kept on long after the war because the politicians and civil servants liked controlling people. Also, someone like Morrison was essentially not much more than the official who visits the council estate and tells you that you can't paint your door that colour. The trouble is that the historiography of the period seems to have been commandeered by historians who approve of these governments Kenneth 0. Morgan, Paul Addison, Ben Pimlott and others. So the Tories have been browbeaten into thinking that it was a great age of Labour statesmanship, and that the Labour Party has declined since then. Is there no independent young histo- rian prepared to do the research to prove what I suspect: that these were the first of the bad governments from whose ills Mrs Thatcher has been trying to cure us?
Ihave not met anyone who wholeheart- edly approved of that television program- me in which Miss Esther Rantzen invited children who thought they were being sexually abused by their fathers etc to telephone a special number. Fighting the abuse of children appears to be the latest cause being pressed on us. One of the problems with television is that it swings from never mentioning a subject to men- tioning it hysterically or non-stop. So it is now probably impossible to discover how much of this abuse there is. Whatever the extent, the problem is not diminished by inviting children to go out into the night to a telephone-box near which a child- molester might well be lurking. The prog- ramme was a fantasist's charter. It was based on the assumption that children were naturally truthful. Freud had difficulties throughout his career in sorting out fantasy from fact in such testimony. Civilised countries have always disapproved of the practice of authority figures on the electro- nic media who encourage children to de- nounce their parents. Who does Miss Rantzen think she is?
It is good of history that relatively obscure people can enter it by, being associated with important things — people such as Plimsoll, Maginot, and Sandwich. So the Tory backbencher Mr Terence Higgins will be associated with the 'Trust which bears his name. A national newspap- er editor asked me the other day why Mr Higgins started the Trust, and assumed that it was because he was a Wet who naturally wanted to help Aids sufferers. But it has to be explained once and for all that it is not the same Terence Higgins. The Trust is named after an early victim of the disease. But the other one is believed to be the only Tory backbencher who is also a former Olympic hurdler.
Frank Johnson is the parliamentary columnist of the Times.
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