15 OCTOBER 1983, Page 5

Notebook

For the past few days people have been pleading with me to exclude any references to Cecil Parkinson from this week's Spectator. They appear to feel that the Spectator should rise above the low hypocrisy which characterises the rest of the press. But we in Doughty Street were not born yesterday. We know what sells the papers — or at least we think we do, for it has to be admitted that the Spectator's cir- culation is not quite at the level of the Sun's. But apart from that, it is both easier and more enjoyable to address the mind to the dilemma of poor, sad, self-obsessed Mr Parkinson than to have to think about public expenditure and law and order and all the other grave matters which ought to — and, of course, also do — preoccupy a serious political weekly like this one. The great thing about Mr Parkinson, although he looks and sounds like nothing on earth, is his extreme ordinariness. By calling him a 'a self-confessed adulterer and a damned fool', Mr Ivor Stanbrook MP makes him appear a rather more robust character than he is. For he seems to me completely typical of most middle-aged, middle-class Englishmen — woman-dominated, morally confused, and deeply self-pitying. Mr Parkinson is in a quite different category to Mr Profumo or Lord Lambton. To say that he has been involved in a 'sex scandal' is to flatter him. For this reason few people feel that he should resign. Nor, in any event, Should he have to.

The question remains whether the press deserves censure for its treatment of the Parkinson business. Jo Grimond feels strongly that it does. 'The newspapers have indeed given up pretending that morality is to be enforced by public punishment,' he writes. 'But that has not deflected some owners, editors and leader-writers from wallowing in a delicious bath of hypocrisy.' The principal hypocrite in Fleet Street seems to have been the 'Times, which has also been rather Parkinson-like in its dither- ing and moral confusion. It reported Mr Parkinson's first admission of his affair With Miss Keays under a modest single- column headline on the right-hand side of its front page, pretending that Mr Callaghan's intervention at the Labour Par- ty conference was the big story of the day. But next day it went to town, leading the Paper with the headline, 'Love affair puts Parkinson's future in doubt'. Obviously rather embarrassed by this, it assured us in a leading article that it would have remain- ed silent if Mr Parkinson had not issued a statement, thereby putting 'his private life into the public domain'. Refuting this justification, Lord Grimond goes on: 'If the Private life of anyone can legitimately be discussed in public, it can only be the lives of

those who seek to mould public habits and opinion — bishops, teachers and the editors and owners of newspapers. What a wonder- ful field for investigative journalism lies unexamined! Surely we should be told far more of the habits of those who control the papers that choose the news and comment upon it. I am not referring primarily to the editors: it is the owners who hide behind the thickest curtains. Yet they take the profits and have the major say in the leading ap- pointments to their papers. There are, of course, owners who make little or no money out of prurience or pornography and whose editors show admirable restraint in commenting on the misfortunes of public men and women. They should reap their reward by having their privacy respected. If it seems difficult to know where to draw the line, one good test is coming up. Any newspaper which mentions or comments on the birth of Miss Keays's child or attempts at that date to revive the scandal should bring down fire and brimstone on the owner.' Murdoch, Matthews and Rother- mere, please note.

Here is a word I have never heard before; it is the word 'outage'. It does not exist in the Oxford dictionary, but it ap- pears to be popular with electrical engineers. It means power cut. A reader in Wiltshire has received a letter from the District Engineer of Southern Electricity which begins: 'As I am sure you are aware, the electricity supply in the Bishop's Cann- ings, All Cannings, Horton and Coate area has been interrupted a number of times dur- ing the last twelve months.' Then the letter goes on: 'The outages since 1981 have all been due to lightning which puts great stress on our equipment.' The purpose of the letter was to inform customers that the

power would have to be cut again while maintenance was carried out on the line `to ensure that the circuit is clear of any weakness left by the lightning'. But the District Engineer adds comfortingly: 'I assure you the outage time will be kept to an absolute minimum.' Perhaps we should learn to speak to these people in their own language. My correspondent has replied to Southern Electricity: 'I note the action you are taking to maintain my innage and the consequent outage necessitated, and, pro- viding this outage results in reliable innage, I shall be happy.'

AA mong the four South Korean cabinet .1)..ministers killed last Sunday by a bomb explosion in Rangoon was the country's Foreign Minister, Lee Bum-Suk. The newsreaders on television pronounced the name with great care as 'Boom-Sook', which most people will have assumed to be the correct Korean pronunciation. But this, I am sorry to say, is not the case. We telephoned the Korean embassy to find out more about the poor man, and a polite Korean diplomat with bad English pro- nounced it just as you or I would be temp- ted to. We were trying to find out whether Lee Bum-Suk was any relation of General Bum-Suk Lee who was Prime Minister of South Korea from 1948 to 1950. Apparently they are not related. Bum-Suk must be a common Korean name. Common or not, it is a name which in its prissier days the British press was embarrassed by. When General Bum-Suk Lee was Prime Minister, newspapers conspired not to refer to him by name at all. It fell to the late Peter Fleming in his `Strix' column in the Spectator to draw attention to this omission. In our issue of 25 August, 1950 Mr Fleming wondered what had happened to the Korean Prime Minister. 'I know nothing of his at- tainments or capabilities, but his name is General Bum-Suk Lee and in some ways it seems rather a pity that he has disappeared from the news.'

Our political correspondent, Charles Moore, was at Preston station on Wednesday, awaiting a connecting train to take him back to London from the Conser- vative Party conference in Blackpool. He was sitting drinking a cup of tea when he saw a man walking out of the buffet carry- ing his suitcase. He pursued him on to the platform to find that the man was none other than Mr Ken Livingstone. The GLC leader smiled apologetically and returned the case. I don't know what the world is coming to.

Next week we launch a new and thrilling competition which we expect to be even more popular than Lord Matthews's promise to turn Daily Express readers into millionaires. For a hint of what is in store, please turn to page 18.

Alexander Chancellor