16 MAY 1981, Page 6

Another voice

Press, Palace and Mrs Hill

Auberon Waugh

It is an unenviable and rather odious thing for any working journalist to write about Fleet Street. Apart from the obvious dec larations of interest which are necessary, there is bound to be an undercurrent of personal preferences, affections, loyalties and even, alas, animosities which, if all are religiously declared, will make his contribu tion unreadable. In discussing the delicate matter of the strange alliance between the Queen and Mrs Doreen Hill, mother of the murdered Jacqueline, against 'cheque book journalism' — or the press's habit of paying for exclusive access to information — in general, and the Daily Mail's conduct of the Ripper inquiry in particular, I will try and slip in these declarations of interest and admissions of prejudice as unobtrusively as possible, marking them only with an asterisk in parenthesis — thus (*)— to make sure the point is taken.

The first and most obvious declaration of interest to be made (*) is that I currently receive money from the Daily Mail for a weekly book review which normally appears on Thursdays. Although, since an unhappy incident earlier in my career, I make it a practice never to accept a regular journalistic commission which would seriously inconvenience me by its loss, the payment for these weekly reviews — £10,000 a year — is quite generous by book reviewing standards, if by no other standards of feature writing in Fleet Street.

But I honestly do not think I was influenced by affection or loyalty for the Daily Mail in the anger — not to say mild nausea — I felt over Mrs Hill's appearance on television last Wednesday to publicise the letter she had received from the Palace in February supporting her campaign against the press in general and the Daily Mail in particular.

Mrs Hill, of course, is unassailable in her grief over the appalling misfortune which has befallen her family. Under those circumstances, it is a foolish man indeed who comes between the dragon and its wrath. If Mr Hill, her husband, had, in the first agony of his bereavement, whipped an offending spaniel puppy to death we would have understood and forgiven him, while privately perhaps judging the reaction a trifle inappropriate. But for the Queen — to whom the feeling of bereavement must, at worst, be more remote — to join forces with Mrs Hill in an attempt to turn all the angry and confused emotions aroused by the Ripper's atrocities into another public outcry against the press struck me as another kettle of fish entirely, as we say in Fleet Street (*).

So strongly did I feel that I planned a measured rebuke to the Queen in my column in Private Eye pointing out the unfairness of her onslaught against the Daily Mail's editor, a man called `Mr David English' and widely (even if untruthfully) rumoured to wear a wig. This was no way for a member of the Royal Family to behave during the Year of the Disabled, I would have said — a cause which the Royal Family is supposed to cherish, whatever reservations the rest of us might have. Nor would I have shrunk from the suggestion, in demanding the Queen's public retraction, abdication etc, that she might have been influenced, in authorising the letter at that time, by a general hatred of the press arising from its interest in her son's sluggish courtship of the beautiful and enchanting Lady Diana Spencer.

However, all these charitable intentions faded when I saw last Thursday's Daily Mail. In place of the Book Page on page 6 (for which I had composed an amusing review of Antonia Fraser's new novel A Splash of Red — Weidenfeld £5.95) was a whining, snarling two-page justification of the Mail's behaviour, written apparently by one of the newspaper's innumerable deputy assistant editors — the Editor happening to be in America — which put all the blame on Private Eye, a magazine from which I receive (*) the paltry sum of £73.50 a week plus occasional bonuses. My intense irritation at this hysterical behaviour was compounded (*) when the review appeared next day on page 35, among the motoring and City pages.

Plainly there is something rotten in the state of Associated Newspapers. Even before this glaring illustration of their false set of priorities, I had had cause to express alarm over their appointment of Mr Bernard 'Slimy' Shrimsley, the disastrous former editor of News of the World, to edit their doomed Sunday Mail, due out next spring. Readers who detect a note of personal animosity in my reference to this revolting man are referred (*) to my earlier articles entitled 'Rupert Murdoch's dirty bottom' (Spectator, 12 April 1980) and also `Shrimsley's end' (Spectator, 13 December 1980).

But the fact that Associated Newspapers and the Daily Mail are capable of what may appear to many right-minded people as such gross errors of judgment does not mean that Mrs Hill has justice on her side in her campaign against the press, or that the Queen has any business to try hitching a free ride on any indignation which Mrs Hill's tragic loss may generate for her cause. As Gordon Burn commented in the Sunday Times, 'it is hard to push that point when you are confronted with Mrs Hill's brimming eyes,' but I feel her campaign is misdirected. Let us examine first the details of the charge, then the general principles involved.

The facts of the matter are that the Mail paid John Sutcliffe, father of the Ripper, £5,000 for background information and photographs. Other, smaller, sums have been paid by other newspapers to other people, and many have withdrawn much higher offers to Mrs Sutcliffe, the Ripper's wife, the largest of which appears to have been a £110,000 contract from the News of the World. All of which Mrs Hill finds 'disgusting' and the Queen views with a 'sense of distaste'. Mrs Hill says: 'Five pounds or £5,000 — nobody should make anything from my daughter's death. It's the principle, isn't it?'

If so, it is a principle which has never yet been applied in human history. Quite apart from the undertakers, lawyers and even hangmen who have traditionally profited from these melancholy events, it is an inescapable fact that news sells !newspapers, and background information to a gruesome mass murder is undoubtedly news. Mrs Hill's especial objection would appear to be that members of the Ripper's family should profit, and on this I have only one small point to make. It would be quite understandable if, in her present state of mind, Mrs Hill were reluctant to imagine what it must feel like to wake up one day and discover that your beloved son, brother or husband was the Yorkshire Ripper, but I should not, personally, find it easy to decide which predicament was the more painful, her own or theirs.

She proceeds to make the general point: 'Nobody has any control over the press in this country. I don't think the public realises.' If the public gave any thought to the matter, it might discover that the British press is . already the most shackled and gagged in the free world, but it is true that as yet there is no statutory control over ' 'cheque book journalism' beyond the illdefined laws of contempt where potential witnesses are concerned. So let us examine the practice, as it has evolved.

No sane person would seek to justify the paying of large sums of money to criminals, and the British press has now dropped this practice voluntarily. No doubt newspapers were prudent to withhold payments from Mrs Sutcliffe until her own role had been clarified, quite apart from the fact that she was a potential witness. The case of the Sunday Telegraph, from which I also receive (*) £4,800 a year, and Mr Peter Bessell illustrated the dangers of that practice, and the press seems to have learned its lesson. But the general practice of paying money for exclusive access to information seems to me as inevitable in a free society as it is healthy and even, on occasions, humane; I hope the press puts up a far more united and robust opposition to proposals to restrict this freedom than it has yet shown any signs of doing.