DIARY
MAX HASTINGS
It has been a prickly summer at the Tele- graph. Week after week, we have found ourselves debating some new instalment of the question: if it's all over the front pages of the pops, how should we respond? The It' at issue has been principally royal, but with a long string of supplementaries pro- vided by the likes of the National Heritage Secretary. Broadsheet papers rarely break stories about private lives. But all of us face a dilemma, once a story about a public fig- ure has been published elsewhere, in deter- mining how far we fail our readers if we do not then follow it. I decided to carry no reporting in the Telegraph about the odious Morton book on the Princess of Wales. Even some of our best and most thoughtful executives believed I was wrong, and argued that my policy made the paper seem foolish. Today, I have no regrets. The tabloid reporting of the Wales marriage makes lager louts look like gentlemen. There was no dilemma about the saga of the Duchess of York, once the collapse of her marriage was officially acknowledged, and her erratic behaviour seemed a matter for legitimate discussion. I hesitated for some hours following the publication of the People's story on Mr Mellor. Once he made a public statement, we followed the pack, and reported his vertical difficulties, although we omitted some of the horizontal details. In the past six months, Fleet Street has moved the frontiers of coverage of pri- vate lives, and especially royal lives, a long mile from where they have stood historical- ly. It is unlikely that they will ever he rolled back.
Todav there is a large school of journal- isM, native but not exclusive to Wapping, not all tabloid practitioners, who sincerely believe the world will he a better place When everything about everybody is known and published. I dissent. There are large areas of human affairs which benefit from, and indeed depend upon, privacy, secrecy, discretion — call it what you will. A mea- sure of hypocrisy is the cement of life, and protects many innocent people from harm. Nor does this only apply to individual pri- vacy. British government is indeed far too secretive. But I support the view that nobody can run anything — a ministry, a business, a newspaper — without maintain- ing the confidentiality of a host of discus- sions, meetings, expressions of opinion. Some of us strongly resist the view that rev- elation must, in itself, he a good thing. When Andrew Knight was chief executive of the Telegraph, I admired much that he did, and remain lastingly grateful for his role in making me editor of the paper. But I could not stomach his recent article in The Spectator claiming that the Sunday
Times has done the royal family a service, by serialising the Morton book. Andrew sought to argue that opening the windows and letting the light into the sorry saga will ultimately be good for them all. His words choked me. I would have been more respectful had he simply written: 'Royal gossip is the best proven route to boosting newspaper circulations. This company is not in the business of making moral deci- sions which may adversely affect its prof- itability.' All newspapers, including our own, struggle through the minefield of moral dilemmas, groping uncertainly for the truth with frequent errors of omission and commission. I do not think privacy leg- islation is workable. The remedy, about which nobody is optimistic, can only lie in a change of attitude by the newspaper-buying public. But the notion seems wretchedly mistaken, that the world will he a better place when the press can Tell All. A lot yes; all — no.
et there are some occasions which profit from a higher degree of personal rev- elation than they usually achieve. I went to a moving and dignified funeral last week. The service achieved its effect, because the priest knew the dead man personally. All too often, it is embarrassingly plain that the parson at the altar never set eyes upon the person he is burying, and, worse still, blun- ders ahead anyway with delivering an address about him. The most unilluminat- ing address I have ever heard at a memorial service was given by Cardinal Hume, for Malcolm Muggeridge. As the hours dragged on, in what was already an extrava- gant and pompous occasion, some of us waited in vain for even the gentlest refer- ence to Muggeridge's exotic personal life
before he turned to God. Muggeridge's reputation as a great and wholly unpompous journalist was matched only by his notoriety as one of his generation's most relentless serial bonkers, who aban- doned the sins of the flesh only at an age when he was almost beyond them. Nobody expects or desires absolute frankness in the immediate aftermath of death, but some charitable compromise with the truth makes funerals and memorial services more convincing, not less so.
Iam generally a defender of the BBC. Mrs Thatcher's meddling in the British television industry seemed one of the most disastrous follies of her last years in power. But, turning on Timewatch the other night, I felt the sort of rising rage that makes some Conservatives want to take an axe to Television Centre. The programme was designed as a chilling exposure of the per- secution which McCarthyism inflicted on American communists in the 1950s. It con- sisted of extended testimony from former victims. As is the modern documentary fashion, there was no interviewer's voice to interject questions, hostile or otherwise. The witnesses were never asked on camera about the depth of their personal involve- ment in the American Communist Party, or about their attitudes to the Soviet Union, or about the extent of their own opposition and hostility to their own government. For all I know, each of them may have been squeaky clean. But the programme, as it appeared, was merely a long, anguished whinge, devoid of essential factual informa- tion or critical judgment. Lillian Hellman would have loved it. Nobody today disputes the awfulness of McCarthy, Hoover, or the paranoia of the times. But to justify spend- ing substantial sums of licence-payers' money on such a programme, it is surely necessary to make some objective attempt to establish facts and ask critical questions. At least some glancing reference would have been useful to the fact that most American communists were at that time professing enthusiasm for a Soviet system which is today generally recognised as one of the most evil in human history. Moscow's commitment to undoing the United States was never in doubt. In all probability, Timewatch's witnesses were indeed innocent victims of a monstrous injustice — from my own historical knowl- edge, this was certainly true of the diplomat John Stuart Service, who appeared. But the programme produced not a shred of weighed and balanced evidence. It was merely a squawk of outrage, demonstrating yet again television's power as a medium of impression, and its desperate shortcomings as a medium of analysis.
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