DIARY
BRIAN INGLIS Watching or listening to broadcasts in which ministers defend their actions, as so many have been doing over the past few weeks, has brought back to mind an occasion some years ago when I heard an old Fleet Street hand reminiscing about his work during the war. He had been chief sub-editor on one of the national dailies; and eventually, owing to the call-up, there was only one other sub on the table whom he could trust. The rest were useless, but could not be sacked. Evenings in the office, he recalled, began to resemble the scene in the film of Beau Geste in which the survivors of the siege prop up the corpses on the fort's battlements, and run round behind them firing at the besiegers to give the impression that the walls are fully manned. Perhaps spineless, rather than lifeless, is nearer to the condition of ministers today; more and more, they give the impression of being ventriloquists' dummies, compelled to defend proposi- tions which, had their circumstances been different, they could just as readily have attacked.
In his 'Keeler, Profumo and Me' in Monday's Guardian Ian Aitken has de- scribed his frisson, watching Scandal, when he saw his front page scoop for the Daily Express — Profumo offering his resigna- tion — come up on the screen. But his pride was tempered by the recollection that the story was not quite correct — Profumo at that stage had not offered to resign, but merely discussed resigning; 'Pretty well no one who was associated with the Profumo affair', Aitken comments, 'came out of it entirely clean'. I hope I did, though I have to admit my role was peripheral. A mutual acquaintance who knew I was writing Fringe Medicine at the time suggested I should show the section on osteopathy and chiropractic to Ward, whom I did not know. Ward happened to be reading it when the shots were fired outside the mews establishment, which brought the story into the public domain. When we met a few days later Ward was bubbling over with the story, which he thought of as a huge joke, Rachman, Keeler, Soviet attache, Profumo and all, and he took me round to the flat with the see-through mirror which was later to add spice to the story. A few weeks later, when he realised the Establishment were out to get him, he asked me to lunch to try to persuade me to write his apologia; the New Statesman, he believed, would run it. I was not prepared to write it; I said I would help him put it into shape if he wrote it himself. He said he would think about it, but I heard no more. A friend of his later told me that Ward could hardly bring himself to put pen to paper; the only time he had seen Ward's handwriting was on his suicide note. 0 n the subject of chiropractic (it was difficult to keep Ward to it; he wanted to impress upon me the need to educate the government and the British people about the merits of Maoist communism) Ward was fascinating. The moment he saw a new patient, he claimed, he knew whether he would be able to treat him successfully, and what treatment would be needed; hunch, he insisted, was far more important than technique. He particularly relished putting opinionated MPs in their place by making them strip and then leaving them for a while, ostensibly while he answered the telephone, but really to break down their psychological adhesions. I was mis- trustful of some of his claims, which he supported by his appointments book sparsely filled, but the names were im- pressive — and with unethical descriptions of what was the matter with some of his better-known patients. A few years later, however, I met the man who had suc- ceeded him as London's most fashionable osteopath. He had despised Ward, he told me, as manifestly a charlatan. Yet when some of Ward's former patients began coming to him, he was compelled to admit he had been wrong. Ward, he realised, had indeed been a masterly practitioner. In the rumpus over the Bishop of Durham's denial of the physical resurrec- tion of Jesus, his other assertion — 'to know he is alive in eternity must be more than the encountering of a ghost' — has not received much attention. I take it this means that the Bishop shares Doubting Thomas's view — and, according to Luke, Jesus's: 'A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have'. But this is by no means the generally accepted test. In the Old Testament the angels were often people of flesh and blood who behaved, ate and drank as other men. I have just been reading a massive collection of case histor- ies contributed by people of our time who believe they have experienced ghosts; and the great majority of the ghosts have looked, sounded, felt or even smelled as if they were 'real' until they demonstrated their identity by de-materialising. Some 70 years ago the French savant Claude Geley surmised that as physicists had shown that the human body in fact is a concourse of whirling particles, materialisation need not involve resurrection. Assuming that the spirit survives death, it might be capable of, in effect, re-creation. This possibility has since been lent some support by Rupert Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic resonance, which suggests that our physical development is the work of morphogenetic fields, on the analogy of magnetic fields. Given the premise of the survival of the spirit, a body could theoretically be res- tored, rather than resurrected.
Some years ago the Dublin Corporation decided to celebrate a Festival by putting down a flower-bed in the middle of O'Con- nell Bridge, with a plastic flame arising out of the middle of it. In his Irish Times column Myles na gCopaleen — for my money, the outstanding columnist of our time — promptly dubbed it 'The tomb of the Unknown Gurrier' a gurrier in Dublin jargon being an uncouth, violent fellow, the derivation perhaps coming from guer- rier. If I remember aright, some medical students heaved it over into the Liffey. The donors of a fountain, erected a few months ago in O'Connell Street, ought to have been warned: the lady who graces it was promptly dubbed 'the floozie in the Jacuz- zi' and then, as the city's atmosphere began to leave its mark, 'the whore in the sewer'. For those unacquainted with the Dublin accent, 'whore' is in fact pronounced to rhyme, near enough, with sewer. And perhaps it should also be explained that a popular song from the 1930s, the theme song of the comedian Jimmy O'Dea, is still remembered: 'Biddy Mulligan, the Pride of the Coombe'. The floozie is now, I am told, 'Bidet Mulligan'.
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