Another voice
Funny, not shocking
Auberon Waugh
Perhaps I should apologise for returning to a subject which was so admirably covered in nearly all its ramifications by The Spectator's own Mr Cosgrave last week, but I think it would be a dreadful shame if the Thorpe affair was allowed to disappear from the press in a welter of self-recrimination over having mentioned it in the first Place. My anxiety to prolong the discussion May derive in part from living so close to Minehead Magistrates' Court where all the action is—even the reddest and most swollen journalist's nose in these parts is bound to catch a scent of the Many Questions Left Unanswered—but far more, I must admit, from the simple fact that like the vast majority of Englishmen and Englishwomen I haven't had such a good laugh for months—probably not since reading Edward Heath's moving tribute to his former masseur at Grosvenor House in the Times about a year ago.
Wipe that smile off your face, Waugh. This is a very solemn occasion. A man's reputation is at stake, not to say his whole career. Democracy itself is being attacked, Or so they say.
Perhaps I can be persuaded to wipe the smile off my face if anyone will tell me just What proportion of the electorate finds these allegations against Mr Thorpe Shocking rather than funny. Perhaps I live la a particularly depraved part of the country, but mine is not the view of some trendy, left-wing coterie in Hampstead. It IS the settled opinion of every tractor driver, bank manager, commercial traveller, scrap dealer, gamekeeper, policeman, doctor, beggarman and thief—and their lady wives—who have been discussing the Matter in pubs, clubs and Women's Institute meetings throughout West Somerset and North Devon for the past eighteen months.
Partisans on both sides will accuse us of immaturity, callousness and all the other crimes which indignant, humourless people trot out when they have an axe to grind. All I can say is that mine is the normal reaction, theirs is not. I am aware of a small, vociferous minority who are genuinely Shocked by any reminder of the existence of unnatural vice. I am aware that my Catechism still lists the Sin of Sodom among the four sins crying out to Heaven for vengeance. My only claim is that most People are reconciled to the fact that certain people do these things, and any suggestion that a particular person in Public life might be among their number is More likely to be greeted with ribald curiosity than with shock and horror.
If I am right, then the whole hullabaloo gets funnier and funnier. Politicians and newspapermen alike are so far out of touch with public opinion that politics becomes a ritualised game, played according to quaint and incomprehensible rules, whereby everybody engaged must be prepared to swear on the Holy Bible at a moment's notice that he or she has not committed a single sexual impropriety in the last seventeen years; as a reward for this, the most terrible punishments await those who suggest anything to the contrary.
I am aware of a robust school of thought which holds a different point of view, maintaining that Mr and Mrs Average Briton are fed up with all this permissiveness on television, sickened by perversion in any form and yearning for a return to former standards and former hypocrisies. The most persuasive and articulate exponent of this viewpoint is Mrs Whitehouse, who can point to so many million signatures on a petition to clean up television, so many thousands of letters every week and so much encouraging support from young people in the universities. My own evidence may be less impressive, but I have no particular axe-to grind in the matter and I am pretty sure I am right and she is wrong. I would point to the fact that jury after jury have refused to convict on obscenity charges, despite firm instructions from the judge to do so; I would point to my own experience at the Bristol pantomime last Year, where gusts of female laughter greeted homosexual jokes of a crudity which makes me blush to think of them even now.
But there appears to be no limit to the ignorance of politicians and their stooges in journalism and the law. The suggestion that reports of court proceedings should no longer be privileged in libel would mean effectively that court proceedings could no longer be reported, since no newspaper could take upon itself the responsibility of deciding what evidence was strictly relevant —or alternatively, that judges and magistrates could suppress any evidence they chose which might embarrass a politician.
More alarming even than the ignorance of politicians is the self-righteousness with which they defend their privileged position. A newspaper which dares embarrass a politician in this way, says Mr Wilson, is attacking democracy. When he referred to the 'nauseating spectacle of supposedly bankrupt newspapers hording out their hands for public money, wasting money in what is a classic innuendo against an MP, and in my view against democracy as a whole', he could scarcely make a plainer statement about the strings which will attach to government subsidy of the newspaper industry.
To do Mr Thorpe justice, he has made none of these ridiculous noises, and has comported himself with great dignity in his embarrassing situation. If only for the sake of the joke, I wish it had been some other more pompous politician who had found himself at the receiving end of these intemperate allegations. Unfortunately, we must make do with what we have got. It is my observation that people in public life who are of humble social origins grow especially indignant when laughed at, as well as being pathologically incapable of laughing at themselves. I do not know why this should be the case, but add it as my contribution to the general store of knowledge about these people. I have not yet decided exactly who will be my victim when next I find myself in a Magistrates' Court, accused of not fastening my safety belt or whatever, but I rather think there may be some bloodcurdling, completely unfounded allegations about my sexual relationships with a certain editor of a Sunday newspaper.
This may be the only way of teaching them not to deal with these stories in the contextof a public indignation which simply does not exist. There may well be voters who will never vote for a candidate they suspect of being a poof-tah. No doubt there are others who will transfer their votes to a candidate for the same reason. The best and only way to deal with these foolish people is to bombard them with conflicting rumours and counter-rumours, not to suppress all mention of their particular obsessions. Rumours about Mr Thorpe have caused such a sensation only because they were suppressed for so long. The West Country has been whistling like a pressure cooker for eighteen months. If Mr Scott had been allowed to have his say without all the elaborate system of privilege and suppression, he might have rated a paragraph in Private Eye, a Diary mention in the Daily Mail and even an inside-page picture in the Sun, but scarcely a first leader in he Times and prominent investigatory articles everywhere else.
So I don't think I shall wipe the smile off my face just yet. The joke is too beautiful for that. Doesn't the Liberal Party believe in Love? Well, up to a point, Lord Beaumont. Eventually, perhaps, these pompous oafs will realise that democracy, truth and journalistic integrity are best preserved—and more valuable—in a society where the press has the freedom to set its own standards, even telling lies where it chooses. In such a society—and only in such a society—will politicians be able to convince us that they are human.
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