Notebook
Mr Graham Walton, the father of the Liverpool sextuplets, has shown en- viable cheerfulness in the face of the terrify- ing domestic upheaval which he now faces. Has he thought about the tins of baby food they will consume, about how many nap- pies will have to be changed every day? He deserves some sort of medal for bravery. So (I hasten to add, in case the feminists get at me) does his wife, whose wish for a child was so strong that she was prepared to take a fertility drug with the awesome risk of a multiple pregnancy. I have never really understood about these fertility drugs, so for enlightenment I turned to an article by the well-known medical correspondent of the Sunday Times, Mr Oliver Gillie. This is what he wrote: 'The drug used to induce the multiple pregnancy is human chorionic gonadotrophin, HCG, which is extracted from the urine of menopausal women. The largest supply comes from an Italian firm, Serono in Milan, which collects urine from nunneries in tanker lorries.' Now if this had not been written by a respected medical cor- respondent, I wouldn't have even begun to believe it. Can it really be true that tanker lorries do the rounds of Italian nunneries collecting the sisters' urine? Do the nuns cooperate in this extraordinary business enterprise? Do they realise what their urine is being used for? I suppose it could be con- sidered rather moving that nuns, who have foregone the joys of parenthood to wed themselves to the Church, should have found this indirect way of spawning babies all over the place. But I have to admit that I find it all a bit revolting. HCG might, however, have a useful function as a form of subversion in China, where the rule that no couple may have more than one child is ruthlessly enforced. If Chinese mothers all started having sextuplets, the Chinese Government would be confronted with a very tricky problem. But even the defeat of Communism does not seem quite worth this Price.
Our efforts in recent weeks to explain the issues involved in the proposed flotation of Reuters news agency as a public company do appear to have had a few useful results. The national press has ended Its conspiracy of silence on the matter. Parliament, through the intervention of Mr James Callaghan (an intervention which Reuters took 24 hours to report), has been made aware of the possible dangers. The Lord Chief Justice, who under the Reuters Trust Agreement must be consulted if the company's structure is to be changed, has finally been informed of this role which nobody had bothered to tell him about
before. The Board of Reuters has at last come clean, admitting publicly that it does not regard the Reuters Trust as anything more than a shareholders' agreement which can be terminated whenever they feel like it, without reference to the Lord Chief Justice or anybody else. The Reuters trustees, on the other hand, have promised to take their responsibilities seriously and obtain in- dependent legal advice when specific pro- posals for flotation are put before them. And the journalists of Reuters are showing a much keener interest in the future of their agency, obtaining, for example, a detailed explanation from the management of the amazing 'Executive Incentive Share Scheme' which has turned three top ex- ecutives into millionaires. All this is to the good, for it means that if the press barons of Fleet Street ever manage to dip their hands into the Reuters treasure chest, a lot of people will be watching them very scep- tically. It is now, I believe, much more widely appreciated that what happens to Reuters is a matter of considerable impor- tance to the British public. But there is little more to be said on the subject until the Board of Reuters comes up with specific proposals for flotation. The next meeting of the Board is• on 14 December.
At the more or less unreported Unesco General Conference in Paris there con- tinues the great, sterile debate between the West and the Third World on what jour- nalism is supposed to be all about. For the past ten years the Third World countries, enthusiastically supported by the Russians and the other Communist states, have been pressing for a 'New World Information Order' which would curb the 'cultural im- perialism' of the western media. Most Third World governments deeply resent their countries' dependence on the West for news, information and entertainment. So they want international controls which would be in direct conflict with the prin- ciples of press freedom which are held as fundamental by most western democracies. As Lord McGregor, Professor of Social In- stitutions at London University, said in a recent and excellent pamphlet on the sub- ject: 'These differences are irreconcilable and beyond compromise.' Nevertheless, some sort of fudged compromise seems to be on the point of achievement in Paris, and one can only hope that it will lead nowhere. Meanwhile, there is an interesting example of western 'cultural imperialism' at work in the latest issue of Sunday, one of the best selling Indian weekly magazines. Its cover story is called `Koo in India', and the magazine contains no less than 11 photographs of Prince Andrew's former girl friend. The presence of Koo Stark in In- dia is clearly thought to be a matter of con- suming interest to Indian readers. The author of the article is himself surprised by this. 'It is an indication of the power of the Western press,' he says, 'that the name Koo Stark rings a bell in this part of the world at all. According to a friend of hers, she was even asked to sign autographs in Burma where the Western world has practically not existed for about 40 years.' The way in which Sunday, while succombing to the supposed demand for news about Koo, strives to distance itself from the Western press is to depict her as something of a saint. 'I was quite shattered to discover that the real-life Koo Stark is about as different to the media figure as Mrs Gandhi is to Mother Teresa,' writes the author of the ar- ticle. We learn that she has 'a passion for wild life conservation and social issues', that she yearns `to breed the Asian cheetah, which has become extinct in India', and that she has personally equipped a lot of shoeless Indian children with snow-boots. One of her projects, Sunday reveals, 'is a book by her on the social customs she has observed in Burma, Thailand and In- donesia'. So Koo's reputation benefits from an attempt by an Indian magazine to discredit the western media's assessment of her. A less subtle way of getting at the Western media is proposed by The Voice of the Arab World, a pre-Palestinian monthly published in London and New York. In its November issue, it praises Princess Elizabeth of Toro, the former Ugandan Foreign Minister, for having obtained more than £50,000 from British newspapers in libel settlements. Under the headline 'Ex- ample to Arabs: how to knock out the press', it reproaches Arabs 'for being reluc- tant to act as Elizabeth did — and arraign some of the great media of the West in court.' Fleet Street should expect tough times ahead.
Alexander Chancellor
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