ANOTHER VOICE

Is there anything to be gained by wondering why?

AUBERON WAUGH

Shortly after something purporting to be

the corpse of Robert Maxwell was fished out of the Atlantic Ocean, having been miraculously spotted by an aeroplane 40 miles off his yacht's course in the vast expanse of the ocean, it was discovered that so mistrustful of his employees had the old lite edifices bugged. Among the employees treated in this way was no less a person than a former Lord High Chancellor of Britain. We marvelled that a foreigner like Maxwell could find it in himself to mistrust so resplendent a figure. It was rather like suspecting a High Court judge of taking

bribes, but infinitely worse. In foreign countries — possibly even on the Conti-

nent, or what is now called the European Economic Community — judges of the High Court take bribes, but this has never happened in Britain or, if it has, nobody has ever been told about it. Lord Chancel- lors are unique to Britain, at the very pin- nacle of the system, above not only the Cir- cuit judges, Masters and High Court judges, but above the Lords Justice of Appeal, the Lord Chief Justice and the Law Lords themselves. For a first-genera- tion Czech immigrant to be suspicious of such a paragon would be comical if it were not faintly sinister. What sort of first-gener- ation Czech immigrant could Robert Maxwell possibly be?

As the weeks passed, and it became clear even to his loyal supporters on the Mirror

what sort of person the Captain had been, it also became clear that he had hidden his activities behind a barrage of libel writs cal- culated to prevent any other journalist from enquiring what he was up to. Yet nobody seemed anxious to ask the obvious question: how did a former Lord Chancel- lor who at one time had been in charge of appointing and preferring all the judges in the country, in charge of all government, legislation and ensuring the legality of the Government's actions (not to mention a former Attorney General of many years

standing, in charge of all Crown prosecu- tions) — how did such a man come to be working for Robert Maxwell?

When I say that nobody seemed anxious to ask this question, this is not quite true.

On at least two occasions I have tried to ask it, only to find it cut out of my copy before it appeared, with no explanation given. Life is too short to chase up every minor alteration to journalistic copy. It is part of the deal that others can bash your stuff around, within reasonable limits. It might have been done by some sub-editor or editor on grounds of taste, or because of friendship with some member of Lord Havers's family, or from fond memories of standing next to him in the gentlemen's lavatories of the Garrick Club. But one is usually told about such intrusions. More likely it was done by lawyers, who do not reckon to have to give reasons for their demands, although since Lord Havers is dead there can be no question of his bring- ing a libel action, nor is there the slightest risk of a criminal prosecution or a writ of magnatum scandalum for simply mention- ing his association with the crook.

I have no reason to doubt that Havers was simply Maxwell's dupe, although it seems reasonable to enquire exactly what legal work Havers undertook in the Maxwell empire. Was he involved, for instance, in Maxwell's personal libel writs, of which 60 were said to be extant at the time of the tycoon's alleged demise? Was he involved in moving assets between com- panies, or in the legal aspects of securing loans to shore up share prices?

My reason for asking these questions is not to throw mud at a dead man who was, by all accounts, genial, indiscreet and as honest as it is possible for any lawyer to be, but because I am uneasy that nobody else appears to have asked them. What, exactly, is the legal profession up to? Is there an uneasy awareness that it is not so much the law of libel, which provides a crook's char- ter for anyone rich enough to issue a bar- rage of writs, as the way the law has come to be administered by the High Courts? That the judges are more responsible than the politicians for the present state of affairs?

W.F. Deedes, in his excellent and bril- liantly enjoyable columns in the Telegraph, has recently come round to the point that I

have been pushing in these pages for at any rate 16 years, that in the new Britain it is no longer possible to assume honesty or benevolence in such institutions as have traditionally earned that assumption. It is no longer safe to take it on trust that your bank is giving you the best advice, that your life insurance policy will be paid on your death, that teachers have the best interests of your children in mind, that the law will protect your home against possession by squatters ...

Deedes ascribes this collapse of British respectability to the failure of chivalry the gentlemen's code of honour — while I ascribe it to the rise of the lower-middle class, but they amount to the same thing. The get-rich-quick generation has turned us into a nation of crooked businessmen, suspect lawyers, idle, power-obsessed policemen and cab-drivers who will seldom give anyone under 35 the right change.

What is sad is that although we do not seem to notice the change much ourselves, we notice that other people have noticed it and feel aggrieved on that score. We learn what is happening only through personal experience, or very obliquely. It seldom appears in the news. How many people now remember that it was Sun Alliance's failure to pay up on an ordinary life insur- ance policy which led to the great national debate about whether its then chairman, Lord Aldington, could reasonably be described as a war criminal? Sun Alliance claimed that some small-print condition in the insurance policy had not been observed. Lord Aldington was awarded £1.5 million or some such ludicrous figure, in libel damages.

We are painfully aware that our football hooligans are the worst in Europe, although other countries seem to be catch- ing up. We may even have become aware of how we are rapidly becoming the laughing- stock of the civilised world, not just in such countries as France, which has always held us in a certain nervous derision, or Aus- tralia, which has more complicated emo- tions, but even in the United States of America, of all places. A dispatch from the Observer's Andrew Stephen at the end of last month described an idiot Washington

dinner party giggling at an exhibition of dis- gusting, naff, English food. He concluded solemnly that there was an anti-British backlash under way in America, and so there might be if more than one in 20 citi- zens of the United States had ever heard of us. The truth is that those who have heard of us now despise the new Britain we have created for ourselves. All that remains for us is to wonder why.