Television
Speculations
Richard In grams
Poor Cardinal Hume had to wait his turn on Tuesday to allow ITN to cope with the Royal engagement. The happy couple got through a fairly embarrassing interview with flying colours, the Prince doing most of the talking and Lady Diana interpolating an occasional mumble or giggle. I was disappointed to see no sign of her stepgrandmother, Barbara Cartland, though Lady Darjtmouth managed to get on to the telly by dragging her poor husband along to mingle with the crowds outside Buckingham Palace in order, so he said, to take photographs for his album. Earlier, on Nationwide, Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, editor of Burke's Peerage, had informed us that Charles was Diana's seventh cousin once removed and Miss Tina Brown, editor of the Tatler, said that the happy couple were 'old-fashioned in the nicest sort of way', by which she meant 'they don't stuff cocaine up their noses and sleep about.'
After the success of his earlier pens& — life is like a great cathedral on a northern hill' — William Rees-Mogg, retiring editor of The Times, has given us a new aphorism to ponder on. 'Life can be one of two ways', he said on ITV in the film profile of ' Cardinal Hume, *either it can all be about VAT or it can be about God'. The mystery of Cardinal Hume is how he got the job in the first place. He never wanted it and he doesn't seem particularly to enjoy it. Hume is a devout and holy man who is well aware of the fact that he is not sufficiently decisive or ruthless to be a leader of the Catholic Church. He described movingly how at his installation in Westminster Cathedral he felt overcome by the realisation of all the hopes that were being invested in him by other people. 'I was deeply upset', he said, 'because, I thought, I can never realise their expectations.' His main love is solitude and ideally, 1 think, he would be suited to the life of a hermit. Instead of which he has had the taxing job of Cardinal thrust upon him. Mysteriously, it looks as if the venerable Rees-Mogg had had a hand in the appointment. He certainly seemed to think of himself as a leading spokesman for the Catholic community, saying that after Cardinal Heenan they wanted someone who wasn't a bishop and who wasn't Irish. The fact that Hume was a public school man and a gent was plainly thought to be an added bonus.
The world of intelligence gathering and spies is essentially a boring one mainly because, with everyone engaged in deception, it is almost impossible to discover the truth about anyone. That is why spying is an activity that attracts large numbers of loonies, perverts and traitors, men whose nature turns them away from reality. Even the Philby story is boring because in the last resort we have no means of knowing what Philby actually did or what effect it had on events. However, the spy world continues to attract the attention of journalists partly for the very reason that it is mysterious and, as someone or other said: 'Nothing makes a man suspect more than to know little.' After weeks of to-ing and fro-ing, with interventions from the DG, etc, Tom Mangold's Panorama programme about the Secret Service was finally shown on Monday and almost inevitably provoked an anti-climax. Mangold, a dour presence, began by talking to a man with the unlikely name of Tony Motion who was described as someone who had been an officer in MI5 for ten years. He told Mangold how he used to follow Hungarian spies all over Londoneven into the gents cloakroom `to see if it would psychologically disturb them'. He concluded sadly: 'I don't think it worked actually.' At once one's suspicions were aroused. If so-called Tony Motion was a bona fide ex-MI5 man who had presumably signed the Official Secrets Act, what was he doing blurting all this out on the telly in front of millions of people? Had he been given special clearance by 'C' or 'M', or whatever he calls himself nowadays, or was he perhaps an enemy agent whose aim was to discredit MIS by telling ridiculous stories on the telly about following Hungarians into lavatories? These are the kind of speculations you get into once you enter the spy world. Mangold's general argument was that there are grounds for 'a greater public accountability'. This seemed a typical piece of BBC humbug. Either you have a Secret Service or you don't. Once it ceases to be secret, it loses any point it might have.
Previous page
