AS I WAS SAYING
When friendship can also be deception
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
According to my friend Paul Johnson, with whom I've been thick for 40 years having first crossed pens about Suez — I was wrong, even unforgivably wrong, in not following his urging and example by writing in defence of our mutual friend, Jonathan Aitken. In fact as things stand between us at present, it seems all too likely that Paul will find it easier to remain on good terms with his relatively new friend Jonathan, who has quite certainly broken the laws of the land, than with his much older friend, me, who may or may not have broken the rules of friendship.
At first I thought Paul must be joking. While there might indeed be a case for a friend of Jonathan to say nothing, I could not begin to see how there could be a case for speaking out in his defence. Indeed, as Paul's article went on to show, there wasn't. But that, I think, was his point. Greater love has no journalist than to make the supreme sacrifice of putting his reputation as an homme seriewc at risk for his friend. Paul gallantly did make that sacrifice and on reflection I am beginning to see that I may have been at fault in not agreeing to do likewise.
After all, by last week there was no ques- tion of Jonathan getting his way with his lies; no question of his career in politics not having been stopped in its tracks. In such circumstances — i.e. once it was certain that the public interest had been secured perhaps the claims of friendship should have been allowed to take precedence over the obligation to tell the truth. While to write an eloquent apologia for Jonathan before his public fate was sealed would have been journalistically irresponsible, to do so afterwards — as Paul did and urged me to do — was to combine the role of the good citizen and the good friend. Heaven knows, the media chorus con- demning the public man was more than loud enough to have drowned out one or two dissenting descants of sympathy for the private man. So there was no danger of the common weal being damaged by too many attempts to pardon the unpardonable. In fact the much more obvious danger was an excess of condemnation, which it was the duty of Jonathan's friends to try to balance by an equal excess of special pleading. In other words, Paul, unlike PW, may have done the loyal and honourable thing. In a much more serious context, of course, these same kinds of questions arose over Anthony Blunt and the other spies for the Soviet Union. Should their friends have informed the authorities about their suspi- cions, rather than allowing themselves to be persuaded into silence — in effect into a cover-up — by E.M. Forster's now notori- ously influential statement that if ever he had to choose between betraying his friend or his country he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country? I am sure that in these cases Paul would have reject- ed Forster's advice with scorn and put his public duty as a citizen firmly before his private duty as a friend. For by not doing so the friends of the spies allowed the spying to continue, and with the benefit of hind- sight it is now clear that this was to accord the duties of friendship a truly sick and per- verted priority.
But what about the case of Anthony Blunt, the Fourth Man, whose treachery was exposed only years after his capacity to do any further harm to the public weal was long since over — how should his friends have reacted in those very different circum- stances? Was it to their credit or discredit that some of them stood by him, refusing to believe that he had done anything really wrong; making the best, that is, of a very bad job? At the time I rather despised their refusal to put the boot in, their insistence on following the precept, 'my friend, right or wrong', and I seem to remember that Paul did the same. But then, too, as in the case of Jonathan, it could surely have been argued that the bounden duty of a journal- ist friend was to make the case, however far-fetched, for the defence in the quite certain knowledge that the rest of the media would be leaning over backwards to do the opposite.
There is a further question, which I find most troubling of all, particularly, of course, in the case of spies. To what extent can a friend who turns out to have behaved in ways that you did not believe him to be capable of — that is to say, wholly out of character — be said to have ever been a friend in the first place? Or not even wholly out of character? If one had always suspect- ed that a friend might be capable of doing something truly awful, but had preferred, in the interests of friendship, to suppress such thoughts, how should one react if these fears are proved more than justified? Does this not change everything; prove the friendship to have been a deception? For all along your friend was concealing his true identity, sailing under false colours. The man you thought was your friend, pos- sibly you did owe loyalty to him. But since he has turned out not to be that man, but rather an imposter, surely those duties dic- tated by friendship no longer need apply. Friendship, in short, is a two-way contract, and if one party has broken the terms by pretending to be what he isn't, that must absolve the other party, the duped party, from abiding by them as well.
It all depends, of course, on the degree of deception, and here we come, I think, to the crux of my disagreement with Paul. He regards the differences between what Jonathan Aitken appeared to be — a bit of a swashbuckling cavalier with a penchant for taking risks and cutting a dash as much in his private as in his public life — and what he turned out to be — a perjurer pre- pared to lie, cheat and bully his way out of trouble — as only trivial. Better a crooked cavalier, he seems to be saying, than an honest puritan. I don't agree. In fact one of the things that must be held most to Jonathan's discredit is that he has behaved in such a way as to bring the whole idea of the cavalier into disrepute, as also — it now transpires — did Lord Boothby. In both their cases a romantic style belied a squalid and dishonourable reality.
Should a friend point this out bluntly or, in the interests of friendship, try to blur the distinction between the counterfeit and the genuine article? In the present climate, with so many of the young Tory bloods particularly the brighter ones — tempted to ignore the distinction, the need for blunt- ness seemed to me particularly pressing. Precisely because Jonathan was for them such a beau-ideal, it was more than ever necessary, in his case, to resist the tempta- tion to make excuses. Paul took the oppo- site view. Quite enough grounds here for disagreement but not, I trust, for anything more long-lasting.
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