A Spectator's Notebook THE CAMPAIGN to get a new Obscenity
Act onto
the Statute Book began five years ago at a meet- ing in the Princess Ida room at the Savoy: and last week, a quarter of an hour after the Bill had received the Royal Assent, a group of its sponsors and supporters met again in the Princess Ida room to celebrate. It was a cheerful occasion, with everybody still slightly astonished that the Bill had got through—nothing like it has been achieved, since, I suppose, Sir Alan Herbert's Divorce Act. The general im- pression was that Sir Alan's Harrow in- tervention had been decisive in this case, too; as Roy Jenkins put it, the threat of a split Tory vote in a by-election had not changed the Home Secretary's mind —Mr. Butler was always sympathetic— but had concentrated it wonderfully. But the initial credit, perhaps, should go to the vendor of pornography who, in an attempt to justify his own wares, brought five volumes issued by respected pub- lishing houses into court, suggesting they were every bit as dirty as the ones for Which he was in the dock. These were the books, apparently, which later found their way to the prurience department of the Home Office; they started off a round of prosecutions, and the prose- cutions, in turn, so irritated liberal opinion that the idea of a new Obscenity Act was born. So now, five years later —again, the source is Roy Jenkins—the terms of the controversy have completely changed. The question is not, as it has been from the days of Mr. Justice Stable, Whether only books which are fit to be read by thirteen-year-old girls should be published: instead, it is whether the rest of us are fit to read books published about thirteen-year-old girls.
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