SHARED OPINION
Reflections on being referred to by Alan Clark MP
FRANK JOHNSON
The 600 Irishmen whose deaths were Mr Alan Clark's answer this week to the Irish question should not take it personally. The other day Mr Clark called me (to fol- low the typography used by the newspaper which quoted it) a 'stupid c—'. He did not say it in private, he said it in an interview in the Observer, where it could be seen by a few hundred thousand people, and could have been seen by my mother, were she still alive. So that's all right then. Had it been in private, I might have taken it personally.
He is, however, always saying this sort of thing in public. I got off not much worse than such of his targets over the years as Edward Heath, Kenneth Clarke and the entire United States. I am relieved that he is an old friend of mine, otherwise he might have said something hurtful.
His observation was, of course, occa- sioned by the Great Prediction in The Spec- tator of 9 August 1997. The Prediction, in the last paragraph of an article by Mr Clark denouncing harassment by the press, was in effect that the low prints' great prize would be the death, 'in unexplained circum- stances', of Diana, Princess of Wales. Except that, as history now knows, in his original manuscript he wrote 'Her Royal Highness'. In this office, we thought he had forgotten that she was not one of those any more. We changed it to 'Diana, Princess of Wales'. Who else could he have been talk- ing about? I had not known him go in for predictions before. A few weeks previously, he could not even tell me who was going to be the new leader of the Conservative party. Confronted with his apparent fore- cast of the Princess's death, how was I to know that he is one of those clairvoyants who prefer to leave matters ambiguous? Nostradamus rather than Gypsy Al?
That on Radio Four's Today programme he denied that his article contained any mention of the Princess of Wales and left millions of listeners with the impression that I had put in the whole paragraph with- out his knowledge or approval, and was therefore almost as bad as the tabloid harassers whom the article was about, is not of course something which I hold against him. As I say, if I had not been a friend of his, he might have been rather horrible about me.
The following week, however, I received a letter and telephone call from the Press Complaints Commission. Mr Clark had complained to that body about me. The lady from the Commission was helpful and kind. But the complaint entailed a certain amount of telephoning, letter-reading, let- ter-writing and faxing on my two busiest days. I admit that at this point I felt, no doubt unworthily, a certain irritation with Mr Clark.
I told the lady that in our next issue I was going to explain the reason for the alter- ation, and apologise for any distress it had caused Mr Clark. Explaining to our readers that this 'Royal Highness' whom the tabloids were in the process of hounding to death was not necessarily the Princess of Wales was easier said than done. An addi- tional problem was that the wording for the apology from me which Mr Clark was demanding, via the Press Complaints Com- mission, was of the comprehensive and abject kind which Lord Goodman used to extract for his more gruesome clients. Lord Goodman would demand stuff like 'unre- servedly withdraw . . . no scintilla of truth . . not a jot or a tittle of a justification • . . nor indeed a tittle or a bottle. . . . 'Mr Clark seemed to want something on those lines In the end, I printed my own apology (16 August), and resigned myself to close com- bat with Mr Clark before the Commission. As a precaution, I told the Commission lady that if Mr Clark formally complained to it about me, I would formally complain to it about his suggesting to Today's mil- lions that I had written the whole para- graph, not just the bit about the Princess. I had hoped that this would create a stable balance of terror which would deter Mr Clark's pre-emptive strike. (Mr Clark and I are amateurs of grand strategy.) As it happened, his missiles fell silent. Word came back that he was not especially happy with my wording, but would take the matter no further. The next I heard from him, he telephoned after the Princess's death to proclaim his prescience. The faint thought occurred to me that this was a bit much, not to say a bit rich. But I do not complain. Doubtless the rights and wrongs of this matter will be examined in any forthcoming BBC 2 series: The Tory Party's History of Alan Clark ('Maverick party tells the story of Kensington and Chelsea MP. Unmissable').
I had intended that any account of the Great Prediction here should briefly pre- cede a longer discussion of another point made by Mr Clark in his Observer interview. But such is my desire to be fair to both par- ties to the dispute, they took up more space than expected. The broader point concerns the British tendency to invent new conven- tions, or snobberies. I think we do so because we enjoy accusing one another of being ignorant of them. Mr Clark assured his interviewer that he did not name the Princess because 'I would never mention members of the royal family . . . Just like Hollywood actors should never work with animals or children, politicians should never mention the royal family . . . That would have been tacky. I left it up to the readers to know who I was referring to. I could have been talking about any member of royalty. It could have been Princess Michael of Kent, or it could have been Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands, if there is such a person, or it could have been Princess Grace of Monaco. . . . '
Mercifully, the interviewer, Gary Galton, was a very good one, and did his duty by pointing out that Princess Grace was dead. This news only momentarily halted Mr Clark. He pressed on, `. . . but the point is that Franko [that is Mr Clark's name, in his diaries for me, and I have always wondered why he spelt it with a k rather than a c. Surely General Franco was right-wing enough] is a stupid c— because he stuffed the Diana stuff in. . . . '
Such is my knowledge of my countrymen, of whom Mr Clark is a fabled example, that had he mentioned Diana, Princess of Wales, and had I changed it to 'Her Royal Highness', one could just as easily imagine him complaining, `. . . Franko changed it to Her Royal Highness because in that rather Pooterish way of his he thinks a politician should never refer to a member of the royal family. Stupid c—!'
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