THE SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

This summer I determined to go abroad with family. Eventually, following the kind offer from an old friend of a villa in Cavtat, we decided to go to Yugoslavia. It was a holiday during which nothing much worked out right. The old friend, for instance, moved out of Dubrovnik before we arrived, leaving no address or messages; and there was no villa for us in Cavtat. However, having brought with us a certain amount of camping equipment — sufficient, we had thought, to get us to the Adriatic and back, but nowhere near enough to dwell with — we made do.

We found Yugoslavia not only much more expensive than we had imagined; but also much more German. Menus were in German and so were many road signs. We moved, after a week or so, round to Venice, and here matters were not improved. We camped across the lagoon, twenty minutes by water-bus from St Mark's. Here, too, in Venice and in the camp, things as well as people were very German.

The camp itself rather horrified me. It was surrounded by barbed wire. Inside were lines of tents, all arranged in streets, With numbers. I did not dare to say what the camp reminded me of until my wife said "What does it remind you of?"; and I had to say that it reminded me, as it did her, of nothing but a concentration camp. The showers, WC's, washing rooms etc., and general regimentation of the place all demonstrated the love of order. The language of the place was German. It was curious that the Germans, on holiday with all their expensive Mercedes cars and tents and portable television sets, should have put themselves, at no little expense, into a compound marked off with straight streets and surrounded by barbed wire and fully equipped with regulations. The Germans, on holiday, send themselves to concentration camps. It is small wonder that many Of them still think that the Jews had nothing much of which to complain.

Entitled to privacy

To my mind, The Spectator was wrong to publish the article on Princess Anne. The neologism to have sex' is a peculiarly nasty expression and publicly to ask, even as in this case) rhetorically, whether someone has, or has not, 'had sex' is to Pander to sensationalism, The anger of many of our readers is understandable. The piece, as published, would have been just as tasteless had it referred to anyone else; but there is no doubt that to use such language of a member of the Royal family causes much greater offence than it would if used of anyone else. I do not think that members of the royal family need (or desire) particular safeguards and privileges over and above those they already possess; but they, like everyone else, are entitlted to privacy.

Matters of taste

The destruction of privacy, the intrusion nowadays not only into grief but into sex and into disaster, is one of the nastier aspects of the contemporary scene. Television continually intrudes, the camera and the microphone thrusting close for tears and sobs. Even if (as I suppose) the members of Lord Longford's committee survive unscathed their exposure to pornography, I am not sure whether the purveyors themselves can hope to be undamaged. Is it not likely, also, that those actors and actresses who, in order to make money for promoters and directors and producers, are persuaded into public displays that would in normal conditions be regarded as taboo, are thereby coarsened?

But at the least, these people are adults; they know what they are doing, they think that they can look after themselves.

What, however, are we to make of those newspapers which, in reporting the case of the sub-lieutenant charged with spying, showed photographs not only of the officer and his wife, but of their four children? The happy family photographs published in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, taken when the husband and wife who had initially been married at a register office had a 'second marriage' ceremony earlier this year, clearly identify the four children. They are completely innocent. They have done no wrong. They cannot look after themselves. These children, already injured through the fact of their father's arrest, have now been further damaged.

We admit and regret our error. Will the Daily Telegraph, and will the Daily Mail admit theirs? The Mirror, Express, and Sun all managed to report the case without illustrating it with pictures of the children. There was no necessity for these pictures at all, only the desire to intrude, or to gratify the readers' desires to intrude.

Man of Principle

Victor Montagu, who writes our Political Commentary this week, cannot be charged with temporizing over the Common Market issue. He opposed the British application from the beginning, and on grounds of constitutional principle. As Lord Hinchingbrooke, he sat in the Commons as member for South Dorset. He succeeded his father to the Earldom of Sandwich in 1962, before it was possible to disclaim the peerage. At the resulting and celebrated by-election in what in normal circumstances would have been a safe Tory seat, the Labour candidate defeated the official Tory candidate, Mr Angus Maude, entirely as a result of the intervention, as an unofficial Tory and anti-Common Mar ket candidate, of the late Sir Piers Debenham. Debenham's candidature was supported by Hinch (as he was generally and affectionately known), and the 5,000 votes he attracted were more than enough to scotch Angus Maude's prospects. Angus Maude subsequently re-entered Parliament as member for Stratford-on-Avon, after the Profumo business.

When, in 1964, it became possible for peers to disclaim their peerages, Hinch, as Earl of Sandwich, promptly did so, turning himself into Victor Montagu in the process. Since then he has sought, without success, to return to the Commons. He is a man who might well have risen very high in Tory circles. He put his political principles before his political career and suffered as a result.

Double standards

It is a typical disgrace, but a disgrace nonetheless, that the BBC should kow-tow to pressure and seek to demote and to silence Fergus Roy MacKenzie for having written his Shortest Way with Tres passers,' which we published as the best piece of polemic writing submitted in our New Writing Competition earlier this year. I hope that when the matter reaches the top, the BBC will adopt the same attitude to Mr MacKenzie as it has done to Mt Hindell, one of the BBC's current affairs producers who has used his BBC telephone number and extension to further the work of the (highly controversial) London Pregnancy Advisory Service.

When Mr Martin Mears, the general secretary of ' Life,' the anti-abortion society, wrote to Mr Charles Curran, the Director-General of the BBC, to draw attention to Mr Hindell's activities, Mr Curran replied: "The BBC has been aware, of course, of Mr Hindell's interest in the abortion question, but

the BBC has for many years held the view

that its main concern must be not with the private views and activities of its staff but

with their programmes. We try to allow mem bers of staff as much freedom as possible to pursue outside interests, subject to their pre serving impartiality in their work. We are satisfied that Mr Hindell's interest in what is admittedly a controversial issue has not in any way been reflected in programme content."

The BBC has made no suggestion that Mr MacKenzie has not preserved impartial ity in his work. It has assured the Jewish Chronicle to the contrary. All the odder, therefore, that Mr MacKenzie should be threatened with demotion and consequen tial loss of salary, whereas the only disciplining to which Mr Hindell has been subjected is that, according to Mr Curran, "he has been reminded that the receiving of private telephone calls through the BBC switchboard is a facility accorded staff as a personal convenience which should be used with discretion." Double standards at the BBC? Help to run an abortion service and you're told "be discreet in your use of the BBC switchboard "? Write up a satire, and you're demoted and told to shut up? I am glad that the BBC branch of the National Union of Journalists had taken up Mr MacKenzie's case. I also hope that Mr Curran will see to it that Mr MacKenzie is treated with the same respect (or more) that Mr Hindell has received.