Another voice
Thorpe and the 'Sunday Times'
Auberon Waugh
now know what arrangements the Sunday Times made with Mr Thorpe over the copyright in his letters to Norman Scott. Several newspapers, we are told, possessed copies of these letters some time before the Sunday Times decided to print them. None did so, whether from squeamishness or deference to the laws of copyright. But assurances given to Thorpe in exchange for his permission to print the letters do not throw much light on the curious attitude adopted by that newspaper towards a story which, unless we hear more about the history of Mr Wilson's relations with the security services, may prove to be the crucial political scandal of the decade.
This squeamishness, which undoubtedly exists among the editors of Fleet Street, deserves closer scrutiny. It may derive in part from a gentlemanly feeling that Thorpe has suffered enough, but it must also be influenced by the British public's traditionally ambivalent, not to say hypocritical, attitude towards the press. On the one hand, the public likes to be told what is happening, on the other it reserves the right to vilify the press for doing so. Added to this, there was a general saloon-bar undercurrent that Thorpe had every right to lie about such a delicate matter (if, indeed, he was lying). It is easy to separate the various strands of objection to the story in an article such as this, less easy in presenting the news.
In the context of these twin pressures the Sunday Times might seem to have pulled off a master-stroke when it published the letters. It gave the public all the dirt after a chorus of self-righteous squeals against the rest of the press for being interested in the matter. Well done, I thought.
Throughout its coverage of the matter, the Sunday Times has always tended to credit Thorpe's denials more than Scott's claims. Thorpe, we learned in 'Insight' (14 March 1976) is a 'man whose word has proved reliable throughout a long career in public life' whereas Scott is 'a man whose allegations are often demonstrably untrue'. The same issue, in a leader, talks of 'unsubstantiated smears', of the 'recondite intensity' of press probing (whatever that may mean) and advances Thorpe's 'relative importance' as a further reason why the privacy of his private life should be respected.
All of which are reasonable enough attitudes to take — although I would quarrel with all of them — so long as the issue is seen in simple terms: who is lying, the politician or the male model? But on 30 October of this year, the Sunday Times went much further than expressing a preference for Thorpe's version. Referring to the Bateman cartoon episode of The Journalist Who Dared Ask Mr Thorpe about his Sex Life at a Press Conference, the Sunday Times thundered or yelled: `To ask a public man whether he has ever been a homosexual is as indefensible as to ask him if he has ever committed adultery. It scrapes the barrel of journalistic slime'.
I am sorry; there are a number of occasions when it is highly defensible to ask a public man about his sex life. One of them is when he calls a press conference to discuss it. But this demagogic reference to 'journalistic slime' marks what looks like an attempt to divert attention from a major political scandal into a witch-hunt of the press, with the Sunday Times leading the pack. Oddly enough, I have often thought that if there is a minor press scandal attaching to the Thorpe affiar, it lies in the readMess of our national newspapers to be bullied or cajoled into keeping quiet about it. But there are quite enough people anxious for any opportunity to revile or muzzle the press without the press joining in. Let us examine the press handling of the story.
Until the night of the attempted murder of Scott in October 1975 not a word of the Scott allegations had appeared in any newspaper. A sinister and disreputable figure called Gordon Winters had been hawking a dossier round Fleet Street for some months, but nobody was prepared to use it. The story was old, and even if it was true, there is some sympathy in Fleet Street for those in public life, even if their private behaviour may be such as to carry the risk of blackmail.
The attempted murder of Scott — or possibly the attempt to frighten him — altered all that. If Scott is lying, of course, he is a villain of lago proportions and should be exposed as such, but his only crime to date was to be frightened out of his wits and have his dog shot in front of his eyes by a gunman on Exmoor, a few miles from where I live. His story, if true, marked an important development in British political life, the revival of the political murder — something which had more or less disappeared from the scene since Tudor days. Moreover the Liberals were not only the repository of five million people's votes, they were also within spitting distance of holding the parliamentary balance. Refusal of a Conservative-Liberal pact had already resulted in a Labour government, just as the existing Lib-Lab pact ensures the continuance in office of the present government. It is all very well for mandarins like myself who may have had a tumble or two in their schooldays and are in any case innately suspicious of democracy to decry the quaint democratic convention whereby known homosexualists, or those with a suspected homosexual history, are liable to be judged untrustworthy or otherwise unfit for office. But those with a firmer belief in the system's validity have an uphill task to explain why any evidence pointing in this direction must be suppressed. Similarly, they must explain why the victim of an attempted murder should be denied any right to make his contribution towards a reassessment of Liberal Party personalities and methods. All in all, [judged it not only a matter of legitimate public curiosity, but also in the public interest that Norman Scott should be given a fair hearing.
But the press thought otherwise. It was not until Newton was awaiting trial and Scott took advantage of the privilege rules to tell part of his story in Barnstaple that the press took any notice at all. One explanation may be provided by a letter which arrived at the offices of Private Eye shortly afterwards threatening prosecution for criminal libel if Scott's allegations were pursued. Richard Ingrams, in his fairminded way, printed it as a Letter to the Editor. The essential difference between criminal and civil libel is that in criminal libel, truth is no sufficient defence. The defendant must also prove public interest, For my own part I do not doubt that the public interest is involved. But the key to the matter remains: which of them is lying on the material point?
So long as that vital question is kept in mind, we can examine a few of the red herrings introduced elsewhere than in the Sunday Times. Watkins's Law (Observer) that nobody should be put in a position of being required to tell the truth about his sex life must have as its corollary that anybody's evidence about his own sex life should be discounted, which brings us back to the original question. The Times's point (29 October 1977) that Christian tradition takes a lenient view of sodomy is quite simply wrong, as a glance at the eighteenth chapter of Genesis will show. Sodomy has always been held far more abominable than adultery.
But the overriding error is to suppose that politicians have the right to be treated as other human beings. They aspire to the superhuman — directing our lives and deciding what is good for us — and should be judged on those terms. Churchill — as I seem to remember, although I can find no mention of it in my law books — once received enormous damages from the Daily Mirror after it published a photograph of him taken from behind which might have suggested he was urinating. If any hint that political leaders have normal bodily functions, let alone abnormal ones, is liable to be threatened with the law of criminal libel, I see no reason why they should be further protected by a voluntarily gagged press. At the trial of Newton — where the prosecution was conducted, I think, by my old friend Lewls Hawser QC — no mention of a murder conspiracy was permitted. Is this how the Sunduy Times thinks our affairs should be conducted?
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