Notebook
On Wednesday morning I opened the Daily Mirror and came across the following statement: 'With regard to our report of references in Crossman's Diaries to the famous Bevan libel action 24 years ago, we would like to make it clear tht there are no grounds for impugning Lord Goodman's integrity in the matter'. I found it surprising not that the Mirror should wish to refrain from impugning the integrity of Lord Goodman, whose integrity no right-minded person would wish to impugn, but that it considered it necessary to say so. I found this extraordinary because, as it so happens, the material which the Mirror apparently considered susceptible to misinterpretation was lifted, albeit without attribution, from last week's Spectator Notebook. There was nothing, of course, in the Spectator that suggested any deficiency in integrity on Lord Goodman's part. When he wrote to us in 1978 saying that none of the plaintiffs (Crossman, Bevan, and Morgan Phillips) ever suggested to him that their evidence was false, we believed him, and we believe him still. (It would, indeed, have been astonishing if they had suggested such a thing.) There may now be a great deal of evidence to suggest that there was a miscarriage of justice in 1957, but nobody, as far as I know, is blaming Lord Goodman. Certainly the Spectator is not. Nor is Mr Bernard Levin who, in Tuesday's Times, described the libel action as `one of the greatest scandals since the war'. Nevertheless, Lord Goodman's sensitivity on the subject, to which • I referred last week, appears to remain acute. A letter of monumental length (which at the time of writing is still awaiting publication) arrived this week in the offices of The Times. The Daily Mirror published its clarification only, I am told, after Lord Goodman had personally visited the paper to threaten libel proceedings. And, whether or not Lord Goodman had any hand in the matter, the authorities at the Sunday Times must for some reason have been feeling uneasy, for instructions went forth to the editorial staff that certain passages referring to Lord Goodman should not be included in the extracts from the Crossman diaries which were published in that paper. Now, if these included the passages from which I quoted in the Spectator last week, I do not understand what the fuss was about. Whether or not Crossman was right in attributing to Lord Goodman great enthusiasm for taking the Spectator to court seems to me to be a very trivial question. What are solicitors for, if not to advise clients on their best course of action? And the course of action which Crossman says was recommended by Lord Goodman turned out to be very advantageous indeed. The Mirror, it is true, added its own clumsy embellishment to the information it took from the Spectator, declaring, quite wrongly, that Lord Goodman's conduct was `being criticised', and, more imaginatively still, that he was `under fierce attack'. If I were Lord Goodman, I would have found this irritating to read, but hardly more than that. As to the famous libel action itself, doubts and uncertainties about many aspects of it have been widely expressed now for 24 years, and it is surely right that Crossman's important contribution should be given an airing. Following the publication of this last piece of evidence, there is not really much more that anybody can say about it. If it was given a chance, I feel sure that the controversy would die.
Now for something completely different — the Giant Panda. I have peculiar affection for the giant panda, having once interviewed Mr Edward Heath for television inside the panda cage at London Zoo. Mr Heath had just received two pandas as a present from the Chinese government and was looking very pleased. He was one of the first beneficiaries of a new post-Cultural Revolution Chinese policy, which appeared to be to purchase the friendship of western statesmen by giving them these attractive animals. But I wonder if it was not just a colossal tease. By giving pairs of pandas to London and Washington, the clever Chinese naturally excited expectations that they would breed. But breed they have obstinately refused to do. Neither the London pandas nor the Washington pandas showed any interest in each other, so now large sums of money and infinite trouble have been devoted to arranging a meeting between Mr Heath's male panda Chia-Chia and Mr Nixon's female panda Ling-Ling in the hope that, `with spring in the air and royal wedding bells in the offing', something or other will happen. Has anybody contemplated the possibility that the Chinese might deliberately have been sending us sterile pandas in order to undermine our morale? It would have been quite a good joke to play on Mr Heath.
It is an unusual subject in which to show such a detailed interest, but a gentleman called Mr Steven Marc Glick is about to publish a book entitled Disability in the USSR: A Dissident View. Even those who will draw the line at reading such a book may, however, be interested to hear how the Soviet Union is behaving towards its cripples in the International Year of Disabled Persons. It has decided to harass them even more than usual. After 1949, when he lost both his legs in an industrial accident, a Muscovite called Yuri Kiselev founded an unofficial group which has been campaigning in vain to establish an official organisation for the disabled. According to Kiselev, quoted by Mr Glick, disabled Russians are condemned to a miserably low standard of living. There are no attempts to integrate them into society, and most of them are `prisoners in their own flats'. The attempts of Kiselev and his colleagues to obtain better treatment are rewarded in the traditional Soviet manner. One of the group's leading campaigners, Mr Valeri Fefelov, both of whose legs are completely paralysed as a result of another industrial accident, was a victim of particularly cruel treatment. In November 1978, a few days after his flat has been searched, workmen arrived, dug a big hole and piled up the dirt in front of his garage, with the result that he could not leave home at all. Other attempts to silence the disabled have included telephone disconnections, and threats of arrest and psychiatric internment. In the Soviet Union, you cannot criticise the regime, and there are no exceptions.
On this page not long ago I compared the Greater London Council to the Vatican, giving as one example of their similarity the tendency of their patriarchs `to make ex cathedra pronouncements on questions of morals'. In a letter to the paper this week, Sir Horace Cutler denies any such tendencies and asks whether I am confused. I ant" not confused by anything except by Sir Horace's pretence that he does not understand what I am talking about. In case we had all forgotten, the GLC, in refusing this week to increase the grant to the National Theatre, admitted that one of its reasons for this action was its distaste for the company's production of The Romans in Britain, which it held to be obscene. Last October Sir Horace walked out of the play, sent a telegram to Sir Peter Hall describing it as 'a disgrace', and threatened to withdraw the GLC's grant altogether. He may not have quite carried out this threat, but to suggest that he considers himself qualified to pronounce on issues of public morality seems to me to be one of the mildest and fairest things that could be said about him.
Alexander Chancellor
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