DIARY
DAVID HARE Why is the universal wisdom always wrong? At the moment you can't walk in the street without someone telling you that were it not for the feebleness of the official opposition, Tony Blair's administration would be falling apart. This so precisely misstates the situation that you wonder that otherwise intelligent people can say some- thing so stupid. Plainly, there is a powerful case to be made against the present govern- ment but, unfortunately from the Conser- vatives' point of view, it can be made only by genuine libertarians. The new regime has done all sorts of wonderful and well- meaning things, but it has also shown authoritarian prejudices which don't settle easily into categories of Left or Right. In its failure to reform the prison system; in its disgraceful attitude to freedom of informa- tion; in its shocking disregard for the rights of asylum seekers; in its pointless meddling with the liberty of teachers to teach in the way they see fit; in all these matters, it has exhibited a puritanic zeal which, quite rightly, disgusts large sections of the elec- torate. But how can any of these abuses be attacked by a shadow home secretary or leader of the opposition who are even less committed to ideas of personal freedom than government ministers? Just when the public need their anger represented, they find instead that it has to be conveyed through the one group of people in Britain most disqualified from doing so. How can you be more authoritarian than Ann Wid- decombe? How can you be more in thrall to the bigots at the Daily Mail than William Hague? How can you attack ministers for betraying Longbridge when you yourself admire the evils of the market even more than Labour does? It is not, contrary to cliché, the calibre of the Tory front bench that is making them so futile. It is their blighted ideology.
The BBC is making a big mistake by dividing the Reith lectures into five. The recent revival of the lecture as a popular form is down to the feeling that we no longer listen to anyone for long enough. A month ago, 600 people crowded into Southwark Cathedral to hear Robert Win- ston discussing the ethics of bio-engineer- ing for three hours with a small panel including Colin Blakemore and the Bishop of Oxford. Not, you might think, the most nakedly commercial subject, but here was a wonderfully mixed crowd drawn by the sim- ple appeal of listening to people who know what they're talking about. It was enthralling. Anyone who has attended The Last Word series at the Royal Geographical Society will never forget the exhilaration of 55 minutes on the human brain with Stephen Pinker, or of a full blast about Northern Ireland from Mo Mowlam — both wonderful stuff. Curiously, when I think about my life at university it's the lec- tures I remember more clearly than the films or the plays: the drama of George Steiner, the delicate drawl of W.H. Auden. In any art exhibition it's the self-portraits I like best, and lecturing, after all, is a form of living portraiture.
0 ther people's court cases are as inter- esting as other people's babies, but last week the Royal Court Theatre enjoyed a welcome victory in a Manhattan court. A New York judge threw out a claim by a Los Angeles playwright that the invitation to send me to the Middle East to write my play Via Dolorosa had been prompted by one of the Royal Court's play-readers hap- pening to see the litigant's own unsolicited manuscript on a similar subject some two years previously. The claim was so far- fetched as to be preposterous, but typically it took ten months to reach the court, where it was immediately thrown out, at a cost to the theatre of $40,000 in legal fees. The case raised important issues of princi- ple. Vexatious litigation has provided movie studios and a good many American theatres with a convenient excuse not to read anything which is submitted from an unknown source. The Royal Court argued that it could not fulfil its role as the coun- try's most important theatre for new work if it wasn't free to read unsolicited manuscripts. The discovery of unknown writers depends on a theatre's ability to open the post without fear of litigation. Anyone who cares about freedom of speech is invited to send money to the Court's beautiful new playhouse in Sloane Square to help defray its legal expenses.
When I was young I loved the novels of E.M. Forster so much that I gulped down his entire output, leaving only one book aside as a treat to be enjoyed all the more keenly for having been postponed. By the time I came to read it I realised I no longer liked E.M. Forster. So, to this day, I haven't finished A Room with a View. I sus- pect I never will. By contrast, I am, on the morning of this paragraph's publication, making a visit to Spain which has me insane with excitement precisely because it is my first. In the days of Franco it was inconceiv- able to go. Those of us who make such choices are always accused of selective indignation — why go to Colombia, for instance, but not to Turkey? — but it's bet- ter to have inconsistent principles than no principles at all. If the resultant charge is hypocrisy, well, I prefer it to cynicism and indifference. The laziest way of dismissing anger against a particular. injustice is to complain that it's not directed at all injus- tice. The only time I ignored these kinds of scruples was when I thought it would be interesting to visit Burma. It was one of the stupidest things I ever did in my life. Noth- ing prepares you for the ubiquitous, rancid ugliness of that terrible regime. If you think tyranny cannot collectively oppress a peo- ple's soul, then I recommend you follow my example. After four days I fled.
Ienjoyed Polly Toynbee's snobbish attack on Tracey Emin in the Guardian for daring to support a mayoral candidate the journalist doesn't like. Having once been lucky enough to meet Tracey Emin, I have a lot of respect for her acumen. She's a remarkable person. In Toynbee's view, painters are a ditzy-headed bunch who always make fools of themselves when they speak about political issues. My only regret was that Toynbee didn't corroborate her case with this handy quotation: 'What strange folk they are, these artists. Political- ly babies, all of them.' It's from Goebbels.
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