Another voice

Time to go for broke?

Auberon Waugh

Q tarting his Notebook last week, Alex-

ander Chancellor quoted a letter from an unnamed friend urging him not to become pompous about the Falklands. The letter was written before the sinking of the Belgrano and Sheffield, and it seemed to him that the comment had been overtaken by events. The fun was now definitely over, he said pomp ... well, responsibly then. The spectacle of our fellow countrymen killing and being killed, our ships sunk, is bound to arouse violent, even angry emo- tions. Tun' is certainly not an appropriate thing to seek, but the second part of his cor- respondent's advice, that these events are no excuse for pomposity, seems more urgent than ever. Pomposity clouds the judgment and leads to nothing but foolishness.

It was pomposity — in the sense of exag- gerated self-importance — which got us in- to this mess in the first place. At the time of the Argentinian invasion, Mrs Thatcher should have announced, in deference to the of the age, that she was now going to ask this marvellous, forward-looking organisation called the United Nations to get the Argentinians out again, and would support any measures its General Assembly deemed suitable.

Now we seem to assume that once the islands are back in British hands, at whatever cost, the Argentinians will wish to negotiate, but I don't see why they should. A bruised task force left wallowing in the South Atlantic, vulnerable to air attack at any time and administering some 8,000 prisoners of war on the islands, is scarcely in a position to guarantee the islands' in- tegrity for very long.

The alternative to defeat or humiliating withdrawal — involving a general election and a Labour government which would sink Britain surely as any Exocet missile is to go for broke just as the Argentinians seem prepared to go for broke. Most saloon bars favour attacking Argentinian air bases, but I doubt whether we could do it suc- cessfully without using Polaris, which not even the Sun newspaper has yet suggested. The best thing, as I have urged elsewhere, would be to attack the softer targets presented by the huge grain silo standing at Rosario, on the River Plate, and in the port of Buenos Aires. They hold the entire Argentinian harvest destined for Russia the junta's announcement that it would trade corn for arms makes them a legitimate tactical target — and are about as vulnerable as it is possible for a target to be.

Their destruction would not only remove the economic foundation of Argentina's war effort, it would also teach the Argenti- nians the dangers of resorting to force and teach Russia the dangers of meddling in South American affairs. What will prevent its execution is the wail of those who, ap- palled by the consequences of Mrs That- cher's pomposity to date, now threaten even greater havoc by trying to impose their own — which amounts, effectively, to a withdrawal. The Falkland Islands may not be worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier, but the survival of the Conser- vative government is certainly worth a cou- ple of million tons (or tonnes) of Argentine wheat destined for Russia.

So much for that, then. But one version or another of this war pomposity seems to be spreading. Now we learn that the Whitehall Theatre is taking off John Wells's Anyone for Denis? on the grounds that, since the Falklands crisis, people no longer find Mrs Thatcher funny.

This I see as a very disturbing sign. Others may have decided that the same con- sideration explains the curious fact that the current issue of Private Eye is quite easily the least funny which has appeared in the last 12 years. In fact the explanation is quite different, and it is to this matter that I now turn as illustrating another aspect of the same syndrome. The reason for the appall- ing standard of jokes in the current Private Eye is that Richard Ingrams spent the entire week in court fighting and losing a battle whose similarity to Mrs Thatcher's struggle occurs to me as remarkable.

The bare facts of the case are as follows. In 1975 Mr Desmond Wilcox, a former head of BBC Features, published a book called The Explorers, purporting to be his own work, based on a BBC series. For this he received about £20,000 in royalties. In fact large passages were taken verbatim from the work of other writers. Private Eye accused him of plagiarism, and suggested that he had abused his position at the BBC in order to commit it. Mr Wilcox sued for libel. In 1980 the BBC and Mr Wilcox were sued for plagiarism (that is, wilful breach of copyright) by the writers concerned, and the BBC paid £54,000 in damages plus the cost of the High Court action. Private Eye persisted in its accusation against Mr Wilcox, and Mr Wilcox persisted in his libel action. An unusual feature of the case was that the BBC were paying Mr Wilcox's ex- penses in this personal action, having decid- ed it was a proper call on licence-payers' money, so that the plaintiff was not sub- jected to the restraints normal in civil ac- tions.

Counsel for Mr Wilcox (Mr A. Hoolahan) argued that Mr Wilcox could not be said to have abused his position, since he had not asked to produce the book in the first place but had been prevailed upon to do so by others; and he could not be guilty of plagiarism because he had wrongly supposed, until losing the High Court action, that the BBC had acquired copyright in the work he offered as his own. Counsel for the defendants (Mr J. Mor- timer) argued that Wilcox was plainly guilty of plagiarism, having admitted breach of copyright in a separate action, and that if he had used his position at the BBC to com- mit plagiarism, he could fairly be said to have abused it.

Mr Justice Jupp, in the High Court, decided otherwise. A weakness of the Eye's case lay in the suggestion that Wilcox had planned the whole series around his book. This was plainly wrong — the result of over-enthusiasm in the office — but Sir Kenneth Jupp thought he had not abused his position at all. Awarding Wilcox £14,500 in damages and £80,000 costs for the 12-day hearing, the judge said damages would have been higher if the accusation of plagiarism had not been justified. But it was plagiarism of a particularly guileless and in- nocent kind. So the plagiarist Wilcox receives £20,00P for his plagiarism, (produced, as 1t. transpired in court, with the assistance 0, two ghost writers) and a further £14,500 for having his behaviour criticised. One cannot complain about the judge's decision, because it was in his discretion so to decide. A jury decision would almost certainly have been more expensive. The interesting thing is that Ingrams should have decided to de- fend the action, knowing full well that it Is very rare indeed for any newspaper to win a libel action, and completely unheard of for Private Eye to win one. The explanation, of course, is that he thought he was right• it was a point of principle. The Eye will probably survive its £94,50° loss, but it certainly won't survive if it loses another action, brought by Mr Gordon Kir- by, Consul in Jeddah at the time of the death of the nurse Helen Smith. Once, again, oddly enough, the cost of Mr KirbY,...: suit is being borne by public funds — time the Foreign Office. I know none of tll`' details of the case and would not comrrient on them if I did. Nor would I criticise 1' grams, whose judgment has kept the EY! afloat for 20 years — anything which 15 destroyed as the result of a faulty judgment now will be of his own creation. 011c,1 again, he sees it as a point of principle, an feels that the Foreign Office's role in the events which followed Helen Smith's death should be more widely known through ex- amination under oath in the witness box.. t This readiness to go for broke on a Poln of principle must form part of any coral prehensive definition of pomposity. But have a word of advice which is applicable both to Mrs Thatcher and Richard Ingrams in the different situations to which their pomposity has led them: it is an admiral/I, thing to stick up for one's moral principles, sometimes a gambler is justified in Poing

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for broke; but the decision to go for broke must be dictated by gambling

Lions, not by moral ones. considera