SPEAKING ILL OF THE DEAD
John Sweeney does
not much regret the death of Michael Horton
PITY for a killer seeped out of the Old Bailey last week. It is an uncommon emotion for a courtroom, but the sight of the almost monkish figure of the Canadian food magnate, Joseph Robb, cradling his bald head in his hands in the dock as the Crown QC laboured the grisly details of what the Independent called the 'penknife and Perrier' killing was extraordinarily touching. The Old Bailey jury, whose black and white mix, cheapish clothes and de- meanour of patient boredom made them look as though they had been plucked Wholesale from a Hackney bus queue, clearly felt pity. They found Robb, a 41-year-old Ulster-born president of the Canadian division of Northern Foods, guil- ty of manslaughter, but not guilty of the murder of Michael Horton, a public- relations executive. Horton had been hav- ing an affair with Robb's wife.
I did not just feel pity for the killer, but something which makes me feel queasy to admit to. I felt a strong disgust, not quite hatred, for the corpse. They say one shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but Mike Horton was one of the biggest shits I've ever met in my life. There is always a certain ghoulish fas- cination about courtroom gore. Leaving aside my interest in the dead man, it was absorbing to observe the lawyers expen- sively grind through the particulars: the cache of intimate love letters which Robb thought were for him until further reading Proved otherwise; Robb's flight across the Atlantic to save his marriage. He had written, 'Communicate the seriousness of my intention and my resolve', in the style of a businessman in his notebook. There were his wife's warning telephone calls to her lover; the Perrier and gin bottles in the room at the Churchill Hotel; the penknife used for sharpening pencils; Horton's re- plying to Robb's pleas with a 'chuckle' and, his final remark, 'I'm off to dinner'; the ainbulancemen finding the dying man dou- bled up, next to a blood-spattered tele- Phone off the hook. While listening to the oysters-in- Guinness voice of the prosecuting silk, Anthony Glass, unsuccessfully trying to goad the pitiable Robb into an admission of malice aforethought, I remembered how, when I had read of Horton's death in the Evening Standard, I had been reluctant to mourn.
Mike Horton talked serious money. He was a globe-bestriding corporate trouble- shooter, a blue-chip communicator. He was 41 when he died and the European president of Burson-Marsteller, the biggest public relations company in the world. A bigshot.
I had interviewed him while I was researching a piece about public relations for Time Out magazine in the summer of 1986. Everything looked the part: an office carpet with a pile so thick it was like hiking across peat, a fancy swivel chair, sharp dark blue suit, blue/gold striped tie, gold- rimmed glasses, gingery sideburns, a bushy head of dark brown hair, which he stroked lovingly while chatting on the phone about a 'comfortable time-frame'. The voice was assured, transatlantic. The smile,' I wrote then, 'is easy, if a trifle saccharine. His teeth gleam; they look his own.'
The remark about the teeth has an edge. Professor Alfredo Bravo lost his teeth in September 1977 when he was picked up by the right-wing Argentinian death squads. They roughed up the professor pretty nastily, culminating in crucifying him up- side down. The professor, however, was fortunate in that he was picked up the same day that General Videla met President Carter in Washington. Carter complained: Bravo lived. Others — 11,000-odd others including nuns, pregnant mothers, seven- year-old girls — were unlucky. Of course, atrocities have happened elsewhere in the world, but what took place during the Argentinian Dirty War, when South America's most civilised and 'Western' nation defiled itself by systematic, government-sponsored torture and killing, was pretty sick. The details of the Argenti- na Dirty War are too miserable and dis- gusting to rehearse here; those interested should read The Disappeared by John Simpson of the BBC and Jana Bennett. In their book they say: `Comparisions with Nazism are dangerously easy to make, and made far too often, but what happened in Argentina in the years that followed 1976 was probably closer to what happened in Germany after 1933 than anything else in the [post-war] Western world.'
The link between the Dirty War and Horton is that from February 1978 to January 1980 he was Burton-Marsteller's man in Buenos Aires, earning the company a $1.2 million-a-year contract to pour unction over the image of the junta. Before I met Horton I asked the Observer's South American expert, Hugh O'Shaughnessy, about the deal: 'It was one of the most repulsive exercises in PR that I have ever known.'
It is worth recounting the conversation Horton and I had a year and a half ago at some length. Horton chuckled when I put O'Shaughnessy's point to him. 'I say! That's going a bit far. I believe the work we did for the ministry of the economy was extremely beneficial in keeping unemploy- ment down and assisting the economy. I don't think it is our job to make moral j udgments. '
Did he believe in good and evil? 'In Argentina there were forces for good and forces for evil. The vast majority of people are good and they tacitly encouraged the dictatorship.' Yet the Argentinian people ultimately threw out the dictatorship? 'Those people eventually didn't work out,' which was one way of describing the Falklands War.
Had Horton ever lost sleep over the fact that his clients tortured old men and pregnant women, that they killed thousands of people? 'No. The products manufactured by car companies kill peo- ple. I am only responsible for communica- tions. We also do work for Dow Chemi- cals, you know. They make napalm. I believe the PR business is like being a lawyer: you cannot choose the type of assignment.'
So would he have worked for Albert Speer, the economics minister of the Third Reich? There was a long pause. 'I suppose in theory. . . if we chose to we could. We are a private company. We would have to make a value judgment whether an assign- ment would be of benefit to our employees and our shareholders.'
I made as if to go. I had had more than enough. And then he changed tack: 'You are right, you know.' 'What?"Er. . .
you're absolutely right to look at how governments employ PR firms.. . . No one in Britain knew. . . . I never had any evidence of what we've been talking about at the time.' 'What about the Amnesty International reports? Didn't you see them?' I didn't know. They wouldn't have been sent to me. . .
He may have been telling the truth, revealing an honest and much regretted ignorance of the Dirty War; it may have been just another PR ploy. And Horton was, after all, one of the best public relations men in the world. That's what the junta paid him for.
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