Another voice

A pompous stand

Auberon Waugh

Certain errors are so vast, so obvious and so deeply entrenched that it becomes the mark of a boor to point them out. The TUC's conviction that greater efficiency means fewer jobs may well be among such errors, but it is bad manners for us to say so because we know the belief is sincerely and immovably held by men of very limited intelligence. Similarly, the TUC's unshakeable faith in the idea that its members will be happier and more prosperous under socialism is so plainly and so stupendously wrong that we can only gasp at it; our good breeding inhibits us from going further, partly for the reason already given, partly because however much the workers have to lose we have even more, and we know that our concern will be misinterpreted. Both these errors are dwarfed, however, by the major prevailing error of our time, that the working class is competent to regulate its own destinies and has a moral right to regulate the destinies of us all.

Since this belief is held not only by the working class and its leaders but also by many, even most, humane people of high intelligence and good education in the West, one is sometimes tempted to think there might be profit in exposing the error. Once again, good taste is the inhibiting factor as much as a sense of futility. It would mean underlining the unpleasant truth that two characteristics of the collective working class are its stupidity and its nastiness. Once a year, this truth is made painfully apparent at the ritual Masque of Stupidity and Nastiness which is the Trade Union Congress. The sensible response is to avert our eyes and think of something else, like the case of the young school teacher in Lanarkshire, falsely accused by two thirteen-year-old school-girls of having seduced them. All these things are no less part of the panorama of life than the Trade Union Congress. My only plea is that we should not forget about the Trade Union Congress when considering the case of the defamed school teacher, or any other items in the unfolding pageant of contemporary social history. It is this journalistic tendency to compartmentalise which leads, in my opinion, to the adoption of multiple standards, and if there is any single explanation for all the stupidities and absurdities of the modern world, it is the readiness of intelligent people to shift their moral perspective.

The dangers of miscarriage of justice may have been seriously increased, as I believe, by the abolition of property qualifications for jury service; and it is certainly true that the collective working class, through its present mouthpieces, frames our laws and reserves the right to change them retrospectively. But the administration of justice has not yet been proletarianised, as it has been in Russia, and the young teacher of Lanarkshire was saved by a shrewd and conscientious judge of the middle class.

I have often argued on this page that the punishment for sexual offences against minors may in many cases be worse than the offence, if one has regard for the physical development and mental attitudes of so many minors today; and the popular odium attaching to offences of this sort is out of all proportion, being a reflection of parental anxieties which would be better manifested in greater care for their children's upbringing. But it is instructive that once the young man's innocence was established, opprobium shifted not to the parents — one of whom is on record as saying 'My husband and I will believe my daughter to our dying days' —nor even to the gullible teachers and incompetent police officers who believed the tale, but to the children themselves. No doubt this is a reflection of our own anxieties that we may be made victims of such a tale. Yet I can't see that the children have done anything all that wicked, especially when I consider some of the whoppers I told as a child.

Most of these were the result of struggling efforts to engage a grown-up in conversation. During the war I lived in my grandmother's house, a huge mansion in West Somerset, which came to be invaded by forty evacuees from East London who took over the whole top floor. Feeling the situation required comment, I one day remarked: 'Granny, aren't the evacuees disgusting?'

'Why do you say that?' she asked.

I had not thought of any particular reason, but rising to the occasion, I said: 'Well, I saw one of them eating the rat poison the man had put down.' From a hastily assembled identification parade, I picked out one boy more or less at random, and he was sent to be Stomach pumped. Even when the boy's stomach produced nothing more alarming than the food he had been given for lunch, I escaped punishment as I stuck to my story.

The second episode was more painful, coming at the end of my first term at prep school, when I was just six. This was the case of Lavery and the Ten Shilling Note. In the first week of holidays, I decided to engage my father in conversation on the subject of Ten Shilling Notes.

'Were you aware, Papa,' I said, 'that every Ten Shilling Note carries a wire filament?'

'Yes. What of it?' I racked my brains. 'Without this filament, it is of no value,' I ventured. 'Are you sure?' said he. Inspiration flowered. 'Yes, indeed,' said I. 'At the end of term I had exactly such a ten shilling note which I showed to another boy, who told me it had no filament and was therefore worthless.'

'Where is this ten shilling note?'

'Oh, he kept it'. 'My boy, you have been the victim of all unscrupulous trick. Tell me this other boy's name.'

'Lavery,' I said at random. Thirty-two years later, I still blush to think what followed: angry letters to Lavery's parents from my father, indignant denials from his father, an anguished letter from Lavery to me saying he remembered my showing him the Ten Shilling Note but assuring me he gave it back. This was taken as proof of guilt. The day came when my father was to write to the headmaster denouncing Lavery. 'Are you absolutely sure?' he said. I thought hard. Lavery was an older, slightly bigger boY than I was. 'Well no,' I said, 'Now I come to think of it, I think it may have been a lie.' I often wondered whether the Lavery family has preserved my father's letter of apology. All these misunderstandings arose from a desire to stimulate conversation rather than from any calculated wickedness, or so I maintain. Children can't be expected to take account of all the consequences of a and it is wrong to force them into a position from which they can't retire. As my father himself wrote: 'It is impudent and exorbitant to demand truth from the lower classes' (Diaries July 1961). All of which can only revive the honest doubts in all our minds about the Norman Scott story. One of them is telling whop. pers; perhaps it is Norman. If this should prove to be the case, what amends can we possibly make to Mr Thorpe? Even more worrying is a second undercurrent which may owe something to this honourable uncertainty, but is surely a perversion of Since my return from France, no fewer tha.t1 four people have separately told me of their view that even if Thorpe is guilty, he was quite right to conspire and/or incite to IMO; der under the circumstances. These were al' honest, decent people of the professional class who would never, in their wildest moment, dream of resorting to cold blooded murder. Yet they give it as their opinion that Thorpe would have been Justified.

I am sorry, but one must be a little pornr ous about this. We may tell the occasionallY whopper, but we do not arrange to have °I.Ir enemies murdered. This may be the morality of the spy thriller, but it is not the morality of every day life in the society 01 polite and intelligent people. We must aiM a little higher than that. If Thorpe is guilty, he must be punished with all the severity of the law. If he is found innocent, I shall send 110 a parcel of Devonshire cream.