Last word
Enterprising
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Mr John Junor is one of the great journalists of the age. I have in mind his column in the Sunday Express more than his editorship of the paper. Students of that commendably ferocious column know Mr Junor's likes, and still more his dislikes: pansies, paddies and politicians. There are few things that enrage Mr Junor more than dishonest politicians, than corruption in public life.
Yet like the rest of us he has his soft — or blind — spots, and last Sunday one of these was in evidence. Mr Junor wrote: 'The Daily Mirror has acted with compassion and generosity in paying £5000 towards the legal costs which the late Reginald Maudling had incurred in his libel action against that paper, and which in the ordinary way his widow would have had to pick up. May we now expect Lord Bernstein of Granada Television, against whom Mr Maudling also had a libel action, to match the Daily Mirror's generosity?'
I'm sure I don't know what we can expect Lord Bernstein to do, though I doubt whether he will turn for advice to Mr Junor; nor for that matter to me. But since he has heard one opinion perhaps I may be allowed another: it is my humble but fervent hope that Lord Bernstein does not give Mrs Maudling so much as a brass farthing or a dud penny. The facts about Reginald Maudling's financial career are not exactly simple, but one may attempt a resume. He was a friendly associate of the late Sir Eric Miller, the noted property dealer, who thoughtfully provided him with a house at a nominal rent. He was also a colleague of Mr John Poulson, the noted architect, and was a director of two of Mr Poulson's companies,ITCS and Open Systems Building. The gravamen of the accusations levelled against Maudling by the Daily Mirror and Granada and which caused him to sue for libel was that in the House of Commons — on the Opposition front bench, indeed — he had advocated financial aid for building a hospital in Malta, without declaring the interest that Mr Pdulson, his associate, was to be the builder; and that the Director of Public Prosecutions had investigated the matter.
Finally, Mr Maudling was a business confederate of Mr Jerome Hoffman, the noted financier, and accepted the Presidency of Mr Hoffman's 'off-shore' Real Estate Fund of America. I can't pretend to understand the intricacies of this ingenious form of financial thimblerigging or three-card trickery. It will suffice to say that, as a result of his entrepreneurial activities,Mr Hoffman has latterly enjoyed the hospitality of the authorities in his native United States.
It is not a bad record. As Lady Bracknell (if I may allude to Oscar Wilde in the same columnar breath as Mr Junor) might have said, to have been involved with Miller could be regarded as a misfortune but to be associated with Miller and Poulson looks like carelessness. And to be tied up with Miller, Poulson and Hoffman looks like — well, what?
Maudling was a nice man and a capable man, and not precisely a crook. It is idle to speculate whether he would have made a successful leader of the Conservative Party, though he could hardly have been a worse one than Mr Heath; it was his disap pointment in politics which drove him to a life of business adventure. I say, not a crook, without irony. One should avoid popular ised technicalities, especially psychological ones, but I cannot do better than to say that Maudling was a financial psychopath: in money matters he simply could not perceive a distinction between right and wrong. He was not so much dishonest as greedy, careless and indolent to a degree.
As such he should be the object of reprobation, especially from his political colleagues and sympathizers. This is a prob lem for the Conservatives, not the Left: the socialists assume that all Tories are bent anyway. The Tories' task is to refute the charge, to recognise that for free enterprise to survive requires the continued application of old-fashioned standards of fiduciary rectitude.
Instead of which Mr Enoch Powell — who, whatever else may be said of him, is a man of scrupulous personal honesty — screws up his face and whimpers about the vilification Maudling had to endure. Instead of which the 1922 Committee thinks it apt to re-elect Edward du Cann as chairman who, while not of course bent, was associated with an unforgivable business error. And they wonder why squeamish, fastidious anti-socialists find it difficult to vote Tory.
As for the libel actions brought by Maudling, the idea that those whom he was suing — and who proposed to defend the actionsvigorously —should pay the bill, strikes me as nothing less than grotesque. The Mirror and Granada did not sue Maudling.
He sued them, and brought the legal costs on his own head, and on the heads of his heirs. I dinna ken what they call it in Auchtermuchty but in other parts it's known as chutzpah. For journalists to give financial encouragement to libel plaintiffs is verily to kiss the rod.
One must be even-handed here. I am a friend of the Private Eye team (and thus, I suppose, a part of the core of rot and purulent mire corrupting English life; Sir James Goldsmith may be pushing it a bit when he calls himself a newspaper man, but he certainly has a way with language). But although I — ah — shared the widespread surprise at the verdict in Gillard v. Goldsmith I will not contribute to Michael Gillard's appeal. How can we help to finance the plaintiff in a defamation case, we who ceaselessly revile libel plaintiffs, who poured mockery and scorn on Vanessa (and the Journalist) when she put out the begging bowl after her happily unsuccessful action against the Observer?
The libel laws are the greatest single imposition that the Press suffers from in this country. What (if anything) might be done about them is a subject to which I may return. But let us not make things worse than they are. If, which seems unlikely, Mrs Maudling is near starvation come next Christmas I shall join in the whip-round for a goose and a plum pudding. For the moment I suggest that Lord Bernstein takes ten monkeys to Bond Street and buys himself a nice painting.
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