SHARED OPINION
Don't worry, Al. I'm on the case
FRANK JOHNSON
Aan Clark is in hot water again. As an opening sentence that would have earned me a rebuke from the succession of gnarled mentors on local and provincial newspapers under whom I groaned for years from the age of 16. That's not news, they would growl. Clark's always in hot water. The news would be if he was in lukewarm water. They would still print the stuff, though. Mr Clark has arrived at that stage when someone does not have to say or do much to be in the news. Such people have been in the news so often before that they are news by definition. They are not to be confused with people who are news a offi- cio, people such as the Pope, the President of the United States and the Prime Minis- ter. An uninteresting soul can hold those offices and still be news because news is what the offices are. It is much harder to be news simply because one is oneself.
Mr Clark is now in the Hurley class. He just has to turn up. Can anyone remember when Miss Hurley did anything other than turn up? Not that this is any objection. There are some people whom most people are happy to see turning up, and Miss Hur- ley is one.
It is, then, a tribute to Mr Clark that he still bothers to get into hot water, to do things — or rather to say things — when to remain famous he no longer has to. Sir Arthur Sullivan said that at dinner, once you have a reputation as a wit, you only have to say 'pass the mustard' for everyone at table to laugh. At dinner, Mr Clark only has to turn to the woman next to him and introduce himself for us all to assure one another that Al's behaving badly again.
Yet still he takes the trouble to get into trouble. In October he got into trouble with both liberals and Fenians for announcing that the only way to solve the Irish question was to shoot 600 Irish people in one night. This week he got into trouble with Tory Wets for writing that the late Conservative politician lain Macleod was a 'card-sharp' whose back was bent, not by disease, but by the chips on his shoulder; and with both Unionists and Mr Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, for saying that Adams and McGuinness should be allowed to sit in the Commons without taking the oath of alle- giance to the Crown.
I would defend him in all of these trou- bles. Here I must strike a personal note. My attitude to Mr Clark's troubles over the years has convinced me that I would be very good if I ever went into public relations.
Public relations is the occupation of the 1990s. The occupation of the 1980s was something to do with the City. That of the 1960s and 1970s was something to do with sociology. That of the 1940s was something to do with war. The 1990s is the decade of PR. Admittedly, there were PR persons before the 1990s. To us observers of occu- pational fashion, the first PR person whom we could name appeared in the late 1970s: Sir Tim Bell. He became famous by doing PR for Mrs Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, the name known to us lay- men is Hobsbawm-Macaulay.
I shall explain what all this has to do with Mr Clark in a moment, but if I may contin- ue on the subject of Hobsbawm-Macaulay, they came to my attention when they did the PR for a recent event with which The Spectator was connected. I confess that, until then, I am not sure whether I had heard of them. `Hobsbawm-Macaulay is representing us,' I was told. But we've already got very efficient libel lawyers, I thought. Then it was explained that Hobs- bawm-Macaulay are the PR firm. One of them was the daughter of the famous histo- rian, I was told.
People are so ignorant, I thought. Macaulay died in 1859. More to the point, he had no children. This PR woman must be some sort of great-great-niece. Still, Macaulay was a great PR man. He handled the Whig account. As a result, for years, if you were a historian and wanted a hearing or a good job, you had to be a Whig. The Macaulay girl sounds a safe bet for us. PR's obviously in her genes.
Eventually my confusion as to which famous historian's daughter we were deal- ing with was cleared up. Hobsbawm- Macaulay got to work for the event with which we were concerned, and seemed to know their business. But, learning from them, I became even more confident of my own PR powers.
The test of a great PR person, I assume, is a client whom it is hard to sell to the lib- eral-minded. That's Alan Clark. I have been representing him to the liberal-mind- ed for years. He's just not as boringly right- wing as you think, was my line. Otherwise he would not be against blood sports. Hitler was against blood sports, better- educated liberals would reply. Whereupon I would change the subject to Mr Clark's anti-Americanism, invariably a cause to which liberals are sympathetic. Then there was the time when he wrote that we should have made peace with Hitler in about 1941. The late Lord Glad- wyn attacked him in the Times, saying that the British people's attitude towards this would have been: 'Never.' It so happened that there had been in my possession for some years, given to me by a historian friend, a photostat of a document from the Public Records Office which Gladwyn had written as a diplomat in 1940, on his sound- ing out of an Italian diplomat in London as to the possibility of then-neutral Italy help- ing to seek a compromise peace between Britain and Germany. I suppose GladwYa could have said that at the time he was only obeying orders, but in the document he did seem rather enthusiastic about the idea, and in any case obeying orders was later rather discredited as a defence. I published the document in the Daily Telegraph. Mr Clark was out of trouble immediately. The 600 Irish dead, and the Macleod case, are harder. My defence on the dead Irish — which has the merit of being what as a veteran Clarkologist I actually believe — was that it was Mr Clark's way of saying that the Irish question was insoluble; it could only be solved by killing 600 Irish, and no government was going to do that. At dinner the other evening, I told Mr Clark that this was how I was defending him on that one. He replied: 'Yes,' or rather, `Yeaaaah.' That could, on the face of it, mean that he had simply taken note of my handling of the problem, but it could also mean that he approved it. Macleod as card-sharp was a remark which Mr Clark made in a Daily Telegraph book review. Macleod's widow wrote to the paper this week to demand the evidence that her late husband, a famous bridge player, ever cheated. My line here is that Mr Clark was obviously referring to Macleod's sleight of hand at politics, not cards.
The bent back being caused by chips on both shoulders will require a bit more work from me. Part of Mr Clark's difficulties, and mine, is that, unless you confine your remarks to a few centrist pieties, you are considered a psychopath. Meanwhile, when asked at dinner what I do for a living, I could reply that I handle the Alan Clark account for my firm, Hobsbawm-Macaulay- Johnson.
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