DIARY
ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR Ihave read a lot of very uncomplimenta- ry things about Rupert Murdoch in my time, but never anything so spine-tingling as a passage by Alan Watkins in last week's Spectator. Reviewing William Shawcross's biography of Mr Murdoch, Mr Watkins described watching the mighty media mogul come down the aisle of St Paul's Cathedral after the memorial service in 1985 for the former editor of the Times, Charles Douglas-Home. 'Never before had I seen evil so clearly expressed in a human face,' he wrote. 'In fact I crossed myself and gave thanks that the church had not been struck by lightning during the course of the service for his deceased editor.' I was rivet- ed to read this because about five years later I too was to encounter Mr Murdoch in St Paul's Cathedral and to have almost exactly the opposite reaction. He had attended my father's memorial service in the crypt, and afterwards we walked togeth- er down Ludgate Hill to the Reuters build- ing in Fleet Street where the news agency, of which my father had once been general manager, had kindly laid on an informal lunch for his family and friends. Several decades earlier my father and Rupert's father, Sir Keith Murdoch, had been friends, but there was no reason why Rupert had to attend his memorial service, and even less reason why he had to attend a lunch at which the guests consisted almost entirely of members of my family. There was certainly nothing in it for him, and no one could reasonably have criticised him for failing to come. Yet come he did, giving much pleasure to my widowed mother by the mere fact of it. Not only that, but he stayed at lunch for at least an hour and a half, chatting amiably with everybody and looking to me not in the least evil but the very picture of benevolence!
By contrast, my spine did experience a strange, Watkins-type tingle when I read in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend that Lord Shawcross, father of William, had weighed into a raging controversy over the Murdoch biography with a letter to Auberon Waugh's Literary Review. I do not suggest for a moment that Lord Shawcross is in any sense evil — quite the contrary, in fact — but I personally find him a great deal more frightening than Rupert Mur- doch. Whatever his faults, Mr Murdoch has an unpretentious matiness about him. Lord Shawcross, to put it mildly, does not. He is very clever and very high-minded, but not at all maty. He is 90 now, but his letter attacking the reviewer of his son's book shows he has lost none of the icy judicial detachment which must have served him so well as a prosecutor at the Niiremberg war crimes trial. 'My attention has been called to a review of my son William's book on Rupert Murdoch by one Francis Wheen, who, I understand, is a person professing strong left-wing views,' begins the letter — enough already, I would have thought, to have Mr Wheen fumbling for his suicide pills. I have never forgotten an occasion many years ago when Lord Shawcross came to The Spectator in a chauffeur-driven car to deliver in person an article he wished to have published. I was editor at the time and I was forced to sit under his unyielding gaze until I had finished reading the article, which was typed on very thick paper in that enormous print which politicians favour for their speeches. Confused and terrified, I agreed at once to publish the piece. Mr Watkins, on the other hand, might in the same circumstances have been perfectly at ease.
In a feature entitled 'The Stigma of Eton', the Tatler lists the pluses and minus- es of being an Old Etonian. High among the minuses was the claim that 'your voice in later life will be too stuck-up to sound "caring" in television sound bites'. That's quite true, as a matter of fact. When in 1974, as a fledgling television reporter, I recorded my first ever story for ITN, the editor rang me afterwards to complain about the fruitiness of my voice with partic- ular reference to the apparently provoca- tive way I pronounced the word 'care'. As time has passed, I have found being an Old Etonian less of a burden, but an element of stigma survives. I think the present head- master, the excellent Dr Eric Anderson, must know this, for when he came to lunch at my newspaper the Independent a while ago, he talked eloquently — indeed, caring- ly — about education in general, but hardly at all about Eton. And when he did discuss his own school, he concentrated on attack- ing the stereotype. (He revealed, for exam- ple, that Manchester is now a more popular
Classified — page 62
university with Etonians than either Oxford or Cambridge.) One of my best memories of Eton in the 1950s was being taught Ger- man by an inspiring young master called David Cornwell, later to become a famous novelist under the pen-name of John le Cane. But I fear that success may have damaged him, for he now shows a rever- ence for his own opinions matched only by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (and just conceiv- ably by Lord Shawcross). He has once again manifested these traits in a very rude letter to the editor of the New Yorker, Tina Brown, my future employer, about — guess what? — the Shawcross-Wheen affair. It is a small world.
Afascinating extract from Con Cough- lin's book Hostages, published in the Sun- day Telegraph last weekend, brutally con- firmed what I think most people had always suspected — that Terry Waite was a martyr entirely of his own making. Dr Robert Runcie, the former Archbishop of Canter- bury, has spoken to Mr Coughlin with extraordinary frankness about the man who was always described in the press as his 'special envoy' in the Middle East. 'I never employed him as an envoy,' Dr Runcie said. 'I employed him to work for the church and to keep me informed of devel- opments taking place throughout the Anglican community.' Instead, Terry Waite became obsessed with the more glamorous task of seeking the release of Western hostages in Lebanon, getting involved in the process with Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, but claiming not to know — when the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986 .— that the Americans had been exchanging arms for hostages with Iran. Whatever Mr Waite did or did not know about this American skulduggery, he seems to have been happy to take more credit than even he knew to be his for the release of Ameri- can hostages. At any rate, Dr Runcie clairns to have been 'misled' by Mr Waite and says he intended to sack him when his relation- ship with Oliver North was exposed. But, disastrously, the archbishop decided, to allow Mr Waite one last mission to Beirut before terminating his employment —. a mission from which everybody tried to dis- suade him and which ended in his kidnap- ping. Dr Runcie still credits Mr Waite with genuine compassion and says: 'His love of publicity and lack of sophistication about what was being worked on him by . the Americans were the cause of all his difficul- ties.' I believe that judgment, but! also believe Mr Waite is likely to retain his posi- tion as a national hero because he did gen- uinely suffer for his folly. This is what. counts, not the folly. General Gordon an Captain Scott showed folly too.
Previous page
