DIARY
ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR S ome people may remember that the Sun last year appointed an internal ombudsman to improve its image, which had become so tarnished that eveh football hooligans were beginning to command greater respect from the British public. I remember the appointment better than most because, in my capacity as editor of the Independent Magazine, I got involved in a dispute with the ombudsman that ended up before the Press Council. The ombudsman, a former managing editor of the Sun called Kenneth Donlan, had gone to the Press Council over criticisms we made of the manner in which he handled a complaint about the Sun's reporting of a teenage summer festival. This had con- trasted a Sun headline stating that there had been '11,000 drug-crazy youngsters' at the event with police statements that no drugs had been found there at all. There was a good deal more to the matter than that, but the essence of the dispute was that Mr Donlan felt deeply aggrieved by and wanted a published apology for — our comments on his handling of the com- plaint, which, we had suggested, seemed to reflect the attitudes of a committed Sun man rather more strongly than those one might expect of a conventional ombuds- man. Well, the Press Council ruled in favour of Mr Donlan to the extent that it felt I had been dilatory in offering him the opportunity to write a letter to the Inde- pendent Magazine giving his point of view — a ruling which, whenever I think about it, continues to irritate me because it perversely ignored the substance of our defence, concentrating solely on my own undoubted dilatoriness as a correspondent, and because it did not recognise the absurdity of an ombudsman complaining to the Press Council in the first place. (I am of a mind to make some outrageous criticisms of the Press Council to see if it will complain about me to itself.) Anyway, I am reminded of this little episode because I have been wondering during the past week what the Sun ombudsman has been up to. His much-vaunted appointment last year and the flurry of self-castigatory findings which the Sun published immediately thereafter don't seem to have changed the paper's ways the tiniest bit. For the Prince Charles-Lady Romsey episode is one of its most nauseating performances yet. On Thursday of last week the Sun published a front-page photograph of the Prince of Wales holding 'old flame Lady Penny Romsey in a lingering, warm embrace at a hideaway villa in Majorca'. But this sickly innuendo turned out to be hideously wide of the mark, for the truth, as it later emerged, was that the photograph had been taken by a Spanish paparazzo just at the moment when a distraught Lady Rom- sey was revealing to the Prince that her four-year-old daughter had been diagnosed as having cancer. Last Saturday the Sun published a grovelling apology on its front page, which might have been thought acceptable were it not for the fact that the previous day, having discovered its dis- astrous mistake, it reprinted the same photograph with a new 'exclusive' story attached to it about the 'tragic secret behind Charles's embrace', something which it defined this time as 'long and comforting'. Leaving aside questions of ethics, journalistic or otherwise, only the Sun (or possibly Saddam Hussein) could have failed to recognise that this was the moment to beat a hasty retreat. And where, I wonder, was the ombudsman?
On holiday, perhaps, like Mrs Thatch- er and Neil Kinnock. I am writing this shortly after their return to London — the Prime Minister from Cornwall and the Leader of the Opposition (poor unfashion- able fellow) from Tuscany. In the mean- time, Douglas Hurd has been allowed a whole week in which to display statesman- like pallor and gravity without any form of prime ministerial interference. It was too good to last, of course, and Mrs Thatcher re-entered the fray with her press confer- ence on Tuesday. But I am surprised that she was willing to be out of the limelight for even that long, especially during a crisis tailor-made to demonstrate her most admired qualities of leadership and deter- mination. Indeed, one of the reasons why Labour Party leaders were reportedly against recalling Parliament was fear that it would give her an opportunity to make them appear wimpish and irrelevant by comparison. So why did Mrs Thatcher lie low for so long? Perhaps some sensible person has advised her that the Gulf crisis is frightening enough without the addition of her own rhetoric, or perhaps she has been advised that, given enough exposure, Mr Hurd's statesmanlike pallor and gravity will eventually irritate the public so much that he will no longer have a hope in hell of succeeding her. Or, perhaps Mrs Thatcher has cottoned on to the fact that holidays are back in fashion. Newspapers have started publishing articles about the need
for relaxation and the pointlessness of overwork. If that is to be the new trend, she got off to a good start in Cornwall, not ostentatiously keeping in touch, like Presi- dent Bush in Maine. But I was glad to see that even Mr Bush wearied of giving impromptu press conferences on golf courses and last week, in a moment of exasperation with the press, uttered the memorable Bushism that he had nothing to say while he was 'recreating'.
0 ne problem with keeping a low profile, however, is that people tend not to notice you, and so it was for Mrs Thatcher in the United States, until President Bush's gushing references to her this week. I read last week's issues of both the big American news magazines, Time and Newsweek, and found the British role in the Gulf crisis almost completely ignored. In 12 pages of Newsweek devoted to the drama, the words 'Britain' or 'Mrs Thatcher' did not appear even once, and the only reference to Britain's military commitment was con- tained in the sentence: 'Bush's European allies offered him a great deal of political support — and a little military help, including ships for the naval blockade of Iraq.' Even the number of British 'hos- tages' in Iraq and Kuwait, far more numer- ous than those of any other Western nation, was played down by the two magazines, with Newsweek simply stating as an afterthought that 'there were thousands of Britons and other Europeans in Iraqi hands as well'. When one remem- bers the praise that was heaped upon Britain by the United States for our sup- port during the American bombing of Libya four years ago, this is pretty dismal stuff.
Like many other people, including apparently A. N. Wilson, I am a fan of
Lord Denning and admire his rugged good sense and love of justice, but is he really entitled to claim, as he confidently did in
an interview with the Times last week: 'I am a common man and I speak for the common people of England'? He was certainly common once, but doesn't acceptance of a peerage suggest abandon- ment of the common people in favour of a rather swankier set? Can you call yourself 'a common man' when you have a coat of arms and a crest 'on a chapeau gules turned up ermine a dexter glove argent grasping a scroll fesswise proper'? Maybe in this extraordinary country you can, but what of Lord Denning's proposal in last week's Spectator that the common man should be excluded from juries? That seems to me to sink his claim completely.
Previous page
