Another voice
House of Horror
Auberon Waugh
rrthe time has come for me to admit an
error. Before suggesting that Mr William Benyon MP had muddled his Com- mandments when he invoked the Fourth, rather than the Third Commandment, against Sunday shopping, I checked my own memory against the nearest reference book to hand, which was the Catechism of Christian Doctrine approved by Cardinal Bourne in 1921 (since replaced by a nauseatingly illiterate and sloppy document approved by Cardinal Hume, about which I may write later). What I forgot — and have since been reminded by more people (most- ly Anglican clergymen) than I thought com- prised the total readership of this column is that Jews, Anglicans and Orthodox number their Commandments one way, Catholics and Lutherans another.
So there we are. Peccavi. Mea culpa. Confiteor. Miserere mei. Surely that does the trick. If Mr Allaun's Right of Reply Bill had become law, Mr Benyon would have been able to demand the right of filling this entire page (under pain of a £40,000 fine) with his own reflections on religion, law and the correct interpretation of the Bible — the same views with which he has been boring the House of Commons rigid for the past 12 years.
1 wonder if considerations of this sort lay behind the enormous vote in support of Mr Allaun's Bill. MPs are painfully aware that practically nobody pays any attention to their debates and even fewer people read Hansard. The Bill offered them a golden opportunity to inflict their dismal preoc- cupations on the rest of us, with the element of compulsion as an additional spice. The Mikado of Japan could scarcely have devis- ed a more fitting punishment for the press than to force it to print MPs' replies, although I suppose the Mikado was getting close with his 'sent to hear sermons from mystical Germans who preach from nine to four'.
I do not know whether Mr William Be- nyon stayed up on Friday to vote for Mr Allaun's Bill because neither the Times nor the Telegraph published Division Lists. I wish they would do so more often on free votes of public interest, like the Shops Bill or hanging or sodomy or divorce, since these lists provide one of the few ways voters can find out the sort of MP they have elected. Probably the only thing td per- suade the quality newspapers to show an in- terest would be if Division Lists were treated as confidential and then leaked. I was tremendously excited by Ferdinand Mount's book on The Subversive Family which I reviewed in the Spectator last year, but nobody else showed the slightest in- terest in his unusual views until someone leaked them to the Guardian disguised as a Conservative policy document. Now he is as famous as Terry Wogan and deservedly so, too.
But I wander from the main point, which is to suggest that the huge vote in favour of giving Mr Allaun's ludicrous Bill a second reading (there were only seven against and 90 in favour, just short of quorum) can be explained as easily by the natural exhibi- tionism of MPs as by their hatred of the ,press. In fact I should judge that MPs as a class are quite keen on the press, so long as it is all about them and their affairs. They merely use the hatred of the press which is almost universal elsewhere as a stick for im- posing their own wishes on it — what Neil Kinnock (talking about Ferdinand Mount's interesting views on the family) called `backroom dictatorship, stocking-footed fascism'.
As a general rule — I think the discovery was made by Richard Ingrams — it is safe to assume that anybody who complains loudly about the press has something to hide. Since I do not subscribe to Hansard, I cannot go through the list guessing at what each of the Naughty Ninety may wish to conceal from an inquisitive public, but of the three MPs named by Sir Charles Win- tour in the Observer — Sir Derek Walker- Smith, Sir Nigel Fisher and Mr Patrick Cor- mack — the first two are surely much too old to have any of the sort of secrets we are thinking about, while I cannot believe that anyone who has so little of interest as Mr Cormack to show has anything of greater interest to hide. In fact the whole approach of this latest attempt to reduce press freedom suggests that jealousy, rather than fear, was the main motive.
On the merits of Mr Allaun's proposal little enough needs to be said. I have often argued for a reasonable right of reply as a substitute for the existing laws of libel and contempt, but Mr Allaun's proposals for an unreasonable, more or less absolute right of reply in addition to the present oppressive laws scarcely seem worthy of discussion. Nearly all newspapers chose to discuss these, however, pointing out the more ob- vious absurdities and unpracticalities in- volved. Once again they demonstrated the enormous power of the press to shape people's attitudes when seven MPs voted against the Bill, 90 in favour of it.
The saddest aspect of press commentary on the press is its grovelling attitude to press critics. If Parliament passes laws against us, we will only have ourselves to blame, they moan. If we behave ourselves properly, nobody will want to smack our bottoms. Thus Sir Charles Wintour, writing of 'the tacky conduct of some newspapers, and the appallingly shifty behaviour of some editors, during the Press Council's lengthy inquiry into the Sutcliffe case ... '
With the greatest respect to Sir Charles, it seems to me nonsense to suppose that good behaviour is any guarantee of non- interference by the government. Ad- ministrative jealousy of any freedom the press may ever enjoy is as permanent and as irremovable as popular hatred of jour- nalists appears to be in Britain. I find that the stupider a person is the more he or she hates the press — and many people in England are very stupid indeed. Both government and people are dying for any opportunity to gag, clobber and rob the press. In this respect, the Press Council, by publicly criticising the behaviour of newspapers and adding respectability to complaints, almost certainly fuels the flames rather than dowsing them. The only thing which prevents politicians taking over the press is an uneasy awareness that the public hates and mistrusts politicians even more than it hates and mistrusts the press.
Obviously, it would be a waste of time to try and talk the public out of one of its favourite antipathies, but I would like to point out that as a result of indulging its hatred of the press — or allowing politi- cians to indulge it for them — it already misses a lot of fun. When I was last in Lon- don the place was seething with rumours about the House of Death in Muswell Hill, the House of Horror in Cricklewood. Corp- ses were said to have been violated sexually, then cooked and eaten. I do not know whether there was the faintest glimmer of truth in these rumours, but they certainly seemed to have gained more credence than they might have done if they had appeared in the newspapers. Yet not a word either in support or rebuttal of these rumours can appear in the newspapers because of our press laws. The Attorney-General has said he is 'monitoring' press reports for anything which might prejudice a subse- quent trial.
Well, let him monitor this. The great er- ror of all anti-press law is to suppose that anybody believes what he reads in the newspapers. We all know that most of ft's wrong, and is bound to be wrong in the cir- cumstances of its production. Even an ex- cellent article in the Times last Saturday about a piece of Burges furniture I am sell- ing contained two mistakes. All that newspapers can do is to point their readers noses in a general direction and tickle their imaginations. The drift is usually the right one. Above all, the press gives us something to think and talk about. By refusing to allow it to answer our questions about the House of Horror in Cricklewood, politi- cians suppose that the public will be per- suaded to take a greater interest in their House of Horror in Westminster.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Previous page
