The Whooper
Alexander Chancellor
Goldenballs Richard Ingrams (Private Eye /De utsch £4.25) There is a passage in Mark Twain's original manuscript of Huckleberry Finn which describes a scene on a raft in the Mississippi. There were 13 men on the raft — 'and a mighty rough-looking lot too' — of whom one was singing — 'roaring, you may say.
and it wasn't a nice song — for a parlour anyway'. The singing went on, to everyone's irritation, until the biggest man there decided to silence him. 'He jumped up in the air three times "Whoo-oop! . . . I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation ! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on my mother's side!. . . lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!"' Then the man who had started the row with his singing jumped up. 'Whoo-oop! I'm the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! . . . Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the pet child of calamity's a-coming.' The fight begins, but is soon over when Sudden Death and the Child of Calamity are separated by an intermediary. Finally, they 'shook hands with each other, very solemn, and said they had always respected eath other and were willing to let bygones be bygones,' In the great confrontation between Sir James Goldsmith, the food manufacturer, and Mr Richard Ingrams the Editor of Private Eye, the intermediary was Mr Simon Jenkins, then the Editor of the Evening Standard. On 5 May 1977 Mr Jenkins helped swiftly to end a conflict which had obsessed both participants for two years and which had involved them in nine court hearings and the expenditure of large sums of money. Mr Ingrams agreed to pay £30,000 towards Sir James's legal costs and to apologise by means of a full-page advertisement in the Evening Standard. There was one requirement which the Child of Calamity failed to meet. Sir James had been adamant that they should seal the agreement with a handshake. This was more than Mr Ingrams was prepared to do. He pleaded sickness — anything — rather than go through with it.
In fact, the two protagonists have never actually met. They have circled round each other, one or the other always evading any proposed meeting, Goldsmith smirking at Ingrams weirdly across courtrooms, Ingrains looking broodily back. Ingrams does not Whoop. He is stubborn, he is emotional, but he is not a Whooper. Gold smith is a terrific Whooper. Such Whooping has not been heard in Fleet Street for years, and there is not likely to be any end to it.
As in popular song, when an irresistible force met an immovable object, something had got to give. In this case, it was Ingrams who gave. He did not have much choice. Sir James had been given permission to prosecute him for Criminal Libel. Private Eye had already admitted the libel — that Goldsmith had conspired with his gambling friends to protect Lord Lucan, the nanny-murderer, from the police. So on the face of it, Ingrams — although spared jail and ruin — was the loser. But was he?
His admirably lucid book tends to imply that he was not. Goldsmith, he suggests, was offered a peerage by Sir Harold Wilson (or rather by Lady Falkender) for services to 'ecology', because (this was supposedly a private joke) he was going to rid the country of 'the pollution of Private Eye'. But at the same time, Ingrams claims that Goldsmith's campaign against Private Eye was a cause of his demotion from peer to knight. However, he is still a knight, which, according to Ingrams, he would not have been if he had not taken on Private Eye. Goldsmith managed genuinely to terrify Private Eye', to knock 12,000 off its circulation, to plunge Ingrams into moods of despondency and to divert him from his job, which he enjoys, into sterile and boring consultations with lawyers, which he does not.
Ingrams maintains — correctly, I suspect — that Goldsmith's apparent efforts to destroy Private Eye helped to prevent him obtain control of a Fleet Street newspaper. It may also be a consequence of this conflict that, finally reduced to starting his own magazine. Sir James found it difficult to recruit the journalists he wanted, even at impressively high salaries. In the long term, too, Ingrams may have inflicted damage upon Sir James's prospects of a political career.
The truth surely is that both are the winners. No public relations firm could possibly have organised a better 'scenario' if it had wished to make both of them famous. The whole thing could almost be a conspiracy. Mr Ingrams and Sir James now seem almost to need each other. Private Eye cannot stop talking about Goldsmith and his new magazine; Sir James even descends from his pedestal to review Ingrams's book in Now! Where will it all stop?
Sir James was courageous to review the book, but it was a dull and rather pointless article. After reiterating his familiar claim that Private Eye has 'a central cast consisting of an extreme left-wing revolutionary, a' blackmailer and a proven liar', he digresses into a lengthy attack upon the Sunday Times before returning to question the accuracy of Mr Ingrams's book. The errors he picks out are mostly of little relevance. The most interesting is his statement that he was 'neither in England nor in contact with Messrs Addey and Paisner when they decided to say what had really been going on.' He refers here to the most perplexing, unsolved mystery of the whole affair, to which Mr Ingram devotes much attention — why two witnesses for Private Eye, a distinguished solicitor and a well-known public relations man, suddenly joined the Goldsmith camp, issuing retractions of their former statements in language which would not disgrace a Soviet show trial. Although Sir James does not believe in the 'seethrough society', he would have done his reputation nothing but good if he had cast greater light on this mystery.
As for Mr Ingrams, he has learnt that Private Eye can be vulnerable, which is no bad thing, while emerging from the battle stronger than before. There is one thing about which Mr Ingrams still appears confused. The quotation which opens and concludes his book is from Dr Johnson: 'Few attacks either of ridicule or invective make much noise, but by the help of those that they provoke.' This is true, but hardly applicable to the Goldsmith case. Ridicule and invective are one thing; libellous allegations are another. But the book is instructive in many ways. Even Sir James has called it 'quite entertaining'. I would call it very entertaining indeed.
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