Another voice

Where Sappho sings

Auberon Waugh

Thad intended this week to discuss a .1.strike which seems to have attracted very little attention in the public prints and even to have escaped much notice in the Sun newspaper itself, which continued to appear without the assistance of the jour- nalists on its staff, almost as if it had never needed journalists to write it. My reason for wishing to express concern over the matter was partly irritation against the obstinate refusal of my fellow-journalists to give us the strikers' point of view — we were simply told that our brothers on the Sun earned an average wage of nearly £20,000 a year before they started claiming expenses, and were demanding a ten per cent increase. But I was also worried for the future of the Sun which has always struck me as being quite easily the best and most intelligently written of Rupert Mur- doch's English newspapers, and the only one with the faintest glimmer of a sense of humour.

Unfortunately, no Sun journalist I could trace proved particularly eloquent in his own cause, beyond pointing out the ob- vious truth that Mr Murdoch could afford to pay them the extra money. They might also argue that it is an intolerable burden on journalists who work for a respectable and successful newspaper like the Sun to have to subsidise such trashy and question- able enterprises as the Times and Sunday Times.

In any case, I could not pursue the matter because my time has been taken up yet again with satisfying another of Mr Murdoch's unpleasant habits to which I have already drawn attention on this page. This is to pay the expenses of journalists on his newspapers who sue journalists on other newspapers whenever his legal staff imagine they have a case.

One trouble with the libel law, as I often point out, is that unless one is prepared to take the line of least resistance and autho- rise the payment of huge sums of money to anybody who applies for them, one must be prepared to put in an enormous amount of extra and unpaid work to defend one- self, as I propose to do. One whole Easter was spent cutting out all the most disgust- ing and scurrilous stories which had appeared in News of the World in order to establish the unsavoury character of that newspaper in a libel action being brought, again at Mr Murdoch's expense, by its former editor, Mr Bernard Shrimsley. Part of the reason on that occasion was the highly peripheral desirability of justifying Mr Shrimsley's affectionate nick-name of 'Slimy'. Perhaps Mr Murdoch reckons that by harassing journalists on rival newspapers in this way his money is well spent. I do not know. Most journalists are happy to leave libel affairs to the lawyers employed at enormous expense by their own organisa- tions. Only the self-employed and those with a certain feeling about lawyers spend hours and hours of their free time working on libel' claims against them. Be that as it may, so much of my time has been taken up this week working on an alternative defence in the case of Tomalin v Waugh and others (see Spectator 2 June `Tomalin inter turdos') that there can be no possibil- ity of writing about anything else. I just hope Spectator readers are not too bored by it.

There are various defences to the va- rious claims put forward in the Tomalin- Murdoch Statement of Claim prepared by Times Newspapers' assiduous lawyers, Messrs Theodore Goddard, but my work this weekend was entirely devoted to points arising from one of these claims. Messrs Theodore Goddard argue that 'in their natural and ordinary meaning the said words meant and were understood to mean that the Plaintiff . . . acted as aforesaid because she was a lesbian and wished insidiously to promote and further the cause and interests of homosexuals; in the circumstances was unfit to be a literary editor.'

As readers may well imagine, the first and most obvious defence to this extraor- dinary suggestion is to deny that my words, in their natural and ordinary meaning, meant any such thing. That defence should, of course, be sufficient. But then one reflects how very few people in Lon- don ' nowadays seem to understand the English language at all, how the entire legal profession earns its bread and butter through pretending to misunderstand it and through the inability of anyone else to understand its own jargon.

Plainly a second line of defence was desirable. Eventually overcoming my dis- taste for Messrs Theodore Goddard's stri- dent and self-righteous prose, I found myself wondering why it was, even if I had said I thought Mrs Tomalin was a lesbian — which I didn't and don't — this would be judged defamatory. Lesbianism has never been illegal in Britain, according to the excellent book on Sex Law by Tony Hon- ore, Oxford's Regius Professor of Civil Law (Duckworth 1978). I am not sure that it has ever even been specifically conde- mned by any of the world's great religions. It is certainly not condemned by contem- porary moralists — indeed my own union, the National Union of Journalists, has promulgated a Code of Ethics which for- bids any journalist to discriminate against its practitioners.

The basis for supposing that an imputa- tion of lesbianism is defamatory would appear to be Kerr v Kennedy 1942 (IKB 409) where it was held, in the words of Gatley, that 'any imputation of conduct considered by right-thinking people to be immoral is necessarily defamatory'.

That was 42 year ago. Do right-thinking people still consider lesbianism immoral, or is it just a matter of opinion? I, for instance, would consider it defamatory to describe someone as a socialist implying a degree of stupidity, an ignorance of history and a selectivity of perception which must be culpable or perverse. Many people, however, rejoice' in the description, just as others increasingly rejoice in announcing their lesbianism.

The question is not so much whether some people think lesbianism immoral or whether it is against Divine law, but whether the consensus of reasonable opin- ion holds that view. So far as the democra- tic will is apparent, one observes that an entire department of the Greater London Council (which appears to enjoy greater popularity than almost any other democra- tically elected body in this country) is largely taken up with promoting the cause of lesbianism.

Last month, the GLC's Women's Com- mittee brought out a 44-page Special Les- bian Issue of its Bulletin which was unmis- takably designed, in the words of Messrs Theodore Goddard, to 'promote and furth- er the cause and interests of homosexuals.' Special features in addition to the normal advertisements for lesbian contact groups, saunas and a 'lesbian self-insemination booklet' included a ringing article by Linda Bellos: 'One of the best decisions I ever made', and special interest sections devoted to black lesbians, disabled lesbians, deaf lesbians, working-class lesbians, Labour Movement lesbians, Jewish lesbians ('Jew- ish lesbians are everywhere — in women's liberation groups and activities, in the Jewish feminist move and in the Jewish community') and the Catholic Lesbian Sisterhood.

The Women's Committee itself has one co-opted lesbian member who was chosen to 'see that lesbians have an adequate voice and presence on a decision-making body covering Greater London' and another, chosen to represent the black and ethnic interest, who explains: 'I am a black lesbian woman, a cancer survivor, who works to break down divisions among women of all races.'

Are we to suppose that the activities of this important public body are held in revulsion by the ethical consensus of our times?

I should be pleased to hear from anyone prepared to give expert evidence on this subject.