DIARY JOHN MORTIMER
Only a few more weeks and it will be time to go back to Chiantishire; one of the great pleasures of our time there is the chance of a few dinners with Muriel Spark. Last summer she told us a story which has haunted me ever since. When Muriel was young and living in London she lodged with Christmas Humphries, then a Buddhist barrister and occasional poet. So she got to know his father, old Mr Justice Humphries, who had actually appeared in the Wilde trial and went on to be a notable passer of death sentences. Mr Justice Humphries tried Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer. Haigh lived in a Kensington hotel which we'll call the Pondichery', because that wasn't its name. He there got into conver- sation with a wealthy 69-year-old widow who was sitting at the next table. In due course he murdered her and dissolved her body in an acid bath. Unhappily her false teeth remained intact, she was identified and Haigh admitted eight similar murders and was duly sentenced to death by Mr Jus- tice Humphries. Later in the judge's life, so Muriel told us, after his wife had died and his house seemed too big for him, he remembered the name of a hotel he had heard about in one of his cases. It seemed, he thought, to be a companionable sort of place where a man might get into conversa- tion, and make friends with, a pleasant old lady at the next table. So, for his remaining years Mr Justice Humphries lived at the Pondichery Hotel' in Kensington, which he had only heard about from John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer.
Punch could be mega. I mean mega mega. I want to make it hip, trendy . . . hot.' So said Mr David Thomas, its editor, according to the Guardian. These were sur- prising words applied to those peeling vol- umes we used to look at in front of the fire in childhood, flicking past du Maurier's statuesque ladies to the man who did em- barrassing things at Wimbledon. Trying to analyse what I felt about Mr Thomas's creed, I came to the conclusion that it's very hard to be funny and trendy at the same time, just as there are never any jokes in pornography. Trendiness and sexual arousal both require intense seriousness. All the great comic writers, such as Waugh, Wodehouse, Beachcomber and Richard Ingrams, have mocked trendiness from a pretty square point of view. Trendy Punch, with a falling circulation, is advertising for its life. Its rivals are Viz (circulation around a million) which, with its almost illegible cartoons and jolly turd and snot jokes, is like the underground press of 20 years ago, hardly trendy, and Private Eye, which observes the follies of the times with the wary eye of a somewhat anarchic, middle-
aged, middle-class, public-school boy. It's not trendy, but it is extremely funny.
The golden opportunity provided by the Strangeways riot and Lord Justice Woolfs report on the prison system, now at the point of breakdown, has been missed by the Government with both hands. Harry Woolf s schemes to avoid overcrowding and his call for smaller, community prisons, divided into special units, are apparently to be ignored, as are any attempts to ensure minimum standards for prisoners. In the horrible language of bureaucrats a Home Office official says their response to the proposals will be 'resource neutral', which means that no money will be spent on them. It's an utterly false economy. Barbar- ic prison conditions not only cause expen- sive riots, they ensure that brutalised inmates commit further crimes on their release. It is also a cause of shame and humiliation to us all to have to live in a society where the present state of our pris- ons is so blandly tolerated.
Aproposal to build 'Stone Bassett' (developers choose such reassuringly rustic names for their desecration of the country- side), a' 'new town' over the fields and vil- lages around Thame, was turned down after legal proceedings which cost the protesting local inhabitants an enormous amount of money. Now there is a rumour that the developers might reapply. Mr Hes- eltine gave evidence against the develop- ment before he was Environment Minister. When I congratulated him on his courage and good sense he thanked me but asked me to keep quiet about it, as any praise from me would do him little good in the a man to seek refuge in the bottle.'
Conservative Party. Now he is the Minister and if he stamps hard on any recrudescence of 'Stone Bassett', I promise to write a blis- tering attack on him.
It seems only yesterday that I was leading Annie Mallalieu in defence of those publi- cations which were fortunate to come to the attention of Mrs Mary Whitehouse our first acquittal, if I recall, was a little spanking magazine. She's a beautiful, com- pelling advocate with an excellent voice and juries thought that if a nice girl like that couldn't see anything wrong with it, it must be all right. No doubt she will perform the same admirable service for the Labour Party in the House of Lords, after she's got up at 4 a.m. near us in the country, exer- cised the horses, delivered a few lambs, defended a murderer, sat as a judge in Reading and followed other such rustic pursuits. I was delighted to watch her, this week, wearing a three-cornered hat and scarlet and ermine and being smiled at from the Woolsack. We started the June 20th Group, a much divided body of leftish outcasts, some three years ago and of our early members Annie has become a baroness and Richard Rogers a knight. I'm not sure what this proves, except perhaps the eagerness with which British society takes its critics to its heart. I hate to disap- point ambitious, right-wing journalists but I'm afraid we have no further vacancies.
Atother of those large television pan- els met to discuss the 'Crisis in the Arts' and there I sat, squashed behind the Minis- ter and next to Glenda Jackson, to get an occasional word in on behalf of the Royal Court Theatre, of which I refuse to be called the 'Chair'. No one talked much about the arts themselves, and discussion about their organisation must make dullish viewing. Both Labour and the Conserva- tives seem committed to devolving control in the arts to 'regional boards', a prospect which I regard with some terror, as it seems to me that local authorities may take some extremely eccentric artistic decisions. The arts may represent the one area in life where democracy doesn't work, and are best organised by such powerful individuals as Diaghilev, Peter Hall and the Renais- sance Popes. They also bring enormous wealth to this country and they are enjoyed by more people than watch football match- es. On the whole they need far less organi- sation and a good deal more money. We live in a land which is bottom but one in the European table for support for the arts (Ireland does worse) and spend £66 million a year on military bands and £6.6 million on all our major orchestras.
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