ANOTHER VOICE
At heart, I think papers shouldn't print such stuff.
But I'm glad the Times had that lover's wife's tale
MATTHEW PARRIS
Stephen Glover is surely wrong (Politics, 22 June). The public interest claimed by the Daily Mail for its research into the pri- vate life of Polly Toynbee is not that the paper aimed to expose any significant inconsistency between what she preached and what she practised. It was the signifi- cant consistency they wanted to expose. In her writing she urges us not to feel shackled by the bonds of marriage, and in her own life (we learn) she has been conducting an affair with a married man. No conflict here.
But it is not really Polly Toynbee who is my focus. The Mail's charge is the charge the press have made against MPs who use a public platform to defend the interests of causes, corporations, friends or relations in whose welfare they have an undeclared pri- vate interest. It is the indictment we make of the MP who speaks in the House in sup- port of the dignity and interests of the accountancy profession and fails to declare that he has a second job as an accountant. The indictment against Ms Toynbee was of this type: that of using her writing and broadcasting to legitimise lifestyles like her own. She should have declared her interest (it is argued), allowing her audience, should they so decide, to take her opinions with a pinch a salt.
We may think this is all rather overheat- ed and silly. I do. As soon as the lapel- clutching prose of argument framed in terms of general principle is applied to peo- ple we know, we see at once how overblown it is. I felt this about the David Mellor and Antonia de Sancha affair; I felt it for MPs pilloried for taking paid trips to South Africa, then arguing against economic sanc- tions — which they would have done any- way. This is because I knew them.
I feel it now for Polly Toynbee, who believes what she writes and would write it anyway. Like Stephen Glover, I could wish that the newspapers would call their dogs off the more agreeable public figures, people we know are kosher. But where I am having more difficulty than Mr Glover is in framing the principle which protects Ms Toynbee from the willingness of the editor of the Times to repeat gripping and arguably rele- vant stories about the private lives of real people, yet leaves him free to repeat, as I fear he really must, reports of an MP's three- in-a-bed with a Sunday school teacher and her lover, or a backbencher's attempts to plant amendments helpful to a caravanning association which pays him a consultancy. I noticed in Ms Toynbee's cracking arti- cle in the Independent, which sparked this exchange off, her remark that, of course, if it had been some 'silly MP like Rod Richards' advocating family values, whom the Mail wanted to expose, that would have been a different matter. And I thought: Ho-hum, Polly, down the plank goes Rod, but you sail on, eh? Next, the eye was momentarily arrested by the very slight infelicity of the sentence, 'I have had a close relationship with a man who separat- ed from his wife'.
`Separated?' had separated? who subse- quently separated? The verbal forensics which a journalist learns for dealing with politicians' weasel-statements came into play and I thought again: Ho-hum.
Then came the marvellous rant by Karen Irving, Toynbee's lover's wife. The Times's page editor, whose decision it probably was to buy the polemic, was well within her rights. Who cares if it was in the Mail first? I did not read it in the Mail because I do not read the Mail, nor do most Times readers. I was gripped by Irving's writing. It is a long time since I have read an entire two-page spread, every word, right through. Because it came from the heart, her argument unmarshalled, her thoughts and fears tum- bling out, her self-pity all too understand- able, her unwillingness to accept the one central fact — that her man does not love her any more — as poignant as Madame Butterfly's, it seemed to me as affecting as a novelette in miniature — and it was real.
At a dinner at which I was speaking that night, almost everybody on my table had read the exchange, everyone wanted to dis- cuss it, and they had all seen it in the Times, not the Mail. Nobody had noticed the foot- note explaining it was a reprint. Nobody cared. Nobody was interested in my ques- tion whether papers like the Times should have printed it. Readers like them were, after all, discussing it! So, incidentally, are we, here, now.
I therefore react warily to Mr Glover's suggestion that Times readers should have been deprived of this, as I should have been sorry to be deprived of it myself. As a columnist whose editors have occasionally in the last nine years left undisturbed columns full of unutterable tosh, on the principle that if you think people are worth keeping, then within limits you give them their head, I react even more warily to the suggestion that the editor of the Times should have stomped in and pulled the piece. Stephen Glover presumably disap- proves of the alleged insistence by the edi- tor of the Mail that his lieutenants pursue such a story. That editor, it is said, over- ruled his lieutenants' judgment. The editor of the Times did not.
When I resigned from the Commons and took up a post as presenter of Weekend World, I doubled my salary overnight and moved from working an approximately 80- hour week to something closer to 20 hours. I also moved from a situation in which my private life was deemed the proper subject of investigation by the media to one in which my professional colleagues would have thought it outrageous if any serious newspaper had thought my homosexuality a matter for revelation or comment. One of the first programmes we made, I remem- ber, involved my urging a government min- ister to give more money and more sympa- thetic attention to the problem of Aids, but no minister would have dreamed of asking me what interest I had to declare, or of impugning my motives.
With Stephen Glover, I don't, at heart, think Polly Toynbee's romance ought to have been in the newspapers if she had not wished it to be. But if what we are seeing is an extension of the jeopardy in which jour- nalists place politicians, generals, bishops and football managers to include journal- ists too, then I am unable to see the devel- opment as without its compensations.
Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter of the Times.
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