AS I WAS SAYING
Once, only the ruling class was. But we are all insiders now. For the ruling class is now all of us
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
Ai effective democracy does not only require that the sovereign people be given 'all the news that's fit to print', as the New York Times used to promise to do. Quite as important is that it be given all the news that is unfit to print — the insiders' gossip. No member of the old ruling class ever formed a political judgment solely on the basis of privileged access to top secret reports and suchlike. Privileged access to gossip, garnered either at his London club or at country house weekends, was consid- ered no less essential. So it was with noble- men under absolute monarchies. Louis XIV's courtiers did not stay at Versailles simply to learn the secrets of the King's council chamber. They did so even more to be privy to the secrets of his bedchamber.
Of course measures are important, but so are the personalities — strengths and weak- nesses, vices and virtues, loves and hates — of the men who make them, and an effec- tive political animal needs to have knowl- edge of both, not only to acquire real lever- age over state affairs but, even more important, to develop and maintain a burn- ing interest in them. Hard information may constitute the political meal, but gossip, as Saint-Simon and Creevey knew so well, supplies the spices which whet the appetite and make the meal worth eating.
So are the spoilsports right who complain about the enormous proliferation of gossip in today's newspapers? Not if they are democrats, I would have thought. For if it is right to want an open society in respect of hard political news, on the grounds that the public at large cannot know how to vote without the facts, then surely it is no less important that they should also know the gossip. In the old days, the man in the street had access to neither. Now, at long last, he is beginning to have access to both.
Undoubtedly, this does mean a sacrifice of privacy on the part of those occupying the corridors of power. But democratisa- tion of politics has always involved inva- sions of privacy. Initially, MPs regarded the chamber of the House of Commons itself as private, and were no more willing to have journalists invade their privacy there than they are to have them invade the pri- vacy of their bedchambers now. More recently, MPs were equally obstructive when new technological advances made it possible for the public to see and hear the debates, as well as read about them. Having succumbed eventually to their privacy being invaded in the debating chamber, however, they are now fighting a no less losing battle to prevent technological advance, like bug- ging and long-distance lenses, invading their privacy in more intimate parts of the House of Commons — the terrace and bars — not to mention the beaches and hotels further afield.
To argue, as MPs do, that their extra cur- ricular activities throw no light on affairs of state is plain silly, as all insiders should be the first to agree. For they themselves take them seriously, spending just as much time discussing a minister's character — for the light it may throw on his fitness for high office — as his policies. After all, it wasn't policy but personality that made John Pro- fumo unsuitable as minister of war, just as it wasn't policy but character — rumours of unpucka conduct in battle — that made another prominent postwar Tory so unsuit- able for that same job. Unquestionably, MPs have to be interested in such matters. It would be imprudent as well as irresponsi- ble if they failed to be, as Harold Macmil- lan, who turned a blind eye to Profumo's philandering, learnt to his cost.
In the old days, of course, before modern methods of mass communication, it was impractical for the public at large, living for the most part miles away from Westmin- ster, to be kept as au fait with gossip as those privileged metropolitans living near- by. In any case, most journalists then did not belong to the magic social circles — London clubs, smart salons, country houses — within which such gossip freely circulat- ed. So even if newspapers had had the means to circulate dirt to everyone, they would not have been able to acquire it. Now, however, journalists are at no such social disadvantage. Wherever and whenev- er the great and the good are gathered together, there in their midst is to be found a journalist. In fact journalists now are themselves much gossiped about. From having been on the outer fringes of society, Tm happy to become embroiled in a "cash-for-vote" scandal ' the despised denizens of Grub Street, they have now moved as stars to the very centre of the stage and where they are not physi- cally centre stage, they have the means of making their presence felt vicariously by, as I say, the bugging device and the long-dis- tance lens.
Another change, no less important, is that for the first time proprietors are pre- pared to let them print the dirt. No longer, for the most part, domiciled in Britain — Rupert Murdoch is not even a British citi- zen — they worry much less than they used to about fouling their own nest. NOT are they nearly so keen on getting a peerage. In the old days, the great and the good could keep gossip out of the newspapers by threatening to deny an awkward proprietor his peerage. Now the really important pro- prietors do not give a damn about such baubles, or at any rate fewer damns than would have been the case in the bad old days. So, to a degree that never existed in the past, gossip now can be made available at the breakfast table to every household in the land.
How can this not be a good thing? Do we or do we not want the people to be sovereign? If ,as we keep saying, we do, then I can see no good reason why we should deny the sovereign people a dimen- sion of political intelligence which every other ruling class since the beginning of time has excelled and revelled in. Just as technology has made it possible for the sovereign people to vote on every issue by pressing a button in their homes — i.e. direct democracy — so, combined with social change, it has made it possible for them to possess that essential prerequisite of being able to vote in a sophisticated manner, confident that they know as much about the real story as the editor of Private Eye himself. MPs have always claimed the right to elect their own party leader, because only they have had the opportunity to get to know the various candidates as they really are — the worm's eye view, so to speak. That claim to insiders' knowledge was justi- fied once, but it is no longer. For the price of a daily paper — preferably one of the broadsheets, which have recently started to carry much more gossip than the tabloids — everyone can be an insider now. Terrible prospect, in my view. But then I was never so foolish as to suppose that full democracy was compatible with civilisation.
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