ONE OF the unfortunate effects of the Burgess and Maclean
affair was that it concentrated public attention upon the Foreign Office, which, considering everything, doesn't do too badly, and diverted attention from the Home Office, which, given half a chance, does very badly indeed. Its latest act of folie de grandeur is to attempt to stop the Empire News from publishing some of Mr. Pierrepoint's reminiscences of execu- tions. It has threatened the editor and Mr. Pierrepoint with a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. This Act is drawn in wide terms and could probably be held to cover last week's article. But there is no doubt that it was never. intended to apply to such a case. It was intended to prevent the leakage of infor- mation to foreign powers—not to prevent the disclosure in the press of matters which Government departments wish from time to time to suppress. The Home Office made three objec- tions to the article. It objected not to Pierrepoint saying he thought Evans guilty, but to the reason he gave. Now certainly this reason was remarkably unconvincing—the way that Evans looked at him as he was about to be executed— but that is no business of the Home Office. The other two passages it tried to suppress were that at Christie's execution Pierrepoint pulled the lever quicker than usual, because he thought, Christie was going to collapse, and that he had once expelled from the execution chamber a coroner's jury who were ghoulishly inspecting the body. That the Home Office is prepared to threaten the use of the Official Secrets Act to suppress matters of this kind is a revealing illustration of the length it is prepared to go in order to get its own way. I ant very glad that the editor of the Empire News refused to succumb to this blackmail and published the article as written. Instead of trying to censor the press, the Home Office would be well advised in future to censor some of its own pronounce- ments. For a start it should make sure it no longer misleads Parliament about what happened at Mrs. Thompson's execution.
* * *
Previous page
