The dons of Pembroke have done nothing wrong unlike the Sunday Times
STEPHEN GLOVER
When in 1994 the Sunday Times offered to pay two Tory MPs to ask questions in thc House of Commons, I had misgivings. It was entrapment — the encouragement of men, who had previously been held to be blameless, to do wrong. All the same, no one could deny that the two Tories behaved badly, and that they did so to feather their own nests.
The Sunday Times's story about Pembroke College, Oxford is less defensible. A reporter posing as a rich banker asked the Reverend John Platt, the college chaplain and former admissions tutor, whether Pembroke could see its way to accepting his son to read law in return for a donation of 000,000. Mr Platt did not say it was a done deal, but he indicated it might be possible. On the other hand, he said that the phantom son should aim to achieve two As and a B — the standard requirement for Oxford in many subjects — and be bright enough to get a 2:1 in his finals. In other words, he would have to be as academically gifted as 80 per cent of Oxford students turn out to be. Moreover, an extra place would be created for him if he were accepted, so his admission would not be at someone else's expense.
What interests me about this story is that no one has questioned the ethics of the Sunday Times. Certainly not Oxford University or Pembroke College, both of which have put their hands up. I don't believe that Mr Platt has done anything of which to be particularly ashamed. Unlike those Tory MPs. he was not hoping to enrich himself. He was trying to raise money for his impoverished college, which he presumably loves. But he was not offering to let in a halfwit or to lower the standards of the university. Nor was he proposing to do down some bright working-class child to make way for a rich banker's son.
Consider who has suffered as a result of the Sunday Times's supposedly brilliant expose. Mr Platt and Ms Hilton have lost their jobs. I don't suppose that Mr Platt will readily find employment again at so good a university as Oxford, and he is evidently not in the first flush of youth. Then there are the students of Pembroke, many of them poor or working class, who in the past have objected to paying the high accommodation costs which the college is obliged to charge. Any large donation would be liable to ease their burden, or at any rate that of their successors. Finally, there is the reputation of Oxford Uni versity, which is already under attack for being elitist. This story has been spun by the Sunday Times and the unreflecting media — and will doubtless be cited for years to come — as another example of Oxford's bias towards the rich and privileged. It isn't.
So far as I can see, the only beneficiary of this sorry tale is the Sunday Times, which is being praised by people who do not think very deeply about these things. But perhaps not everyone will take this view. I'm afraid the newspaper has been narrow, priggish and cruel.
Despite the hundreds of correspondents who have been and remain in Afghanistan, this is one of the most underreported wars in history. Journalists can barely get close to the fighting, and if they try they risk being arrested, as one British reporter picked up by special forces discovered. The truth is we have very little idea of what is going on. The government is so confident of our ignorance that it felt emboldened to feed the press the totally false story that al-Qa'eda terrorists have built a biological and chemical weapons laboratory in Afghanistan. The American government has produced its fair share of whoppers too. Some day somebody should make a list of all the lies we have been told.
In the meantime I want to reflect a bit about the state of ignorance we are in. It really means that no journalist is in a position to pontificate about Afghanistan, since we just don't know what is happening. Are the Taleban and al-Qa'eda a few hard-core desperados whom our boys will mop up pretty soon? Or are there thousands of them threatening to do to our soldiers what the 'freedom fighters' did to the Soviets in the 1980s? I haven't got an answer. But in the absence of any evidence one way or the other, perhaps one might be permitted a guess. This is that our involvement in Afghanistan may be longer rather than shorter, and that by committing fighting troops Tony Blair is taking a risk. Did you know that by mid-April Britain will have some 6,000 troops in Afghanistan, which is probably greater than the number America has now? This seems very odd, bearing in mind that the US defence budget is ten times as big as our own, that their best marines are every hit as good as ours, and that this is, after all, supposed to be an American war. As the mists swirl about us, one thing can be said with reasonable confidence. Those journalists who told us that the Taleban and al-Qa'eda were done for were barking up the wrong tree. Some urged caution as the Northern Alliance entered Kabul on 13 November, John Keegan, a supporter of the war, predicted in the Daily Telegraph that a cornered Taleban would be dangerous. The much-maligned Robert Fisk, a critic on the other side, later made a similar point in the Independent. But, by and large, the anti-war brigade was rather borne down by the triumphalism of the war party, and too ready to believe that the Taleban were finished. And, my oh my, how the war party crowed! On 14 November the Sun laid into the `wobblers', and the next day referred to the 'rout of the Taleban' and suggested that bin Laden was surrounded. On 17 November the Daily Telegraph wrote of the 'swift collapse of the Taleban', and reflected that 'when confronted by superior forces, rather than soft targets such as civilians, fanatics rarely prove to be tenacious fighters'. (Oh yeah?) Perhaps the most memorable piece of crowing came from Christopher Hitchens in the Guardian. 'Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was obvious from the very start that the United States had no alternative but to do what it has done. It was also obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taleban will soon be history.'
Mmm. Let's agree, shall we, that in this war, of all wars, armchair predictions are dangerous. In my state of ignorance I shall confine myself to hoping that all will be well, and to fearing that it will not be.
The headline on Peter Preston's column in Monday's Guardian was 'The people of the Rock must be told what's good for them'. The headline writer had been faithful to Mr Preston's argument. Mr Preston really does believe that Gibraltarians should do exactly as they are told by the government. But imagine how he would feel if the minority in question was one towards which he felt sympathetic. Imagine the headline 'Blacks in Brixton must be told what is good for them', or 'Asians in Oldham', or 'Lesbians in Gateshead', Mr Preston would be shocked. So would we. No one — least of all members of a browbeaten minority — should be told by the government what is good for them. Except, it seems, the people of the Rock.
Previous page
