The press
The Chapman's Tale
Paul Johnson
If MIS cannot keep a secret, evidently the publishing world can. The Sidgwick and Jackson — Daily Mail publication of Chapman Pincher's 'disclosures' about Sir Roger Hollis was a neat operation. The first anyone knew that Their Trade is Treachery was coming was an advertisement in the 21 March issue of the Bookseller boasting:'Next week you'll receive copies of a book that you haven't ordered and haven't even heard of. And the week after that it will be a best-seller'. In what the journal described as 'an unprecedented step', the President of the Booksellers' Association wrote to members warning them 'the reason for this secrecy will be apparent when the book is published'. Sidgwick's had 21 vans delivering copies of the book, the moment serialisation started, from 'a secret location in Oxford'. According to the Sunday Express Lord Longford bet his Sidgwick colleague, William Armstrong, a bottle of sherry that the news would leak, but had to pay up, rounding on columnist Olga Maitland: 'How did you hear about this bet? It just goes to prove my point — everything leaks these days'. For the Daily Mail, now running advertisements in Campaign, quoting the National Readership Survey that it has overtaken the Daily Express in key categories of readers (ABC1 Home Owners, two-car families, cheque-book holders etc), the success of the serial was a triumph to be savoured, especially since much of Pincher's material was gathered on a Daily Express expense-account back in the good old days of Beaverbrook. The author, whom Lord Home insists on calling 'Mr Chapman', fears it may end a beautiful friendship. Mrs Thatcher's statement called his book 'inaccurate and distorted'. He told the Sunday Mirror: 'I have had two letters from her saying she liked previous books of mine . . . she wrote to me in her own fair hand'. He added: 'Poor lass, I do feel sorry for her. She came back from a tricky European summit in Holland and gets up in the House like a badlybriefed barrister rushing into court.' Like other aggrieved authors, he accused the reviewer of not having read his Opus.
In fact Mrs Thatcher is not one to skimp her homework, and the initial Fleet Street reaction was that her statement had done the trick. 'Mrs Thatcher,' wrote the New Standard, 'laid to rest, as far as anybody could, the spectre of a British security service run as a part-owned subsidiary of the KGB.' The Guardian thought that 'one of the cheery things' was her evident contempt for 'bureaucratic soporifics' and 'when she is personally convinced, the tyres grip the road within ten paces'. I'm not sure what this means, but I gather the Guardian believes her. The Times could only reach 'a less generous conclusion of "not proven" about Hollis, but one suspects it might have been more trusting towards Mrs Thatcher if it had not taken the extraordinary step of reprinting the Pincher material after it appeared in the Daily Mail. This desperate ploy meant not only that it had, to some extent, to stand by its own second-hand story, but it had to endure snooty abuse from its competitors. The Guardian rudelY editorialised about serialisation 'in the Daily Mail and associated pastules' — pastule, you may like to know, being 'a small rounded elevation of the cuticle, inflammatory at the base and containing pus', OED — while the Daily TelegraPh dismissed the Pincher stuff as 'a sensational work of popular history' (so much for Top People) and found 'the picture which MI Thatcher painted' was 'entirely credible and therefore reassuring'. By the weekend its stable-companion, the Sunday Telegraph, felt that 'on a second reading her statement started to look a bit blurred at the edges'. But by this time, of course, Fleet Street was starting hares in all directions, some of them rather elderly animals. The News of the World's Richard Deacon (`Expert on the World of Spies') unearthed a double agent called Desk° Popov and a bumbling fellow by the eagle of Guy Liddell, active in MIS as long ago s,5 1927. The Sunday Times had a rambling tale about Harold Wilson, Lady Falkender, the late Senator Hubert Humphrey and other dusty relics. It implied that both Sir Harold and her Ladyship might be on the spot if Mrs Thatcher's inquiry into the source of Pincher's material ranges widely: `Wils°,,ti must be aware that this could well lead baci, to Downing Street in 1976.' As for LadY Falkender, 'if she is approached now she will have a great deal to say'. That one can well believe. But Wha,t, about the late Tom Driberg? I thought " odd that no convincing attempt was made to deny the assertion that Michael Foot, OW leader of the Labour Party and, in theorY , least, a possible Prime Minister, go: Driberg his peerage. Driberg's 1977 Posr humous autobiography, Ruling Passi°1: while gruesomely open about his cemPu sive homosexuality and perpetual 'cottaging', says nothing about getting his money from both British and Soviet intelligence for betraying his colleagues, friends and aft)fr one else within reach. Which makes thed 'Postscript' Foot appended to the book, rea hilariously today. Finding it 'one of the most honest I have ever read', 'creditable 'courageous', 'shining' with 'qualities', F°° added innocently that the 'services' Dribergf rendered to the Labour Party 'were trulY a different nature from that which it received from anyone else'. So it would no‘: seem; and we can agree also with Foot,.. verdict: 'Most of his readers will conclude these last pages clamouring for more'. But who knows what to believe? sprn&.,' observed the Sunday Telegraph, is 'a secret; n world where to meet a colleague's eyes ts t, see yourself reflected in a two-way Inirjr°ta I'm not sure what that means either; irweA'd the Pincher fracas brought some metaphors, if nothing else, to the surfoeVf Whether or not, as the News of the I'Vor,.. claimed, Mrs Thatcher had tried to 'scoteb,o' posthumous smear', it was clearly a case, t. use the felicitous phrase of a recent tette,' writer in the Guardian, of 'scratching the tip of a desperately important iceberg.
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