THE NEW BARONS RULING BRITAIN
Paul Johnson argues that the Aitken case raises the spectre of unbridled press power
THE REPELLENT manner in which the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, exulted on television at the 'downfall' of his 'dis- graced' court-room opponent, Jonathan Aitken, was strongly reminiscent of the tri- umphalism of Arthur Scargill and his fel- low union barons in the 1970s. The parallels between the abuse of union power then and the abuse of press power in the 1990s are close. In the early 1970s, echoing the famous 18th-century Com- mons motion against the Crown, I wrote: `The power of the unions has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished.' At the time there were very few of us working for the reform of union power. Everyone, from the Lord Chancellor down, told us it couldn't be done. But we persisted. We never let up. We eventually acquired an energetic leader, Margaret Thatcher, and in time the job was done, thoroughly. Where are those almighty union barons now? Our democracy, wealth and quality of life have improved in consequence. We made Britain virtually strike-free.
Now the time has come to cut down to size the new barons who abuse their power for evil purposes: character assassination, the pursuit of personal vendettas and inva- sion of privacy. I do not mean the old barons, the press proprietors, men like Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and Vere Rothermere. Despite the mythology, they interfere little in the editorial content of their newspapers. I mean the new barons, those editors who, corrupted by power, have forgotten why newspapers exist and who use them to destroy people. Rus- bridger, odious though he seems, is not the worst. That title belongs to the then editor of the News of the World, now running another downmarket tabloid, who was responsible for hounding our saintly parish priest, who died heartbroken. There are also a few decent, responsible editors. I single out Rusbridger because he has accelerated the decline of a fine newspa- per into the gutter.
It is worth remembering that all Aitken did was to lose a libel action. If he had won it, he would now be a hero. But he was forced to settle, and so became a vil- lain. But the same thing happened to Rus- bridger the same month. He is, in addition to editing the Guardian, editor-in-chief of the Observer. Since he took overall charge of it, there has been a marked increase in its tabloid-style sensationalism and a cor- responding decline in its accuracy.
On 1 June, the Observer published a false front-page story about Lady Soames, Sir Winston Churchill's only surviving child, under the headline: 'Daughter bars access to £13 million Churchill files'. It confused two quite separate issues, the sale of the Churchill archives to the nation and access to them, and it bore all the marks of the new Guardian-Observer dis- pensation; it was personal, malicious and untrue. Not only did it accuse Lady Soames of preventing scholars from using the archives, from the worst possible motives, but it also alleged she had removed (i.e., stolen) some of them. As Lady Soames wrote to me: 'I minded dreadfully being accused of "shoplifting".'
The Observer was finally forced to con- cede that the story was untrue and they settled by paying 'a substantial donation' to one of Lady Soames's charities, though their grovelling apology, far from striding across the front page as the original fairy- tale had done, cowered shamefacedly down-column on page 8. So here were Rusbridger and co. caught out in an admitted falsehood, and a peculiarly unpleasant one, directed against an hon- ourable lady of unblemished reputation. Does this mean that Rusbridger is 'dis- graced'? Has his 'downfall' taken place? Is he, or anyone else, being made to resign? Of course not. These people are privi- leged, like the union barons of the 1970s. They benefit from the extraordinary sys- tem of double standards they have erected for themselves. If Aitken tells a lie it is a crime against civilisation. If Rusbridger or his underlings get their facts wrong — or get a hundred facts wrong — it is all in the day's work.
These double standards were applied on a monumental scale immediately after the collapse of Aitken's case. It was now legal- ly safe for Rusbridger to publish anything he pleased about him, and he immediately poured out from his presses a cascade of abuse just as he had done in the earlier case of Neil Hamilton — and as he would do to you, dear reader, if you were unlucky enough, or broke enough, to abandon an action against him. Any notion of truth or fair play was thrown to the winds. In place of the old Guardian adage, coined by its great editor, C.P. Scott, 'Comment is free but facts are sacred', Rusbridger has substi- tuted a new one: 'All the lies it's safe to print'.
Obviously, Rusbridger and his rough trade journalists think they are fighting for some kind of cause. But what can this be? No unifying thread of principle runs through the efforts to destroy the charac- ters of men like Hamilton and Aitken. Is it the promotion of honesty in public life? In that case, how does the Guardian justify its forgery of a letter by Aitken and the signa- ture of a civil servant in an attempt to obtain evidence against him? If the Guard- ian's case was so overwhelming, why was it necessary to resort to fabrication? Forgery is among the most serious of crimes, once punishable by death. In this case it was accompanied by theft. How can the Guardian claim to be cleansing public life by engaging in crime? Rusbridger may claim that the forgery was committed not by him but by his predecessor, Peter Pre- ston. It is true that, if Preston's forgery had not been exposed, Rusbridger might not have become editor. But Rusbridger has never apologised for the forgery. On the contrary, he has been its beneficiary.
If Rusbridger is so keen on a spotless public life, why is the Guardian so closely associated with Mohammed Fayed, the man at the root of the payments to MPs? Without his help, the Guardian's campaign against Hamilton and Aitken could never have been mounted. Indeed, Fayed is behind all the Guardian's self-righteous indignation. Yet no word of criticism of him ever appears in the Guardian. He is a no-go area for the paper's 'investigative journalists'. Why? What material does he hold in his capacious archive of bills and receipts and secret tapes and videos which makes it inadvisable for the Guardian to cross him?
The essence of the Guardian's case against Hamilton and Aitken was that it is wrong to accept undeclared hospitality from Arabs. Why just Arabs? The racist nature of the objection was made explicit in the faction television movie made by the Guardian's libel-associate, Granada's World in Action, where a hired camel filmed near Liverpool and actors dressed as sheikhs were used to hold Arabs up to ridicule and contempt. In fact, Guardian people are as eager to accept hospitality from Arabs as from anyone else. Indeed Guardian hacks are always on the cadge. Only this week Rusbridger himself, and his underling or master — it is not clear which — Hugo Young, chairman of the Scott Trust which owns the Guardian, were taking part in a freebie to Hong Kong. They were travelling in style, gorging and sluicing and toasting the surrender of six million free people to the Peking tyranny — and doing so not at their own expense, that's for sure. At least Arabs pay with their own money. Rus- bridger and Young enjoy their luxuries thanks to others. Whenever you lift the lid on the Guardian's doings, the stench of humbug emerges.
As the paper has itself shown, there are worse evils than taking Arab money, even Fayed money. For many years a senior fig- ure on the Guardian, Richard Gott, who held various key posts, was a favourite of the KGB and in receipt of what he himself called 'Moscow gold'. The KGB was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Russians, and it is notorious that it financed its operations, including its freebies, from the stolen goods of the peo- ple it murdered. It would be hard to think of money more tainted. Yet, when Gott was finally exposed, Preston, then editor, tried to laugh it off. Gott was not sacked but allowed to slip away of his own accord. Young, head of the trust which is supposed to uphold the paper's ethics, said nothing at all, at any rate in public, though the Gott exposure — like the forgery — deter- mined the ferocious power struggle which replaced Preston with Rusbridger. No one in authority at the Guardian has ever apol- ogised to its readers for Gott's conduct. That is another no-go area. Nor, so far as we know, have any steps been taken to prevent a recurrence of this kind of thing. The moral confusion with which the Guardian conducted its business under Preston has intensified under Rusbridger. He seems to have no particular conviction or policy, other than a fierce desire to 'get' people on the right of the political spec- trum. A former gossip columnist, suffering from all the deformations professionelles of that unlovable species, he is turning the Guardian into a daily Private Eye, titillating its readers with an ingenious mixture of malicious chit-chat, sexual innuendo and character assassination. Much of the paper is devoted to soft porn masquerading as sociology. Politics is analysed at the gossip level. It runs more gossip columns than any other paper in British publishing histo- ry. Its handling of Gordon Brown, shaping up to be one of the most original chancel- lors of recent decades, is characteristic: entire pages were devoted to discussing his sex appeal. The Rusbridger formula is being extended to every subject. Many of those lucky enough to see it found the Richard Eyre/Ian Holm King Lear the finest Shakespeare production ever staged at the National. It made the most moving and spine-chilling evening I have ever spent in the theatre. But one of Rus- bridger's columnists put it in its true Guardian perspective, under the headline, `Tragedy of Thing Leer', by complaining that Ian Holm, who had provided the columnist with 'a close-up of his crotch', had a small penis. `Thing Leer' and the Safe Lie sum up the Rusbridger approach to journalism. The Guardian, in a sneering editorial attacking me last week, suggested that to defend Aitken was the act of a madman. The paper has accused me of lunacy on over a score of occasions simply because I insist that no newspaper is above criticism. In Rusbridger's opinion, anyone who com- mits lese-majestd against his paper ought to be certified. Arthur Scargill said virtual- ly the same thing to me in the 1970s. But if asked to choose between the morals of Aitken and those of the Rusbridger gang, I would not hesitate to choose Jonathan, whom I am proud to call my friend. He fought a good fight, and though he lost the round, there will be others. The Guardian is not the most evil newspaper in Britain, but its recent behaviour is particularly tragic and poignant because I recall a time in the 1950s when it was the best daily in the world, with the Observer, which it has now swallowed like a boa-constrictor, the best Sunday paper. So the moral and pro- fessional collapse is awesome. One day soon I hope the members of the Scott Trust will throw out their chairman, taint- ed as a member of the Preston-Rusbridger regime, replace him with a disinterested outsider of the highest probity, and set about restoring the paper's lost honour. Meanwhile, the abuse of power by the press as a whole is a matter for Parlia- ment. The passing of a privacy law to defend individuals from outrageous press intrusion is not going to be enough. A more general statute is required, which among other things will oblige newspapers to keep registers of journalists' interests and to operate codes obliging them to declare gifts, favours and services they receive. Many journalists now exercise more power than MPs or even ministers. It is only right that they should be subjected to stringent rules about their conduct. It may also be necessary to enact a new law of criminal libel, to make the worst instances of the abuse of power unlawful. In short, the 1997 Parliament must do to the press bullies what the 1979, 1983 and 1987 Par- liaments did to the union bullies. Any sug- gestions from readers about the way the work should go forward, and instances of press abuse which they think should be taken into account before the legislative machinery starts rolling, would be wel- come. As Gladstone said, the resources of civilisation are not exhausted, and the British people do not lack the means and will to make our press once more responsi- ble, fair-minded and honest. It will be hard going, as it was against the unions. The men who have seized control of certain newspapers, as once with certain unions, are agile, cruel, vindictive and vengeful, as I know from my own experience. So we will need courage, and we will find it.
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