ANOTHER VOICE
How the defection of 'the elite' rather changes the picture
AUBERON WAUGH
As he approaches his 70th year, Ludo- vic Kennedy can look back on a long career devoted to various liberal causes, not least of them the abolition of capital punish- ment. I have not always agreed with him, and in particular have often suspected that Timothy Evans, hanged in 1950 for the murder of his wife and baby daughter, was guilty all along — despite the fact that John Christie, later discovered to be a mass- murderer of women, was living in the same house at the time, and indeed confessed to the murder of the wife, if not the daughter. After reading Kennedy's book on the subject, Ten Rillington Place (London, 1961), I was convinced that Evans was an accessory to both murders, and probably an actual participant in the murder of his daughter. Kennedy's point, which impress- ed many people at the time, stressed the statistical improbability of two multiple murderers living in the same house. This would be true if the murders were uncon- nected; but when two men conspire to commit a murder together, or one of them persuades the other to join him in a murder, then there is nothing remotely improbable in the idea of their living in the same house, particularly if the victims did, too.
However, one could not help admiring the way Kennedy went on agitating for a reprieve 15 years after the unfortunate Evans had been hanged. Nor could one help rejoicing a little when Roy Jenkins secured a posthumous free pardon as Home Secretary. Having attended a trial or two in my time, I have no doubt that many innocent men and women have been hanged, even if Evans was not one of them, and Jenkins's gesture in pardoning a guilty man many years after his execution seemed to redress the balance a little, however ineffectually.
Another of Kennedy's most sacred tenets has been the presumption of an accused person's innocence, enshrined in British criminal law (although not, of course, in civil law, where the falsehood of any defamation is assumed, and with it the defendant's liability). He even wrote a book Presumption of Innocence (London 1975) expressing his dismay at the failure of this presumption in the case of Patrick Meehan, so we can suppose that at that time he thought that the presumption of innocence should extend to Irishmen.
I produce this background merely to
stress the full weight of Kennedy's appa- rent conversion to the opposite point of view in relation to the present Irish trou- bles. Did you see his article in the Daily Mail last Thursday? It appeared in the famous 'Why, oh why?' page six spot, employed by many of the greatest men of our time when they feel they have some- thing of urgency to communicate to the masses. The headline, a quotation in the text, was: 'Moderation in war is madness, especially when it is urged on one side and not the other.' In the course of his piece, he forgets everything he has ever argued against judicial execution or for the pre- sumption of innocence, and urges that SAS squads should shoot anyone fingered by intelligence as being an IRA terrorist. 'If he doesn't [shoot first], he will be a dead man. It is as simple as that.' You get the message, Carruthers? This is War.
I do not propose, on this occasion, to rehearse once again the point that we are not at war in Northern Ireland: if we were, the IRA would be quite justified in blow- ing up army coaches, even possibly terror- ising civilians, to achieve their ends. The IRA does not represent a sovereign state which is capable of declaring war on another, nor can a state of civil war possibly exist until the civil authority has declared one. To do so would be absurd in the circumstances of Northern Ireland, where active IRA members number a couple of hundred, their active sympathiz- ers a couple of thousand, in a province of 11/2 million people. The problem of North- ern Ireland is the problem of a commun- ity's criminal psychopaths united in a single purpose by outside support, whether from Libya, the United States or from behind the Iron Curtain.
Kennedy concedes that General Sir James Glover, the former C-in-C of British land forces, may have been right when he 'I ran into Tyson.' said that the IRA can never be defeated militarily, but he persists in the Sun- Thatcher line that even so we must hit them where it hurts. Cynics will argue that all this proves is that Kennedy is getting older. These Why-oh-why? articles often have to be written at short notice, and it seemed a good idea at the time. It strikes me that the conversion of Ludovic Kennedy into Carruthers-of- Curzon-Street has greater significance than any such explanation allows. There is no evidence that Kennedy's brain is softening. He is more than an aging liberal. He is the very personification — along with Mark Bonham Carter and a few others — of what Sir Peregrine Worsthorne and his satraps refer to sneeringly as 'the elites', who dare to oppose the New Brit common man of Thatcher and Murdoch. The New Brit common man would happily see any Irishman fingered by intelligence hung up on a meat hook. It was an awareness of this which led me to urge, on 23 July, that the time had come for 'the elites' to assert themselves, unless we were prepared to accept a Gaddafi-style leader, demented by conceit and delusions of royalty, elimi- nating her political opponents as and when they are pointed out to her.
But now, it seems, 'the elites' are them- selves deserting camp. Their prescriptions are those of the Sun newspaper — repre- senting a populist, gut reaction. Modern thinkers have great respect for this gut- reaction, but their attitude is not thought out. Perhaps I am wrong in seeing Ludovic Kennedy as a straw in the wind, but I would be surprised if a poll among Lady Antonia Fraser's left-wing cucumber sand- wich Study Group did not produce similar noises from most of them.
If I am right, then this development seems to be more serious and more wor- rying than the prospect of any number of suspected IRA terrorists 'executed' by the SAS. It represents the final descent of British society into its lowest common denominator. Thatcher may have achieved wonders in having demonstrated the errors of liberalism and unworkability of social- ism; if she has no inclination to stop the pendulum before it celebrates the triumph of stupidity and brutalism, then I, for one, will not mourn too much if the forces released succeed in 'executing' her — even if the event heralds a new Hattersley terror, with tax at 83 pence in the pound.
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