It is fair and humane to try to protect James Bulger's killers
STEPHEN GLOVER
What do we feel about anonymity for criminals? Obviously it is a bad thing. All of us must live with the consequences of our actions. A murderer who is given a new identity is largely shielded from those consequences. With a new name and passport he or she will be able to blot out the past. It certainly puts a new complexion on killing people.
Then we must consider the rights of the non-murderers among us who happily still make up the majority. If a former serial killer moves in next door, surely we have the right to know. Conceivably the killer might strike again. A good Christian should certainly pass the time of day with such a person, but one would want to keep a more than usually watchful eye on spouses, children and animals.
So the decision of a High Court judge to grant lifelong anonymity to the killers of James Bulger is in every way regrettable. I do not expect that Robert Thompson and Jon Venables are very likely to offend again. But they killed a two-year-old boy in a most horrible way; the full details of what they did were never published. Why should they be able to shuffle off what they have done? Any prospects there might be of confronting their crime are surely diminished by the granting of anonymity. They become different people with different identities who can forget their past.
And yet if Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss's judgment was regrettable, it was surely correct. For the fact is that if Thompson and Venables were denied anonymity, if they were just themselves, they would be destroyed by some tabloid newspapers. I do not mean that in such circumstances any of them would publish their exact whereabouts, though one should not rule out such a possibility. It is that they, or some of them, would create a climate of hate and vengeance in which it would be impossible for Venables and Thompson to live normal, or even safe, lives.
Consider the recent behaviour of the News of the World, which Dame Elizabeth remarked upon in her judgment. In some ways I was rather sympathetic to the position taken by the paper's editor, Rebekah Wade. Any parent would want to know if there were a convicted paedophile living down the street. The trouble is that 'naming and shaming' created a lynch-law mentality in which innocent people were targeted. The newspaper had a reasonable fear and its readers had a reasonable fear, but when the two were put together the result was rioting, lawlessness and injustice.
I don't have much confidence that all our tabloids would have shown restraint in the case of Venables and Thompson. They would have published lurid stories about the two young men. In part, of course, they would have been driven by the simple desire to sell more newspapers. But it's more complicated than that. The tabloids would have evinced genuine moral outrage and this would have communicated itself to readers, who would also feel genuine moral outrage. Unfortunately a few of them might then do something which most of us would regret.
Of course this may still happen. The Internet, Scottish newspapers and the foreign press are not covered by Dame Elizabeth's judgment. It may be that she is spitting in the wind. But that is no reason for not trying to make a judgment which seeks to be fair and humane. Thompson and Venables have probably not spent long enough in custody for the crime they committed. But if they are to be released early, they still do not deserve to be torn apart by a lynch mob.
Is it a precedent? I don't know. I hope not. Thompson and Venables were child killers, and child killers are rare, and probably more deserving of our mercy. Anonymity for adult murderers could never be justified. It would be better if there were no anonymity for child murderers either, but this is the world we live in and this is the way our tabloids are. Dame Elizabeth's judgment is in the end a judgment on our press.
On Monday Peter Stothard, editor of the Times, made a very welcome return to his editorial chair after an illness. His paper has missed him. One of the first things he did was to sack someone about to join the Times as a leader writer. This was Stephen Pollard, mentioned in these pages a few weeks ago as
one of the refuseniks leaving the Desmondowned Daily Express.
Mr Pollard's parting leading article for the Express, which appeared last Saturday, had been a coded attack on Richard Desmond, The code, once broken, was very vulgar. If you took the first letter of each of the 14 sentences of the editorial on organic farming, you got the message 'Fuck you Desmond'. This expressed Mr Pollard's extreme dislike for the new proprietor of the Express, and was also a reference to Mr Desmond's love of four-letter words.
It was a silly thing to do. First there was the sheer crudity. Hardly anyone reads second leaders on organic farming but one does not expect to be ambushed in a family paper by expletives, even of a coded variety. Then there was the aftermath. Comment editors and subeditors have been accused by Mr Desmond and his lieutenants of colluding with Mr Pollard, though they appear to have been unaware of the ruse. Even the paper's editor, Rosie Boycott, and her deputy, Chris Blackhurst, have not escaped suspicion. Mr Pollard has left many of his former colleagues in a stew.
So one can see why Mr Stothard got so worked up. This is not the sort of behaviour you expect of someone chosen by the deities to be a leader writer on the Times. But wasn't the editor's reaction a little excessive? Would not a stern written warning have sufficed? Some unkind souls have accused Mr Stothard of exploiting the issue to re-assert his authority as the returning editor. Surely he would not be so callous. No, I am sure he was genuinely affronted by what Mr Pollard had done.
But we are talking about a man's livelihood here. It is not certain that Mr Pollard will find a job of equal standing in Fleet Street. Stupid though his jape was — and by all accounts he is extremely contrite one should try to understand why this apparently mild and decent man was driven to act as he did. Mr Desmond is, after all, an absolute horror who makes Mr Stothard's own proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, look like the Archangel Gabriel. The offence must be judged in its context. Here was a young and idealistic journalist making an ill-judged protest against a pornographer who has gained control of a once great national newspaper. I don't believe that is a hanging offence and I am surprised, and slightly appalled, that my old friend should have thought that it was.
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