AND ANOTHER THING
When is a contract not a contract?
When a writer's heirs benefit
PAUL JOHNSON
The British are suffering from an out- break of their old disease — envy. I don't entirely blame the new Labour govern- ment. Some of the most venomous criticism of so-called 'fat cats' of the lottery and pri- vatised industries has been whipped up by cartoonists in Tory newspapers, themselves paid over £100,000 a year. And the worst instance, the continued persecution of the Churchill family over the public's purchase of the old man's papers, had its origins in Tory establishment circles, where the Churchills have never been persona grata. (Randolph Churchill was prevented by Conservative Central Office from getting back into parliament and his son, young Winston, has now suffered the same fate.) I must declare an interest. I know four Churchills and like them all. Lady Soames is everything a grande dame ought to be and so few are these days. She has both her father's nobility and her mother's sweet- ness. Her book on her mother is a master- piece of its kind and I am not surprised she resents people horning in on the subject with their catchpenny efforts. I like her for a particular reason. She is the only lady (apart from Marigold) who now dares to tick me off (for asserting, for example, that her father planned his own funeral, or for referring to the Anglican Church as 'the Church of Sodom'). In the old days when I was young, my outrageous views often caused distinguished battle-axes to take a swing at my provocative head. Mrs Dora Gaitskell actually handbagged me, and Mrs Annie Fleming literally rapped me over the knuckles, sitting next to her at dinner, for denouncing her husband's James Bond novels in an article called 'Sex, Snobbery and Sadism'. Lady Violet Bonham Carter summoned me to tea to 'pick a bone', as she put it, and Lady Pamela Berry regularly bawled me out on the telephone. I am even old enough to have been rebuked by Lady Waverley. Now the Age of the Dragon is past and there is no one left to put me firm- ly in my place — except for Mary Soames, and she is not a dragon at all but a gentle custodian of the best English standards. So she is dear to me.
Of her children, Emma Soames has matured into a brilliant editor, who has transformed the fortunes of the Telegraph Magazine, making it one of the jewels in Conrad Black's crown, and Nicholas is a splendid period piece, who sports good, old-fashioned Tory gents' suitings, makes traditional Tory noises in a powerful voice and inclines one to sing 'There'll Always Be An England'. He holds some dangerous left-wing views, in my opinion, but his heart, if not his head, is always in the right place.
Young Winston is a favourite of mine because I had a soft spot for his brave father, who stood up to the press barons in the days when no one else did. Young Win- ston is brave too. I shall not forget the time he came to my aid on a dreadful television programme when I was under abusive attack from the black ringmaster Darcus Howe. It is no joke, I imagine, being called Winston Churchill and having to live up to it, especially if your mother was Pamela Harriman, whose sins, real and imaginary, continue to resonate. He is a good egg and I am entirely behind him on the issue of the Churchill papers. We have it on the author- ity of Lord Rees-Mogg, who is a leading expert on the value of literary properties, that the price Churchill charged the nation, £13 million, is only about half their market value, which Rees-Mogg puts at £25 million.
In any case, behind the criticism of Churchill and the cries of outrage at the papers being sold, rather than donated or, as some would have it, seized — is a presumption which I, as an author, find totally unacceptable. It is that the legal title to literary property is, in some metaphysical way, inferior to the title to any other kind of property. The argument seems to run as follows. If you inherit papers from your father or grandfather which have an intrin- sic as well as a copyright value, and they are of interest to the public, they don't really belong to you. Whatever your financial cir- cumstances, you are under a moral if not a legal obligation to surrender your title to the nation or sell it for a nominal sum.
I don't wear this line of thought at all. It `You only hate me for my money.' goes right back to the days before copyright existed and anything you wrote was up for grabs by printers and publishers. Writers were plundered in their lifetimes and their heirs got nothing at all. Now I can under- stand the view of those who insist that all property is theft and that inheritance is wrong; but that is not the argument in the Churchill case. The critics think it is per- fectly all right for themselves to inherit houses and paintings and shares and land, and to pass these things on to their chil- dren, but quite wrong — and indeed `greedy' — for heirs to benefit from literary property and documents of historical value. What the critics are in fact doing is launch- ing a confiscatory assault on the rights of the creative minority. Dr Samuel Johnson and others had to fight long and hard to establish copyright and we writers should stick together to defend its principle now. We should uphold the law that letters and papers, whatever their public interest, are inheritable as fully and absolutely as stocks and shares.
There is another principle at stake in this envious outburst over 'greed' and 'fat cats', and it is just as important. The argument runs that a lawful agreement between the state and individuals ceases to be morally valid if the profits they make are larger than the public — in effect the media thinks proper. When this happens, the argument continues, the government has the right to blackmail one party to the bar- gain into 'surrendering' its 'loot'. This was the reasoning behind Chris Smith's bullying of the lottery directors. Here we have a frontal attack on the law of contract. If you destroy the law of contract by insisting that certain contracts are invalid when you say so, you undermine the rights of all proper- ty. And if you weaken the individual's right to own property, you are halfway to destroying freedom too. So let us be clear about this. If the government made a bad bargain, then it must get it right the next time. If the privatisation laws are unfair to the public, then they must be changed for the future. But the law, as it stands, is the law and a contract is a contract and must be honoured. To abuse people publicly merely for exacting their legal rights is itself dis- honest and an abuse of power by the gov- ernment and the media, both of which are always exigent in extracting their legal rights. Let us have no more of this nonsense.
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