Another voice

'Speaking with authority

Auberon Waugh

T think the Sunday Times has got to be

I.the leading quality newspaper in the market because it is the best and it has got to stay the best. We've got to deal with the serious issues in a way that gets to a pretty wide audience. It's got to be a paper that speaks with authority.'

Thus Mr Andrew Neil, newly appointed editor of the Sunday Times at the delight- fully young age of 34, addressing his troops in that newspaper's issue of 26 June 1983. At the time, searching for some clue to the Sunday Times's future under his edi- torship, I was chiefly impressed by the way he managed to use the construction `to get to' five times in the course of three short sentences, every time in a slightly different sense.

Although deliciously youthful at 34, he was too old to be able to claim he was a victim of Mrs Shirley Williams's education- al reforms and too old, also, to have the excuse of feeling bashful. King Henry V, after all, was only 28 when he addressed his troops under somewhat similar circum- stances shortly before Agincourt:

Then imitate the action of the tiger, Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard favour'd rage. . . .

No, I decided that unless he was making a special effort to get to the journalist of the Sunday Times, this must simply be an example of the exciting new way young people speak to each other nowadays. It is only with subsequent developments in that newspaper that one begins to reappraise the significance of these strange exhorta- tory imperatives.

On Sunday the Observer carried a short, bottom-of-the-page, two-paragraph announcement under the heading 'Sunday Times in "spy" error':

The Editor of the Sunday Times has apologised to Mr Cedric Belfrage after the paper had alleged he had 'partially confes- sed' to being a KGB spy. The paper also reported he was dead.

Mr Belfrage, aged 80, who lives in Mexico, said yesterday the Sunday Times has given him £1,000. Mr Neil had subsequently writ- ten: 'There appears to be no reason whatso- ever why you should have been included in the MI5 list of suspected spies . . . please accept my personal apologies.'

To have included Mr Belfrage's name for no reason whatsoever seems odd. Under those circumstances, if I had in- advertently included his name on a list, I should be tempted to suppose that I was drunk at the time, but not even this possible reason is suggested. My own reaction to the snippet was that Mr Neil and the lawyers of Times Newspapers

Limited had escaped rather lightly if they paid Mr Belfrage only £1,000. I hope he accepted the money without prejudice and has reserved his rights in the matter. A libel of that magnitude, even if published for no apparent reason, should be worth at least £40,000. Sunday Times reporters could easily have found out that Mr Bel- frage was still alive if they had looked him up in the Authors and Writers Who's Who (Burke's) or The Writers Directory (St James/St Martin's), both of which give his address in Mexico.

I was puzzled by that particular 'scoop' at the time. As Phillip (sic) Knightley writes in this week's Sunday Times in an article pointing out the weaknesses of Chapman Pincher's case against Sir Roger Hollis, the assumption of guilt before conviction is against all our legal traditions — even when national security is involved.

What, then, is one to make of the extraordinary front-page lead story in this week's Sunday Times which carried the five-column headline: 'Woman, 28, behind IRA terror bombs':

Scotland Yard believes it has tracked down one of the IRA's top bombers. The suspect is . . . (name supplied), aged 28, originally from Belfast but now living on a council estate in Dundalk (the name of the council estate is supplied later). She is wanted in connection with at least five IRA bomb- ings on the British mainland (these are listed later, and include an alleged bomb attack on the Wimbledon home of Sir Michael Havers in November 1981). Police also believe she could have been involved in the planning of the attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton last year.

And so the story goes on. An unnamed Irish policeman is quoted as saying: 'She is well-known to us, a known republican activist and highly dangerous.' Even odder, the Attorney General, who was consulted by the Director of Public Pro- secutions about the issue of a warrant for her arrest and extradition from Ireland (where the British police found her without any problem, living on the Dundalk hous- ing estate), had apparently spoken to the Sunday Times on the matter, being quoted as saying: 'I am satisfied that there is enough evidence to justify the issuing of the warrant.'

So the warrant has been issued. It would be strange, under the circumstances, if it had not been. And when the woman is arrested and brought back to Britain, she will face trial, charged with at least some of the five offences of which the newspaper effectively accuses her in its headline: 'Woman, 28, behind IRA terror bombs' — as well, perhaps, as with involvement in the Brighton bombing, although we are told that police merely 'believe she could have been involved' in that.

In the 24 years I have been a profession- al, full-time journalist — Andrew Neil, I suppose, was still romping around in shorts when I first took my seat at the DailY Telegraph sub-editors' table under the basilisk stare of Mr Peter Eastwood, then the chief sub — I have often railed against the laws of contempt. It is only in Britain and in British law, I cry, that members of the public likely to serve on a jury are judged so stupid as to believe or be influenced by anything they read in the newspapers. It would be absurd to pretend that in a country like America, where questions of guilt and innocence are freelY discussed in the newspapers before and during as well as after a trial, a greater frequency of injustice results. There is a strong case for abolishing all. or nearly all, the laws of contempt which hamstring revelation as well as comment in this country. But the fact remains that in.a country where the press is hamstrung in this way — by the laws not only of contemPt but also of libel — greater weight inevitablY attaches to what newspapers can say. The, libel laws, where the defendant is assurnen guilty until he has proved his innocence, require that an editor must be in a position to prove anything he says which is defama- tory of someone. There can be few things more defamatory to say of a woman living in an Irish housing estate than that she is behind the IRA terror bombings. Hence there is a greater tendency in this countrY to suppose that what Mr Neil says about this woman is true than there would be in a country where the press was free to say what it liked. The risk that someone may take Mr, Neil's newspaper seriously is increaser' when he describes it, in the simple lan- guage of the people, as the one which 'ha. s got to be the leading quality newspaper In the market . . . . It's got to be a paper that speaks with authority.' With whose authority? one asks. Since I started in journalism, the laws of contemPt have been tightened to the point of inconv prehensibility. They are applied by the, present Attorney General, Sir Michae' Havers, with a rigour which borders on fanaticism. Only he appears to understand them. Only he can approve a prosecution. Yet in this case he appears to have co- operated in a story in a 'leading (Pont)? newspaper' which quite clearly states that woman is guilty of charges on which, she has not yet been arrested, let alone tried. Is the new position that an Attorney General can direct the press to accus.e people in this way? What chance has this wretched woman of a fair trial now that 'the leading quality newspaper . • . that speaks with authority' has announced her guilt, and has apparently had the assistance of the Attorney General, as well as rhe is police, in preparing the story? How old Sir Michael Havers?