ANOTHER VOICE

More power to the elbows of ordinary working people and their families

AUBERON WAUGH

A. disturbing news item appeared in Lord Stevens's reinvigorated Star news- paper last Monday. It told how Shane Dewar, a boy of 12, went through puberty at the age of five and had grown to an amazing 5ft 4ins by the time he was nine:

Specialists diagnosed a rare condition called Precocious Puberty which affects only a handful of children in this country. In Shane's case, it meant he was capable of sex before he was old enough to go to school.

All this happened some time ago. It became top-page news, spreading across five columns when his mother, Carol, decided to announce to the world, ten and a half years after the event, that she had an explanation for it:

A Star Stunna's brother who was a man sexually at the age of five could have been the victim of a hospital horror accident, his mother claimed last night. Carol Dewar said her son Shane had a radioactive substance splashed on him when he was just 18 months old.

She said: 'He was having this atomic stuff piped into his body to light up his kidneys when some of it spilled on his trousers.'

Perhaps I should explain for those who do not yet read Lord Stevens's reinvigo- rated Star newspaper that a 'Star Stunna' is a girl who agrees to be photographed, usually bare-breasted, in the pages of the Star. Shane's sister, who had appeared previously, was called Georgie De War, but no further picture of her decorated the story about her amazing, atomic brother. Nor were we shown pictures of Shane during the course of his unusual develop- ment. Nothing explained why Mrs Dewar should suddenly make this claim on a Sunday night in October, seven years after Shane's precocious puberty had manifested itself, or why the Star should print it if she did. This is how the story ended:

Said Mrs Dewar, 41, from Plymouth: 'I asked doctors if it could have been through the stuff spilled on him, but they said no. I still think it had something to do with it, though. It took six washes to get the stuff out of his trousers.'

What are we to make of it? Prima facie it seems unlikely that a spillage of this sort could have such an effect, but a single telephone call by the Star's medical corres- pondent (if, indeed, it has a medical correspondent) could have established which was right — Mrs Dewar or the doctors she had already consulted on the subject. Her only reason for thinking there might be some connection between the two things seems to be that it took six washes to remove the spillage from Shane's trousers, and it might have put her mind at rest to be assured that there was no connection.

But that would have spoiled the story, of course. What was the story, again? Here it is, across five columns at the top of the page: MY AMAZING ATOMIC SON - he became a man at five!

A Star Stunna's brother, who was a man sexually at the age of five, could have been the victim of a hospital horror accident, his mother claimed yesterday.

The fact that Carol made the claim on the day before gives it some sort of topicality, I suppose, although the events described all took place many years before. One wonders about the exact circum- stances of her making the claim. I suspect that the unnamed Star reporter was visiting her home to interview the Stunna daughter for a new caption when Carol made this surprising claim. The 'news' aspect reposes not so much in the nature of the claim as in the fact that Carol made it. The fact that Carol's daughter, Georgie De War, had already shown her breasts to Star readers elevated it to something like family news.

Should we judge that the reporter, news editor and home copytaster on the Star have a defective sense of news? I do not think so. Anyone who has stood in the queue at Taunton post office on a Monday morning will know that this is exactly the sort of thing which interests working peo- ple and their families. It has all the ingredients of working people's news: sex, children, medical curiosity, a suspicion of incompetence in the health service and a deep mistrust of 'experts' in any field. Doctors may have denied Carol's theory, but they would, wouldn't they? Anybody present could cap Carol's story of a `hospit- al horror accident' with dozens of worse ones, involving faulty diagnosis, surgical cutlery — even teacups and saucers — left inside after an operation, wrong limbs amputated. . . .

My point in discussing this matter at such great length is to raise the question of whether Mrs Thatcher knows what she is doing when she promises an 'irreversible shift of power in favour of working people and their families'. At least she did not promise an irreversible shift of wealth and power, as in the second Labour manifesto of 1974. We should be thankful for small mercies. The context of her remark sug- gests that she was merely promising to remove the power of other people to boss working people around, which is not quite the same thing as giving them power. But there are other indications that she has the proletarian-populist bit between her teeth, and I can't help wondering whether she will run away with us all.

Has she, for instance, studied Lord Stevens's reinvigorated Star newspaper and its sister publication the Star Sunday Sport? I really cannot recommend them too highly. It saves us all the tedious duty of talking to our London cab-drivers. Maybe I am getting deafer, but it seems to me that London cab-drivers speak less distinctly than in former times. In any case, they always say the same things. These two newspapers provide an entirely different insight into the concerns of working people and their families. The front cover of my Star Sunday Sport this week showed a coloured photograph of a peculiarly hideous young woman in bathing dress with the caption: 'Happy Birthday Natalie. Our recent super Stunna Natalie Banus is 16 today. . . . You'll see a lot more of Natalie in our sister paper The Star this week. Don't miss it.'

Is she really called Natalie Banus? Where do such people come from, sudden- ly breaking the surface of our placid English Sundays? Does Natalie also have a brother with some peculiar medical condi- tion — perhaps a three-foot penis — which might be attributable to NHS incompe- tence? Wherever they come from, these are the New Britons, not the growling old bores who write to the Sun and News of the World to say that hanging is too good for the directors of Townsend Thoresen. I wonder how long it will take for the politicians to catch up with them.