Another voice

Legitimate public curiosity

Auberon Waugh

David English, the editor of the Daily Mail, has no matrimonial difficulties; he has never had a homosexual experience and has no lesbianism in the family. What a dull dog he must be. Never mind. A boyish forty-five, he still has time to catch up. It would be a sad day when every public post was filled by people with these negative qualifications. David English's recreations are listed as reading, skiing and boating. Ugh ! His namesake Michael English, the paralytically dull Labour MP for Nottingham (West), gives his recreations as 'reading history and the more usual pleasures of the majority of bachelors.'

Am I being particularly dirty-minded in seeing a sexual innuendo there? What are the more usual pleasures of the majority of bachelors? Not masturbation, I hope, or we must begin to entertain grave fears for Mr English's eyesight as he approaches the age of forty-six. This might impair his efficiency as an MP, and bring his recreations into the area of legitimate public interest, as opposed to the area of vulgar curiosity which he was presumably catering for when he listed them for Who's Who in the first place. Still, I suppose that for as long as he can still pursue his other solitary pleasure, of reading history, we must not worry.

Le vice anglais surely consists in worrying too much about these legitimate areas of public interest. Last week I mentioned Lord Wigg's terrible worry over the security aspects of John Profumo's sex life during the Christine Keeler scandal. Need he really have worried so much? A few years later, during the 1967 war in the Middle East, 1 happened to find myself with Mandy RiceDavies in the discotheque she kept at that time in Tel Aviv, when the news came through that Russia was sending more tanks to Egypt. 'Coo,' said Mandy, in a fine state of indignation for her adopted country, Israel : 'and to think of all I've done for . those Russians.'

But in point of fact, Mandy had done Practically nothing for the Russians beyond landing us with the disastrous Douglas Home and helping Labour to victory in

October 1964—not quite what Lord Wigg had in mind,! feel, when he spoke of security

risks. If we are honest, the whole Christine Keeler-john Profumo episode was no more and no less than the excuse for a grand national giggle. So, of course, was the Wigg episode of a few weeks ago. That had the additional poignancy of the biter bit, or snooper snooped, with a deliriously enjoyable letter to The Times from a strange Collection of elderly journalists questioning the right of a magistrate to decide who is lying and who is telling the truth. Their concern was strangely selective, when one comes to think about it, since Wigg's counsel had repeatedly accused Police Sergeant Peter McNulty of lying, and a simple acquittal would have left this stain upon his character. Perhaps the only answer is to ban all reporting of court proceedings, or parliamentary proceedings, or any other proceedings, lest someone's reputation suffer undeservedly.

But no journalist—not even one from the Parliamentary Press Lobby—wants it taken

to this extreme. Let us seek the middle way, they cry: Sergeant Peter McNulty's reputation may be blackened, our friend Lord Wigg's must not be called into question in any way. One or the other was lying, of course, and it is not only jolly interesting, it is also a matter of legitimate public interest to know which : the police sergeant or the Privy Councillor. But it is not for the likes of magistrates or judges to decide which is lying or which is telling the truth. Oh, no. That must be left to a committee of senior journalists, at least sixty years old and preferably with thirty years' experience of hearing confidential briefings in the Parliamentary Press Lobby.

Any discussion of rights of privacy is bound to be riddled with double-think or half-truth or both. I do not see that there is any respectable medium between the two extreme positions—that everyone's private life should be protected from vulgar curiosity, on the one hand, and on the other the doctrine enunciated by that great journalist Nigel Dempster during his recent inquisition by the Press Council, that anyone who enters public life forfeits his or her privacy. Even Dempster's Law allows a certain amount of fudging on the point of who is engaged in public life. Politicians and show business folk, of course. Newspaper proprietors? Yes, certainly. Editors? I rather think so. But journalists—wen, journalists are a little different, are they not ? Quite apart from the possibility that it may be a sin against the Holy Ghost to reveal details of journalists' private lives, there is the important consideration that their work is of national importance, it is essential that they should be held in respect. .

But however much one may laugh at the more obvious contortions of a crooked conscience and however much one may try to avoid them ones If

e..—as Dempster, to do him justice, certainly does—an element of hypocrisy undoubtedly survives. Two Sunday colour supplements have approached me in the last twelve months to ask if I would co-operate in a Profile of myself—the Sunday Times and the Observer. In both cases, after reflection, I declined, suggesting rather grandly that the country has enough to worry about without the unwholesome emotions of envy which might be excited by any inquiry into my personal circumstances.

But the truth in both cases was that I felt the deep and, for me, unusual stirrings of a privacy-urge.

Almost anyone, 1 imagine, can be humiliated by one revelation or another. At a time when so many wives are either insane

or obtrusive in some other way, they promise a rich harvest of humiliation for their men folk. Some undoubtedly deserve it, like the terrible Pierre Trudeau, but the only two recent occasions when I have been shocked or embarrassed by an intrusion of privacy was on television where two women were seen talking about husbands who had by then been removed from danger of harm: Martha Mitchell, on the Frost Programme, and Mrs Ewart-Biggs, on BBC Television News. Both women, of course, were cooperating enthusiastically in whatever intrusion occurred. It must have made many husbands wonder if any of them is safe.

In the case which gave rise to the present debate, a female MP called Maureen Colquhoun, who is also a strident supporter of women's liberation movements, had left her husband, set up a lesbian ménage and was sending cards to advertise this new arrangement to her friends. The Press Council decided that the public interest was involved, and obviously the Press Council was right. A speech in favour of women's liberation has quite different validity if one knows it is delivered by a practising lesbian.

But it would have been interesting even if the public interest had not been involved- if the lady had been the runaway wife of an unpleasant Tory MP, for instance. It is the crudest hypocrisy to pretend that one read it only for those elements which are of legiti mate public interest. Public interest is as capricious a way of deciding that a story is newsworthy as public curiosity, and so far as natural justice is concerned one might just as well decide that scandalous stories can be printed only if the victim has red hair, or was born under a particular sign of the zodiac.

The public surely has a right to be curious, even if it has no absolute right to have its curiosity satisfied. There is no conceivable obligation on anyone to assist in his own humiliation, but exposure is surely something we must all risk who have anything to hide. Arguments about the ill-effects of such exposure on innocent children are surely the crassest form of humbug, since such distress is caused by the message, not by the messenger. Whatever anyone says, and however many hairs are split in the definition of public interest, our attitude to a free press depends on whether we feel more threatened or more protected by it. Journalists, politicians and others in the public eye will always feel more threatened, but I don't think the public should allow them to get away with imposing their anxieties on everyone else.