DIARY
LUDOVIC KENNEDY Anong the junk mail that reached me this week was a rag calling itself CARE Campaigns Bulletin. 'Let's be clear what we mean by euthanasia,' it says. 'Euthanasia is where a doctor, friend or relative intention- ally ends or helps to end, a person's life . . . 'The uneducated polemicist who wrote this seems unaware that euthanasia means 'the good death' and that the present debate is about voluntary euthanasia, that is a request from a patient and only from a patient suffering from an incurable termi- nal illness for a good death to end it. 'Pain can now be controlled in 90 per cent of cases,' claims the polemicist again, seem- ingly unaware that it is the indignities and discomforts of chronic vomiting, inconti- nence, tube feeding, insomnia that can't be controlled, which so many terminal patients find unendurable. A recently retired ear, nose and throat cancer surgeon wrote to me last week: 'What makes me mad about the anti-euthanasia lobby is their belief that the misery of terminal illness can always be relieved. Those making such claims must be totally ignorant of the true position.'
Nor do you have to be terminal to find death a consummation to be wished, for if the fear of euthanasia once was that of being snuffed out before our time, the fear today is of living beyond our time, having to endure a degraded senility, all love of living gone. At 83 my mother, not terminal but exhausted by life, wanted to die a year before she was able to, and this old lady Who heard me broadcast on the subject, is another: How right you are. I am 90, living alone. I can shop and care for myself, above all I have the most loving and caring family, but I have had enough, dread living to 100 and want to be 'gathered'. I've considered taking my own exit, but fear hurting my dear family and friends making unkind comments; and partic- ularly I fear bungling any attempt. My kind doctor knows I do not wish to be revived. There should be a clinic where, after a month's reservation to prove we really mean it, we could go, taking our own pills, ensuring that we can depart in peace and dignity and not be discovered at home, halfway out. Birth control is accepted, so should death control be too.
In the wake of the Grand Duchess Fergie affair, the monarchy has taken a drubbing such as I have not seen in my lifetime. Janet Daley in the Times suggested that the country may finally be growing tired of the deception that what you are is more important than what you do', while A.N. Wilson in the Evening Standard looked for- ward to a time when an elected president was installed in Kensington Palace, and
Buckingham Palace had become a confer- ence centre, concert hall and art gallery. This is strong stuff but not to be dismissed. And it has come about because time has rendered invalid Walter Bagehot's warning about the monarchy not being able to stand too much daylight. When the royal family first opened their doors to television, what- ever residual mystery there was about them vanished. Kings and queens, princes and princesses are the stuff of story books and the role we expect ours to play (half human, half Olympian) is almost impossi- ble. Relations with many of their subjects cannot be other than unnatural, leading too often to gush or inarticulacy on the one hand and well disguised embarrassment on the other. Our obsession with their activi- ties is pathetic: it as though, having lost an empire, we seek compensation by still clinging to its trappings. People say, 'Isn't a president a comedown after a queen?' and the answer would be no because he is not there for adulation. This country could rejuvenate itself as a republic, encouraging us to look outward as we once used to instead of gazing at our navels. When King George V lay on his deathbed, the BBC announced that his life was moving peace- fully towards its close. I hope that the same
'There's a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there, here a moo there a moo, everywhere a moo-moo.'
may soon be said of the collective public life of today's royal family.
Well, it may be said, even if the monarchy were to end, it won't be for years and years, so integral a part is it of the fab- ric of our lives. Yet it could begin to crum- ble even sooner. A poll in my native Scot- land last week showed a large majority in favour of some form of self-government. If that comes about in the near future and we make a fresh start, I cannot see a Scottish parliament allowing the establishment of a Vice-regal Lodge: the prospect of Andy and Fergie in Holyrood House is insup- portable. And if Scotland goes, can Wales be far behind?
If the monarchy was the last great institu- tion to succumb to television, there remains one other which still holds out against it — the law-courts; and fuddy-duddies of all kinds who saw the William Kennedy Smith rape trial thanked heaven that it couldn't happen here. But because a rape trial is the least suitable to televise does not mean that no trials should be televised. In my view they should be; and that was the view of a working party of the Bar Council, chaired by Jonathan Caplan QC, which recently examined the whole question, talked to judges, barristers, broadcasters and politi- cians, visited jurisdictions where trials are televised, and came to this conclusion:
We have found the objections to television are based largely on fears which in practice are revealed to be unfounded, and in part upon an emotive reaction to television which does not do justice to the skill and responsi- ble attitude of the broadcasters.
The Committee agreed on certain safe- guards (no reaction shots or shots of the jury lest they be nobbled, the judge to have overall control etc) but their view was a simple one: that a trial is a public spectacle
and in any place where press and spectators are permitted, there television and radio have a right to be also. As for witnesses feeling more nervous giving evidence than they are anyway, the Committee found that in courts where trials are televised this had not been so. A few of the trials we could have watched with benefit over the past 40 years were those of John Christie the multi- ple murderer, Dr John Bodkin Adam, Jere- my Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party, Dr Stephen Ward, Jeffrey Archer against the Star, Lord Aldington against Count Tolstoy. Parliament held out against televi- sion for 25 years because MPs feared it might alter the character of their proceed- ings. Their fears, as some of us kept telling them, were to prove groundless, and it will be the same with the courts.
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