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THE MARBLE FOOT

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This offer closes 28th February 1984. Some people in the National Union of Journalists seem determined to involve the union in a suicidal showdown with the courts of the kind that left the National Graphical Association — a much richer, more united and powerful body — bloody, bowed and impoverished. The NUJ is in some ways an unsatisfactory union. Because of the closed shop system, which operates with varying degrees of intensity in many British publications, the NUJ con- tains large numbers of reluctant members who pay their dues simply in order to exer- cise their profession. Hence they never turn up for chapel meetings, vote in elections or play any part in the affairs of the union. So the union tends to be run by left-wingers, including people who want to use the union to challenge recent government legislation, particularly the 1982 Act, which is the one that sank the NGA. In fact the Act works strongly to the benefit of most, NUJ members, whose interests are rarely, if ever, served by being caught up in other disputes within the printing industry.

To the NUJ hotheads, the case of David Dimbleby seemed to offer a first-class chance for a confrontation. Like his father before him, Dimbleby is not only a BBC star but proprietor of a group of local newspapers, in the Twickenham area. Like many other people engaged in producing newspapers, he ran into trouble with the NGA over redundancies. To stay in business at all — and so save the jobs of his other employees, including NUJ members — Dimbleby was obliged to switch the prin- ting of his papers to a firm called TBF Printers, where the closed shop does not operate. Dimbleby's 13 NUJ members had no sensible reason to get involved, but they were persuaded or pushed into doing so, and went on strike in solidarity with the NGA. discounted. The NUJ complied with the court order and withdrew its backing of the NUJ strikers on Dimbleby's papers, but ap- pealed against the ruling to the House of Lords. Meanwhile it looked for other ways to carry on the war against Dimbleby. The latest move was to try to inhibit Dimbleby's broadcasting career. The idea was to get members of the BBC's 1•11-!-/ chapels to 'black' his broadcasts, and,..,1,r) particular his presentation of the BBL- Budget coverage on 13 March. The ra- tionale behind this campaign is byzantine th its perverted ingenuity. The NUJ cited BB. C staff rules on outside activities, forbidding employees to 'permit any conflict between their duties [to the BBC] and their private interests' in such a way as would `impair their ability to carry out those duties effec- tively'. Dimbleby is not a member of the BBC staff, but a free-lance under contract, and has always avoided conflicts of interest by declining to take part in broadcasts deaf' ing with the printing industry. In any case, the idea of the NUJ trying ,t°, stop BBC people engaging in controversial outside activities is rich in humour, since if the rule were to be applied in the sense the union seems to want, it would fall heavily on a large number of political tYPcs employed by the BBC, virtually all of themon the Left. And then of course instan,t, pressure-groups, not least the NUJ, woo' set up a barnyard cackling of `censor` ship', 'witch-hunt', `McCarthyism' the like — you can write the script yourself. The fact, of course, is that the objection t° Dimbleby was not that he had engaged ",1,1: embarrassing political activities, as : plainly had not. There is nothing in his c?',, duct, inside or outside the BBC, could fairly be said, in the words of, the BBC staff rule, 'to bring the BBC into disrepute or affect its reputation for impar tiality'. Dimbleby's sin, in the eyes of the NUJ, was quite different and mite simpler: he had exercised his right, like allY other aggrieved citizen, to invoke the law r the land under the 1982 Act. The absurdity of the claim that Dimbleb_Y was bringing the BBC into disrepute highlighted by the fact that the Corporatil itself is doing exactly the same as he is. 111ft quite separate dispute, arising from Robed Maxwell's International Printing CorPoZ Lion contract to print the Radio Times, LP t BBC has been using the 1982 EmploYiheil_ Act against the print union Sogat. It 0.; stopped their blacking of the paper and .10 now suing them for nearly L150,0.111 damages. How could the BBC parish Dimbleby for conduct identical with tai own? In any case, if the NUJ were blebY log1,5 would be blacking not just Dim dotty, up until his latter-day fondness for spiritualism and his belief that the Jews are all Chinamen. He campaigned tirelessly against capital punishment, with the zeal of one who had spent three months in a Nationalist prison in Malaga under sentence of death, listening every day as other prisoners went out to the firing squad. He wrote a book, Darkness at Noon, which, as Orwell saw, illuminated one of the great

The Knight, the Lady and the Priest Georges Duby (Allen Lane £14.95)

Simon of Crepy was 'morbidly averse to worldly pleasures', we are told. That, I think, is putting it mildly. Simon's father, Raoul, had accumulated great lands and Power by marrying two or possibly three heiresses. For this he had been excom- Municated not for adultery, but for incest, since one of his wives was

Simon, however, cousin. however, refused to carry on the

Sex, the Church and Petronille

Ferdinand Mount

problems of the age and which so frightened the French Communists that they tried to suppress it by buying up and destroying its stock before the 1945 election, an election which Koestler may well have influenced. A man who had done nothing else would deserve Yeats's epitaph on Swift: He served human liberty. He certainly deserved a better memorial than Stranger on the Square.

concession. In fact, this attitude set so hard and so clear that it is not easy for us to imagine that things were ever different. But they were. And the Church's power over marriage was won only with great dif- ficulty and against fierce opposition within as well as outside the clergy. Indeed, the first sinners to be hauled before exclusively matrimonial Church courts were the mar- ried canons who obstinately refused to part with their wives.

Bringing together the diaries, letters, memoirs and journals of some of the most eminent and influential, famous and infamous individuals ever to have put pen to paper

LIVES AND LETTERS

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to property was in constant doubt, and an inconvenient birth or death might mean the withdrawal of a handsome gift or legacy, the Church had to protect its own in- vestments.

These wrangles, which Duby recounts with such laconic charm, may seem extraor- dinary and remote today. Yet at the time, the calculation of cousinship was the coinage of clerical power over marriage and inheritance. The curious rules were the in- struments of the Church's twofold task: to achieve total dominance over the institution of marriage, while at the same time attempt- ing to reinforce both the worldly and the spiritual power of the monastic ideal. It is hardly surprising that the results sometimes looked as confusing as though the League

Alexander of Russia: Napoleon's Conqueror Henri Troyat Translated by J. Pinkham (New English Library £10.95), Most Alexanders are not expected to be Great. They don't mind being nor- mal, ordinary, or even small. The Scotch kings who sported the name were not unduly depressed by it. There was a Grand Duke Alexander of Lithuania who appears to have aimed no higher than Grand Dukes of Lithuania not called Alexander. With Czars of all the Russias, the case was dif- ferent. Particularly with the first, to whom much was given, and from whom much was expected.

His grandmother was Catherine the Great, who of course had ways of living up to the description denied to a mere man. However, she expected her grandson to be a world conqueror and a philosopher king, and she made arrangements for him to suc- ceed her in lieu of his unpopular father Paul. When he came to the throne, less im- mediately than Catherine had wished, his glamour and good-will made him the idol of his subjects. They expected the world of him; and most of them went on expecting it for the next 24 years. They submitted to his experiments in government like volunteer guinea-pigs. For him, they overthrew Buonaparte. For him, they marched to Paris, and so'rnade him the most popular Russian the world had ever known. Or would know, until Stalin. He was even awarded a doctorate by the University of Oxford. The same cannot be said either of Stalin, or of Alexander the Great.

He was handed supremacy over the Old World on a silver salver. He graciously con- sented to save civilisation, first from the Corsican, then from Infidelity and Revolu- tion, and most of the rulers and statesmen of Europe bowed respectfully to St Against Cruel Sports had attempted to take over the Quorn.

And it is hard to avoid the feeling that the intensity of emphasis even today on 'that side of life' — the obsessive urge to define sex and marriage as heaven or hell — springs, at least in part, from the psychological impact of this titanic tussle for control.

At the beginning of the 1 1 th century, Bourchard, bishop of Worms, drew up a questionnaire to help his network of in- formers report back on the parishioners' misdeeds. Duby calculates that more than one in three of the questions were about sex in one form or another. The agenda for the average Church of England synod these days shows little change.

Petersburg for a decade. He was even moderate in his appetite for other men's territory, just taking the odd snack, like Finland and Bessarabia. He never went mad, and he died in his bed. By the stan- dards of Russian rulers, he was prodigious- ly lucky; and yet it could be argued that none of them, not even Nicholas 11, was more pitiful.

His character was a curious mixture of jelly and ice. He hated tyranny, but, let his tyrannical father become Czar and pandered to his military mania. His filial feelings stopped short of preventing his father from being strangled by his friends. He found it impossible to sleep while this was going on, but it happened. He neither rewarded nor punished the murderers. He spent years chattering in private about reform, liberty and enlightenment, but in the end entrusted the government to the cruellest and most unenlightened minister he could find. Busy but lazy, serious but vacuous, he rushed into war with Buonaparte for no purpose that could benefit Russia, and lost it with ignominy at Austerlitz.

Then he changed his tune, and fraternis- ed with the enemy. To no effect, because he fraternised with everyone. In the war of 1812, he sneered at the generals who beat the French, and then made his armies carry him to a pinnacle of glory from which he could preach and posture, like a sanc- timonious fop. In religion, in politics, in government, he deferred to every strong- minded charlatan he met, and promoted their dismal nostrums. His utopianism was satisfied by the creation of military set- tlements run on penal lines. His universal benevolence produced a system of interna- tional police surveillance, His love of order found expression in the knout, the cane, the censor's pencil and the panoptical prison.

Even so, he died without taking the pro- per steps to ensure a peaceful succession, or

Jelly and ice

Eric Christiansen

The Spectator 25 February 1984 preventing his discontented guards officers from breaking out into revolt. Negligence could go no further, whether the cause of !I was indecision, self-pity or despair. His was the regime that drove some of his 50- jects to conclude that they could dispense not only with the Czar himself, but with the whole system of autocracy. His successes vanished like snow; his failures were lasting. Such is the contrast between promise and performance in which most historians have delighted, and it hangs over the latest biography by Monsieur Troyat. It is a roost polished and readable performance, the work of a very high-grade hack, whose humour heightens the pathos of Alex' ander's failures: as a son, as a husband, as a general, as a ruler, as a Christian, as a philosopher, as almost everything, in fact, except as an actor, a seducer, and a dandY, The blessed Czar smiles gently on the dust' jacket, with the confidence born of really superb military tailoring. Peruse the volume, and Troyat's dissection of his dicta and fa,c,- la leaves him with nothing else to smile about. C'est inagnifique, mais ce n'est Pas lin work of original scholarship. It is an attrac- tive distillation from a mass of printed materials of which the greater part are memoirs and therefore unreliable. There is too much quotation from professional deceivers like Metternich and Talleyrancl, and from the common run of titled gossiPs, who wrote merely to satisfy the public ar)- petite for scandal. It is not always clew