THE MUGGERIDGE ARTICLE Stg,—The writer of your last week's 'Notebook'
says that as he has not read the Muggeridge article 'com- ment is impossible'—and goes on to comment. Admittedly there was only a stinging lunge at the Romanoff reference; but comment should indeed be impossible on any mere fragment lifted from a con- text of 6,000 words.
I haven't read the article either. Who, of all the commentators to date, has? But I know something about it not generally known: that the Sunday Ex- press, who had somehow come by a typescript, offered to buy the British serial rights for an im- posing sum. As this would have meant their cutting it to shape, and as the author had a fair idea what shape they would cut it to, he declined both offer and sum. So the paper, if its readers were to be dutifully served, could only make a front-page story out of a few suitable selections, headlined 'SHOCKING krrAcs. ow THE QUEEN.' Publication, by a quaint chance, coincided with the appearance of the first of the new Muggeridge series in the rival Sunday Dispatch.
It is largely on the basis of this front page that I heard my bus companions the other day de- scribing Muggeridge as a 'Judas' and agreeing loudly that he should be shot. (They were mostly gentlemen of Fleet Street, on their way to the day's work.) Is it on this basis, Sir, that your 'Notebook' joined in? And would its next paragraph, which attacked Mug- geridge's Dispatch article—rightly or wrongly is beside the point—have been written at all if other hounds had not been baying? I can understand the stupidity of my bus-companions, the eager bile of the news- paper letter-writers who know nothing of Muggeridge except that they hate his TV face; I can, of course, understand the Sunday Express; but I cannot under- stand the Spectator.
When Malcolm Muggeridge was my editor I once proposed a somewhat barbed sally against an un- favourite politician of his—no one can deny that he has his unfavourites—but he said, 'I'd rather we didn't. The pack's after him now.'—Yours faithfully, J. B. BOOTHROYD The Savage Club, 1 Carlton House Terrace, SW 1
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