The press
Caesar's organ
Paul Johnson
`Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy house, is a receiver of stolen goods.' It is not yet clear whether Dr Johnson's famous riposte to a Thames waterman can fairly be hurled at The Thunderer. Consider: if I write you a letter, the physical bit of paper becomes your property. You can do what you want with it, even (if you are optimistic, and and a howling cad) flog it at Sotheby's. But the copyright of the contents remains mine. If you or Sotheby's publish it, I can sue. If the letter is stolen for copying purposes, and the publication of the contents, though innocent in themselves, leads to the distress and embarrassment of the sender, punitive damages might well be in order, as well as the criminal prosecution of the parties.
There is no doubt that Denis Thatcher's letter to the Welsh Secretary was illegally removed. I thought at first that the editor of The Times was merely receiving stolen goods. In publishing the letter — `a copy of which has reached The Times', it announced grandly — it made no mention of filthy lucre. We now know that the substance of the letter was first 'revealed' in a publication called Welsh Leak. According to the Observer, two other Welsh magazines had copies; another copy was 'obtained' by the Cambrian News Agency, which 'sold it exclusively to The Times', though it beats me how you can sell exclusive rights in matter which doesn't belong to you. If the Observer story is true, should not The Times, which takes a severe line on 'chequebook journalism', have come clean with its readers, revealed the nature of the transaction, and told then how much it had paid?
That is the first point. The second is more serious. I don't take the purist line that a newspaper, even an august one, should never under any circumstances make use of documents which have been pinched. But if it invades privacy, breaches copyright and pays for stuff which it surely knows has been illegally obtained, it must be able to defend itself on grounds of an overriding public interest. Where is the public interest in this case? My first reaction, on reading the letter in The Times last Thursday, was of contempt for the newspaper for using grubby means to obtain what was essentially a non-story. Nothing revealed since has changed that view. Mr Thatcher behaved impeccably. He did not telephone, or buttonhole, or write to his ministerial friend at his private address. He did not use official Prime Ministerial writing paper. He wrote openly, to the Ministry, from his own address and on his own paper and paid for his own stamp. He declared his interest. He did not ask for a favour but drew attention to an outrageous instance of bureaucratic delay. As such he was in an excellent English tradition which goes back to the Charles Dickens of Little Dorrit, in which he savaged the Tite Barnacles of the Circumlocution Office.
Tite-Barnaclism has grown enormously since Dickens's day, not least in local government, whose inefficiency and contempt for ordinary people is perhaps the biggest single outrage in Britain today. Ministerial spouses have an important role in checking the arrogance and bungling of jacks-in-office. For most ministers, once they get locked into the official world, their family is their only window onto the real one of ordinary people. It was Ted Heath's great weakness that he lacked such an aperture. If the wife of a Prime Minister nags her husband or his colleagues about such 'feminine' issues as rising prices in the shops, she is applauded, not censured. Mr Thatcher should not be penalised for his sex. It is an excellent thing that the husband of the Prime Minister still retains some business interests, and knows what is going on — still more important, what is going wrong — in the harsh world outside Whitehall, where businesses are struggling to keep afloat and create jobs. On the face of it, the council's behaviour in this case was unconscionable and the ministerial delay not to be endured. If Mr Thatcher had not been connected with the firm he would never have heard of the mess. In my view he was not merely entitled but under a public duty to let the minister know about it and he did so in a straightforward and honourable manner.
As the Guardian said, the first intimation of the Thatcher story was enough 'to warm the heart of any news-editor'. But once The Times had the text of the letter and the facts behind it, there was nothing 'that justifies its text being blazoned on any serious front page'. The miserable Times leader-writer who had to produce, next day, a defence of the decision to publish, made it clear his heart wasn't in it. 'Caesar's Husband' his effort was called, and the mere fact that it was shoved below Liberal Party defence policy and the politics of Chad was a confession of failure. The paper's stable companion, the Sunday Times, had another shot, and was no more convincing. It was left to the editor of the Sunday Mirror to express genuine enthusiasm.
Harry Evans, the editor of The Times, thinks I am inclined to be rather hard on him and his paper. Perhaps he is right. But then I believe The Times occupies a special position in the British press, and should maintain and must be judged by higher standards than the rest. The Times creates news itself by its decisions. For a private letter to appear in facsimile on any front page is a story; when it pops up on the front page of The Times it is an event. If, on examination, it turns into a non-event, and a reprehensible one too, The Times must expect to receive severe chastisement. In this case, the analogy of Caesar's wife applies not so much to Downing Street as to New Printing House Square.
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