DIARY
The interminable 'revelations' about the royal family which have filled the press in recent weeks hold a lesson so obvious that many people seem to have missed it. The moral is that it is folly to take seriously what the newspapers say. One might have thought John Major's triumph at the gener- al election, which many hacks including myself expected Neil Kinnock to win, would have induced a degree of scepticism about the ability of journalists to under- stand what is going on. Yet even some members of the royal family seem to take what the newspapers say about them to heart. I know this is a human failing: I recall an almost sleepless night I spent some years ago, after a diary column had rung me up, when I feared it would publish something embarrassing about me the fol- lowing day. It didn't, but if it had I ought not to have minded. We need to be a bit more robust. Andrew Neil has done us a service. He has reminded us that journal- ism is a low and often thuggish occupation. That is the main reason why journalists, who love to invent high moral explanations for what they do, cannot bear Mr Neil. He is like the uncouth relative who arrives with his loutish entourage at a wedding and destroys the rest of the family's pretensions to gentility. Grub Street is by nature grub- by. Some good men, and good writers, have been hacks: Dr Johnson was a hack. But almost anything one reads in the press on a subject one happens to know about proves to be wrong, or at best misleading.
Aminor illustration of this truth was afforded by the death last month of the Independent's columnist Peter Jenkins. His admirers burst forth with extravagant eulo- gies. According to them, he was 'the best political columnist the British Press has known'. He was indeed at times the soul of . affability — I remember with pleasure a game of croquet with him and his delightful family — and he was quite untainted by puritanism. But many journalists thought Peter was an intensely boring writer, who got things wrong at least as often as the rest of us, and a preposterously self-important man. He could be exceptionally nasty to underlings such as secretaries and sub-edi- tors; exceptionally pleasant to powerful politicians and editors. In conversation he would turn laddish. 'The Irish are an inferi- or race,' he would remark, and one was supposed to admire his daring: which would have been greater if he had put so loathsome a sentiment in his column. Scarcely a word about this less admirable side of Peter appeared in his obituar- ies. De mortuis nil nisi bonum is a very fine principle, but so is trying to tell the truth. ANDREW GIMSON Good news from Barcelona. The Euro- pean Community has brushed aside objec- tors who think politics should be kept out of sport, and has taken over responsibility for the 25-minute climax to the opening ceremony at the Olympic Games. It has arranged for 2,000 Catalan villagers to build a tableau of 12 human pyramids, a concept based on the Catalans' ancient tra- dition of seeing who can build the highest and fastest castella, or human pyramid, to the accompaniment of traditional music. The record, according to Nigel Dudley of the European, is a pyramid nine people high. I am not sure what I would make of this if I were a Catalan villager, but as a keen European I shall be watching in some alarm lest any of the 12 pyramids shows signs of falling over. One trusts that the leaders of the other 11 pyramids will have a word beforehand with the Catalan villagers representing Denmark, and will tell them they must on no account lose heart, or else. The Irish pyramid looks fine. But what's going on over there? Surely the mighty German pyramid isn't starting to sway? We had better move quickly forward to the per- formance of the Ode to Joy.
Until recently, I went along with the conventional liberal line that the police have got above themselves. Like many members of the chattering classes, I started to think this after a policeman was insolent to me while checking whether the driver of the car I was in was drunk. I even devel- oped a theory about why the police have
got uppity: the trouble is that they take 'classlessness' seriously. They have only one grade of intake, and all their leaders have to rise through the ranks. This means they are less meritocratic than they should be few of the most gifted potential recruits will opt for a career which involves starting at the same level as everyone else — and have stronger social bonds with each other than with the rest of us. But though this may be true, it now seems trivial compared with another problem. I recently witnessed a riot on the edge of Coventry. Most of the riot- ers were children, and it was the middle of the night. They justified what they were doing on grounds of 'police harassment', but these children needed harassing a great deal more by someone else, preferably their parents and teachers. They needed harassing into bed, once the petrol bombs had been harassed out of their hands, and the next day they needed harassing into learning something at school. It is com- pletely unfair to leave this job to the police.
Afriend has just lent me The Marquise of 0— by Heinrich von Kleist, in the Pen- guin Classics edition. I had read nothing by Kleist, who committed suicide in 1811, and have seldom come across a work so full of intense, violent and volatile feelings as this 45-page story. The first sentence sets the scene. 'In M—, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of 0—, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up chil- dren, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find her- self in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expect- ing to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.' A modern writer in search of strong effects could start with a woman in B—, an important city in the English Midlands, who inserted the follow- ing announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause,
found herself HIV positive... Kleist's hero- ine has been raped while in a faint, having just been rescued from Russian troops storming the fortress commanded by her father. The modern writer would doubtless, if as great a genius as Kleist, find ways to achieve as overwhelming an impact on the reader. But if he used this week's Aids story from Birmingham, would have the harder task, because the wickedness of the deed would not command universal assent. We are still strongly against rape, but many of us think that to infect a woman with Aids is more of a technical than a moral transgres- sion. The real trouble was that the man failed to wear a condom.
Previous page
