DIARY
LUDOVIC KENNEDY Although I didn't really expect the Home Secretary to pay heed to my plea not to send the case of the Guildford Four back to the Court of Appeal, I am profoundly depressed by his decision to do so. (Mr Ivor Stanbrook, MP, is equally depressed though for a different reason: he thinks with Lord Denning, that it is better that Possibly innocent people should rot in prison rather than that belief in our system of justice should be shaken. Well, it is high time it was shaken, so we can think out ways of improving it.) I had hoped that Mr Hurd might have brought himself to do what Willie Whitelaw did in the Luton Post Office murder case after the appeals of McMahon and Cooper had been turned down by the Court of Appeal an unpre- cedented five times— release the prisoners unconditionally; and then set up an inde- pendent inquiry. The Court of Appeal is traditionally reluctant to overturn juries' verdicts (whether or not they might have been reached on false evidence), especially when the convictions rest, as these do, solely on police confessions. One of the most entrenched of its judges was Lord Justice Roskill. It was his blindness in the Luton case that prevented McMahon's and Cooper's fourth appeal from succeeding. It was his blindness in the earlier Guildford appeal that prevented him from seeing that the statements of the IRA men Dowd and O'Connell that they had planted the Guild- ford bombs and the prisoners hadn't were true. Anyone who reads the prisoners' letters home during the past 14 years must have the gravest doubts about their guilt. Paul Hill, one of them, wrote after the trial to his mother: 'Mum, we were fitted up something rotten.' That is not the language of hardened IRA men. If two former eminent judges (Devlin and Scarman), two former Home Secretaries (Rees and Jenk- ins), two current Archbishops (Hume and Runcie), the authors of two books on the case, the prisoners' solicitor and many others now consider the verdicts to be unsafe and unsatisfactory, then it might be thought that the Appeal Court, when it Convenes, will conclude the same. But I bet, in the first instance, they will think up all sorts of reasons for not doing so.
This has been a week of publishers' rounds to promote my autobiography. On Thursday I took the train with the enor- mously spry, 83-year-old Frank Longford, Who has written a book on the House of Lords, to a Yorkshire Post literary lunch in book-burning Bradford. We arrived at 11:30 and were asked what we wanted to drink. Frank said he never had coffee after 11 and never had a drink before 12. So what would he have instead? 'I'll have a whisky,' said Frank. After the speeches (in which Frank, with typical generosity, spent half his allotted time praising my book and that of Nancy Livingston, the third speaker, rather than his own) we ad- journed for the signing session. At my last signing my fellow authors were Kingsley Amis and Phil Drabble. I had a queue of maybe ten people, Kingsley of maybe twenty, but Phil Drabble's stretched out of sight. On the way back to London in the train Frank insisted on readings bits of my book in a booming voice and then quizzing me on them, to my discomfort and the bafflement of all within earshot. Later we discussed the possibility of (a) the Virgin Birth and (b) Myra Hindley ever being released from prison. I said I thought both unlikely. Frank, naturally, disagreed. Frank had a book with him called Faith Alive, a simple guide to Catholic beliefs in which he had underscored many passages (to dispel doubts?) He offered to send me a copy, but I implored him not to.
On arrival at Euston, to the BBC studios in Lower Regent Street to take part in a political quiz show called Out of Order. Julian Critchley and Craig Brown are one team and Austin Mitchell and I the other. Austin has three large pages of notes in front of him, and when I ask what they are, he says 'Jokes', and tells some in
the course of the proceedings. Does this mean that he knows what we are going to be asked, for if not, how can he tell if the jokes will be relevant? It begins to look like it, for when I am asked on what issue Sir Oswald Mosley resigned from the Government in the 1920s and look blank for the umpteenth time, Austin scribbles something on my pad. Donegal is what he seems to have written, so in desperation I say, Donegal. The audience laughs. Then Austin writes Unemployment, which was what Donegal was meant to be. So I say Unemployment and get an even bigger laugh. If only I had chosen Watergate instead of Mosley, for I covered it for the BBC and knew nearly all the answers.
Iwas due next day at 10.20 a.m. at the unmanned studio 2S in Broadcasting House to be interviewed on Radio Essex. But there was a muddle about the time and when I arrived it was occupied by Dannie Abse being interviewed on Radio Oxford. He was asked to read some of his marvel- lous poems and in that tiny studio I had the privilege of being a one-man live audience. Unlike many poets who deliver their lines in expressionless monotones, Dannie read his with variety and feeling. Quite elec- trifying was his rendering of 'In the Theatre', an account of how the surgeon Lambert Rogers probed a man's skull under local anaesthetic to locate a brain tumour; and how the man suddenly cried out 'in a ventriloquist voice' (and Dannie did the voice brilliantly), 'You sod, leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone'. Shocked, the surgeon drew out the probe, the nurses stood petrified.
Then the antique gramophone wound down and the words began to blur and slow . . . 'leave . . . my . . . soul . . . alone. . .
to cease at last when something other died.
And silence matched the silence under snow. Dannie Abse's collected poems are called White Coat, Purple Coat and are published by Hutchinson.
Am I getting senile that I no longer understand some things drawn and said? For instance, that cartoon on page 20 of last week's Spectator about the fox and the huntsman, even the one on page 11 about the birdman: both baffling. And what about this quote from Dame Elizabeth Murdoch in Bill Deedes' column in last week's Daily Telegraph: 'I am not sure whether this will be known as the age of promotion or the age of the alibi.' Bill Deedes concluded: 'It bears thinking ab- out.' It certainly does, Bill. Tony Howard and I thought about it all the way from Newcastle to Heathrow and are still none the wiser.
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