ANOTHER VOICE
The terrible dangers in taking a high moral line
AUBERON WAUGH
For an Englishman, there was some- thing homely and reassuring in the specta- cle of those Rumanian coalminers terroris- ing the streets of Bucharest, beating up any students they could find and half- murdering anybody suspected of opposing the brutal government which appeared to offer them their only slim chance of pre- serving their bestial way of life. As reports continue to arrive, the picture which emerges is a surprisingly familiar one.
In the Telegraph Alec Russell described how the marauding miners were given an `ecstatic reception' by the citizens of Bucharest. A miners' leader explained to Victoria Clarke and Nick Thorpe of the Observer: 'We don't hate the students. We hate people who don't work.'
Some people's minds went back to the miners' strike in 1984-85, when night after night we saw the hideous, grimacing faces of our class enemies and we bravely shook our fists back at the television screen as we sat in our living rooms in Somerset, Surrey and South Kensington. Perhaps it was the first glimpse that many southern English- men had of how much the miners hated them.
For my own part, I was reminded of the more recent scenes during the Strangeways riot, now unfolding in the course of Lord Justice Woolf s enquiry. There, they were not coalminers, of course, so much as incompetent criminals who had not been able to escape detection, arrest and convic- tion. With the first scent of freedom in their nostrils, they all rushed to the sex offenders' wing and started trying to mur- der the prisoners segregated under Rule 43 for their own protection. These sex offen- ders were apparently known as 'the beasts'.
The reason that Bucharest reminded me more of Strangeways than of Orgreave was that in the first two demonstrations of proletarian exuberance or 'people's power' there seemed very little that was spon- taneous. Both the miners in Bucharest and the convicts in Strangeways were thinking and behaving as they had been taught almost instructed — to think and behave, whether by the Government, in the case of the Rumanian miners, or by the Sun newspaper and its imitators, in the case of the English convicts. Only at the battle of the Orgreave coking plant on 29 May 1984 could the workers really be said to be standing on their own feet — against the three corners of the world represented by the Government, the Sun and the liberal intelligentsia.
Appalled by support given to Iliescu and the Rumanian miners, many British com- mentators have retreated into the conclu- sion that Rumanians by and large are perhaps not very nice people. A similar conclusion was reached by a leader in the Sunday Telegraph this week — 'Who feeds the gutter press?' — where our native football hooligans and tabloid press were adduced to establish 'the uniquely appall- ing yobbishness of a large mass of the British population'.
There was nothing to be done about the uniquely appalling yobbishness, apart from educating or evangelising the mass because `people love to read the muck', but a possible remedy for 'these offending pap- ers, the nastiness of which is not equalled anywhere else in Europe and North Amer- ica', lay in Mrs Thatcher's grasp. She must simply stop asking Mr Murdoch and Lord Stevens to luncheon at Chequers, said the Sunday Telegraph. On the one hand, the Prime Minister basks in their political support, while `on the other hand, her Home Secretary threatens to prosecute them for vile intrusions of privacy. A certain hypocrisy here.'
The moral then is that Mrs Thatcher should choose her luncheon companions more carefully, rather than that Mr Wad- dington should legislate against these vile intrusions of privacy. Luncheon is the key — 'far more effective than introducing new legislation which will tend to inhibit the freedom of the innocent as well as the guilty'.
But the question of who feeds the gutter press is capable of several answers. An appetite for 'muck' is not peculiar to the lower classes. Where did they learn their delight in scandal, in the humiliation of their betters, if not from their betters themselves? Sickening as we may find the moral righteousness with which the gutter press tends to dress up this simple plea- sure, it is no more sickening than the moral righteousness with which the quality press dresses up the simple pleasure of chastising its inferiors.
The issue of the Sunday Telegraph which accused the Government of hypocrisy in its double-faced attitude to the tabloid press, with its 'vile intrusions of privacy', carried also the second instalment of a piece of investigative reporting by a militant Au- stralian homosexual whose only purpose, so far as one could tell, was to expose the private life of a man who never sought public attention, never occupied any posi- tion in public life and whose whole exist- ence was spent seeking privacy. Perhaps a secondary purpose was to 'out' Evelyn Waugh as a one-time homosexual, but there has never been the slightest mystery about the homosexual phase in his early twenties, nor any posthumous attempt to conceal it.
Duncan Fallowell once met a certain Alastair Graham, as an old man living as a recluse, in a pub in North Wales. Subse- quently, he ran him to ground, demanded to talk to him about Evelyn Waugh, and had the door shut in his face. 'It was pathetic,' writes Fallowell. 'His whole de- meanour was of a man in mortal terror of exposure.' Nothing further of substance is added to the narrative. 'Back in London, I muck-raked, but gleaned little.' The article is padded out with two letters of very little interest, and the usual second-hand opin- ions which were the stock-in-trade of hack reviewers in the 1950s: how Waugh be- came a Catholic only to make himself somehow more upper-class, how he wrote books only to ingratiate himself with the `provincial county' — to which is added the distressing homosexual whine that if he had been true to himself, he would have remained a homosexual. The first section ends on a fine sententious note, worthy almost of the News of the World: 'What you are reading is a story of shame and hiding. If most of the hiding was Graham's, most of the shame was Waugh's.'
The second piece ends on a note which is definitely not worthy of the News of the World: 'Finally, one of my contacts said something very strange indeed' — that Graham was in hiding over some scandal involving a piece of jewellery.
On the contrary, Fallowell's own evi- dence makes it absolutely plain that Gra- ham was in hiding from Duncan Fallowell — and also, as it would now appear, from the Sunday Telegraph. My purpose in telling this story is not so much to berate the Sunday Telegraph for its vile intrusion of privacy, nor even for the vulgarity and shoddiness of the homosexual tittle-tattle it chose to print. It is merely to point out once again the terrible dangers in taking a high moral line.
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