Notebook
Next month I am planning to go to Venice for a little holiday. I am looking forward to it, and I will, I trust, enjoy myself rather more and behave myself rather better than did the late general secretary of the Labour Party, Mr Morgan Phillips, when he went there in February, 1957. Mr Phillips, it is true, had one advantage over me. He was Oil a free trip, paid for by the Labour Party, as an officialobserver at an Italian Socialist Party Congres. But I have twodecisive advantages over him: I will not be accompanied on the trip by Mr Richard Crossman and I have recently given up drinking. In the latest volume of his monumental diaries (The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossmann, Hamish Hamilton, £15.00), Crossman admits that he found travelling with Phillips to Venice a considerable burden. He noted that Phillips had 'the acutest inferiority complex' about matters cultural or intellectual. One may assume from this that Phillips didn't find travelling With Crossman much fun either. In any Case, this is Crossman's version of how Poor old Morgan behaved when he was exposed for the first time in his life to the glories of the 'Serenissima. Driving in a motor launch up the Grand Canal, which was looking `an elegant, pale Caneletto': he remained 'stolidly impassive'.1 did, next day, drag him to St Mark's Square,' continues Crossman, 'but he refused to look — I think partly because he didn't want to be caught out being ignorant about it or Showing innocent enthusiasm or saying the wrong thing. He was rather the same about the wonderful food and drink we were Offered . He would eat practically none of the food, pushing it aside and saying, "Can't stick any more of this stuff". He drank steadily— I think mainly to avoid conversa tion with the result that he got fiddly by midday and soaked by dinnertime.' While the trip was clearly no fun for Morgan, partly no doubt because .of his arrogant and patronising companion. Crossman was having a wonderful time. 'My our days in Italy were enormously enjoyable and gay,' he writes. To make up for the inadequacies of Morgan Phillips. there was Nye Bevan 'bland, ebullient, impeccably dressed in his beautiful new suit, fresh white linen, with his handkerchief falling out of his breast pocket, pretentiously discussing the qualities of Italian wine, pretending to knowledge of Venetian architecture, laying down the law about Italian politics with vitality and charm, and occasionally with the wildest irresponsibility I Crossman, so he wrote, enjoyed his time in Italy 'more than anything for a very long time'. Also in Venice, observing this two thirds ebullient, one third depressed Labour Party team was a representative of the SpectatorJenny Nicholson, a daughter of Robert Graves and the wife of the Reuters correspondent in Rome, Patrick Crosse. She did not seem to know quite what to make of it all, for this is what she wrote in our issue of I March, 1957. 'And there was the occasional appearance of Messrs Bevan, Morgan Phillips and Richard Crossman, who puzzled the Italians by their capacity to fill themselves like tanks with whisky and coffee, while they (because of their livers and also because they are abstemious by nature) were keeping going on mineral water and an occasional coffee. Although the Italians were never sure if the British delegation was sober, they always attributed to them an immense political acumen.'
As most readers probably know, this was a passage which Jenny Nicholson and the Spectator were both going to regret. For on 22 November of that same year a High Court jury in London awarded each of these three Labour bigwigs the sum of £2,500 in damages, the equivalent of about £14,600 in today's money (nearly £44,000 altogether).
In any case, the article was one of the last that Jenny Nicholson wrote for the Spectator. The outcome of the libel action was a shattering blow for her. She burst into tears in court. She felt that her reputation as a freelance journalist had been irrevocably damaged. Afterwards, distraught, she sought comfort from her friends. A few years later she died. So did practically everybody else involved. Phillips, Crossman and Bevan are all dead. And, indeed, we might have heard no more about this sad little affair sad, at least, from the Spectator's point of view if it had not been for the fortunate survival of two of the leading protagonists, Sir Ian Gilmour and Lord Goodman, for whom nearly a quarter of a century later the case remains a sensitive one. Sir Ian's discomfiture is understandable. As proprietor and editor of the Spectator, he had to pay the damages; he believes that the Spectator bungled the defence by failing to plead justification; and he believes that the plaintiffs lied in court. Lord Goodman, as the solicitor who advised the plaintiffs, does not like it thought that he could have been party to a miscarriage of justice. In a letter to the Spectator of 22 April, 1978, he stated: 'In this famous libel action, none of the plaintiffs ever made any statement to any of their legal advisers including myself either before or after the case suggesting that their evidence was false'.
Lord Goodman's letter was in reply to an article by Auberon Waugh recalling a Private Eye luncheon of 3 May, 1972, at which Crossman, according to several witnesses, admitted that he, Bevan and Phillips had indeed been drunk in Venice though not, he suggested, on whisky (`You don't drink whisky in Venice'). The controversy surrounding it overflowed into The Times and produced a very long letter from Mr Michael Foot, Bevan's biographer, express ing his 'astonishment and nausea' at the revival of the controversy. The purpose of the letter was to refute allegations that Bevan had committed perjury to secure damages, and it may have done so to some people's satisfaction. Mr Foot said he had consulted the still unpublished sections of the Crossman diaries dealing with the visit to Venice and the libel case.
Well, we now all have the oportunity to read the relevant sections of the Crossman diaries, and I will agree that there are no direct suggestions of perjury on Bevan's part, or, naturally, on Crossman's. But what of Morgan Phillips? 'Directly Morgan got into the box, it was clear he as a sub-normal witness shifty, fearful, sweating with panic (legitimately, for he'd been dead drunk for most of the confer ence) and within ten minutes the crossexaminer was exploiting his inferiority complex and forcing him to admit things hed never thought of admitting an hour before'. So much for Morgan. So much, too, for his daughter, Mrs Gwynneth Dunwoody, the Labour MP for Crewe, who was so incensed by Mr Waugh's Spectator article that she introduced a bill into the House of Commons extending the law of libel for 50 year's after a person's death. Rather than make the Spectator pay twice for its libel, which was what she presumably hoped would have happened if her bill had become law, I rather feel that she should now be refunding Sir Ian his £2,500. Never mind whether Crossman or Bevan periured themselves in court. What is Ode quite clear by Crossman is that the idea of perjury, had it been necessary, would not have shocked him one bit. His contempt is for Morgan Phillips' performance as a witness; not for his moral posture. Furthermore, Crossman makes it quite clear that he feels the case should probably not have been brought. It was 'a very satisfactory result' but one on which he did not enjoy receiving the congratulations of his colleagues. 'It seems to me, the more I reflect on it, to have been the kind of gamble which no one should responsibly have undertaken, even though we did win it in the end.' Are these the words of a man who felt very gravely wronged? If it was such a dangerous gamble to go to court, if Morgan Phillips was 'scared stiff of fighting that action', if Crossman was on whole reluctant, and if Bevan was 'his old pendulum-swinging self' why did they go to court? It was, so Crossman implies, almost entirely the work of Goodman, who thought he *could win and win kudos'. Goodman had been 'determined to fight the action if he could', and once it was over, Crossman was 'sure of one thing that Mr Goodman, who I regard as a pleasant villain, will sleep easier in his bed tonight now that he's got his verdict, despite the disparate and discordant views of his three clients'.
Alexander Chancellor
Previous page
