by Clive James
PRIVATE LIFE
Dates of show: 14 and 16 March 2008
London’s mayor Ken Livingstone has an aide who has recently been busted sending amorous e-mails to a friend. The aide, known in the tabloid press headlines as ‘Ken aide’, has a few questions to answer about what he has been doing with some of the money entrusted to him. No doubt he will give satisfactory answers, and I, to name only one, will realize that my council-tax cheque has been put to good use under his guidance. But he will find it harder to shake off the accusation that he has been writing besotted e-mails, because the Evening Standard printed them verbatim. Andrew Gilligan, in charge of that newspaper’s investigations into Ken aide’s activities, can congratulate himself that he has caught Ken aide red-eyed with lust, if not red-handed in malfeasance. But I wonder if anyone else should be congratulating Mr Gilligan. Isn’t there something wrong about helping yourself to the private e-mails of politicians, the private text messages of footballers, the private phone calls of . . . But you fill in the blanks. And to the contention that nothing is private for the prominent, shouldn’t we be saying that privacy is for everyone, and not just for you and me?
To say that, however, you have to believe in private life as a value. I think most of us still do, although it may very well be true that a private life is becoming impossible to lead. But just because it’s fading from existence doesn’t mean that it was never vital. Private life is an institution, like the English language, which is collapsing too, and proving, even as it falls to bits, that it’s a structure our lives depend on. Ken aide’s friend, prominent in that official field of race relations which is now known as community cohesion, has been quoted as saying, ‘I see a time when race policy will be actioned with the sanction of committees.’ There could be no clearer evidence that the English language is in a bad way. But I got that quotation from something she published, not from one of her e-mails. If she had said it in an e-mail it might well have raced Ken aide’s motor, but as far as I know she didn’t. And as far as I know is, I think, quite far enough.
Most of us are capable of grasping that if everyone could suddenly read everyone else’s thoughts then very few people would survive the subsequent massacre, which would effectively bring civilization to an end. If you were living alone in a cave, you might just stay alive until the following morning, but only if you were in there alone. To live in society at all, we have to keep a reservoir of private thoughts, which, whether wisely or unwisely, we share only with intimates. This sharing of private thoughts is called private life.
Until recently, the concept of private life was basic to civilization. Its value could be measured by the thoroughness with which totalitarian states and religions always did their best to stamp it out. But now we have to face the possibility that the latest stage of civilization, this era of perpetual alteration that we are living in now, might also be trying to stamp it out. You can still keep your thoughts to yourself – nobody has yet invented a machine that can get into your head and broadcast what it finds – but if you try to communicate those private thoughts to anyone else you run an increasing risk that they will be communicated to everyone.
It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are conspicuous enough in public life and use a mobile telephone to transmit a private secret then you might very soon see it printed in the newspapers. You probably remember that when this actually happened a few years back, the press coverage was endless. But I can’t remember a single feature article which raised the question of whether the printing of an intercepted private phone call was not in itself far more startling than any secrets that might have been revealed. Partly this was because the press, taken as a whole, had already reached the conclusion that everything was grist to its mill. The British press, even its tabloid basement, could be worse. On the whole it leaves the children alone. But one way or another it will print anything it can get about an adult. What has changed, in recent years, is the range of what it can get.
There was a limit to what it could do with letters sent through the post. It couldn’t steam them open. In the reign of the first Elizabeth, her chief spy Walsingham routinely opened every letter that entered or left England, but that was early days. If the press wanted to do that now, it would have to steal letters faster than the post office can lose them: a difficult ask. With the arrival of the mobile telephone, things got easier. I can well remember, late in the last century, a senior executive of one of the big press conglomerates trying to impress me at some reception or other by saying that he had, in his safe, transcripts of mobile phone calls that would rock the monarchy on its base. He seemed very proud of himself, but for a moment I realized what it must be like to be face to face with the head of the secret police in the kind of country where only the police have secrets.
Things have moved on since then. No transcript stays in the safe for long, and now there are e-mails to draw upon. It’s been said that nobody sensible confides to an e-mail anything that he wouldn’t be prepared to see published in the newspapers, and this might indeed be so. But it could equally be said that nobody sensible puts his money in a bank that might be robbed. There are identity thieves robbing banks every minute of the day without even having to pull on a balaclava. Unless we keep our money in the mattress, we have to trust the bank, which might be hard to do, but would be even harder if the bank-robber could not be classified as a criminal. Pinching private phone calls and e-mails ought to be a crime, but somehow it isn’t.
And it probably won’t be. There are too many laws as it is; too many of the new laws are useless; and a law against printing anything you can find would probably be seen as an infringement of free speech, even though the unrestricted theft of private messages amounts to an infringement of free speech anyway. After the Ken aide e-mail incident hit the headlines, some commentators were quick to note that if you really want to speak freely in private, the thing to do is write an old-fashioned letter.
Few of these commentators noted that their suggestion came at the very time when Post OfficeTM – trade marked because it is no longer the Royal Mail but is now a business – is proceeding with its plans to close somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 post offices. Most of these post offices slated by Post OfficeTM for destruction are in rural areas. In other words, they serve small towns and villages that are hard to get to, which you would have thought was the very reason why the people in them need to write and receive letters. Post OfficeTM’s rationale for this further truncation of its already abbreviated service reaches a height of absurdity which Jonathan Swift would have hesitated to scale, lest his readers stop laughing and reach for the arsenic. Post OfficeTM says that it all costs too much. The losses, it says, are ‘unsustainable’.
You will immediately spot that Post OfficeTM is speaking the same new language as Ken aide’s friend. The post office, before it was hobbled with its trademark, wasn’t a business, it was an institution. An institution is something without which civilization itself is unsustainable. It could be said – no doubt Post OfficeTM has a management layer in which such things are said full time, as a prelude to their being ‘actioned’ – it could be said that the old ladies in the villages, who will no longer meet each other at the post office after it is turned into a community cohesion centre, could always send e-mails. They need never leave the house. After all, they’ve had plenty of practice since Dr Beeching was deputed to annihilate the railway service on the same grounds: unsustainability.
And there is always something to be said for leaving the village behind, if you don’t mind waiting for a bus. G. K. Chesterton used to argue that the best reason for moving to the city was that in a village everybody knew your business, so you couldn’t lead a private life. He’d find it hard to say the same now. You can be in the biggest city in the world, and every phone you pick up, and ever computer you sit down at, is a direct pipeline to universal publicity for any thought you dare to express. Plato would have been envious. He devised a legal body called the Nocturnal Council, but if its
members suspected you of impiety they only wanted to discuss it with you for a few years. And Plato never dreamed that his hideous Republic could be established except by coercion. We seem to be volunteering for ours. But nobody has invented a mind-reading device yet, although I have noticed that some of the latest mobile telephones are small enough to crawl into your ear.
Postscript
In my role as a television talking head I had to sit for a lot of press profiles and I was frequently told by the interviewer, when I tried to hold something back, that the public would be interested. I soon learned not to say: ‘If you knew better than I do what interests the public, I’d be interviewing you.’ It would have been arrogant, and it wouldn’t have been true. The interviewer knows exactly what interests the public. The only failure, on the part of the interviewer, is the failure to draw a distinction between what the public finds interesting and what is in the public interest. The question turns on whether the concept of a private life is vital to the general welfare, and the answer is surely yes. In practice, however, privacy is usually trumped by news, and the ethical quarrel is confined to the question of whether or not the news is true. Back near the beginning of the twentieth century, Roger Casement’s diaries, which helped to bring him down, seemed likely to be a forgery put about by the British intelligence service, but the less likely possibility, that they were genuine, proved to be true.
What Prince Charles really needed, in the absence of a law forbidding the publication of private phone calls, was maximum publicity given to a phone call concocted by somebody else. If his call was real, it was grist to the mill. Or at least it was in Britain: if his future job had been King of France, his private life would have been as invulnerable to the press as President Mitterrand’s. But during the period covered by these broadcasts, it was becoming evident that civilization in Britain was suffering less from the accelerating indiscretion of the media than from the carefully preserved unfairness of the legal system, which allows an ambitious nuisance from anywhere in the world to sue against the slightest sign of defamation, and win large sums. Under this bad law, a book or periodical doesn’t have to be published in Britain, it merely has to be available there in some form and however briefly, for anyone from anywhere to bring an action in a British court against the author of the text that is felt to be offensive. The system amounts to a kind of libel tourism. In this respect if in no other, Britain looks like the dunce of the EU. No British institution is felt to be working well when there is a general opinion that they do things better on the Continong.
STATE OF LAW
Dates of show: 21 and 23 March 2008
Last week the man who wanted £300,000 compensation because he slipped on a grape in the car park of his local branch of Marks & Spencer lost his case. Good news for the rule of law, perhaps, but bad news for those of us whose lives have been blighted by injuries which were never our responsibility. I wept for the man who slipped on the grape, because three hundred grand was the least he had coming. Here was an accountant who, before his shoe made contact with the grape in question, was able to charge £225 an hour for his financial services. After he descended from the lofty parabola into which the grape contact had thrown him, he sustained a rupture to his quadriceps tendon. This rupture led, he said, to a ‘loss of confidence’, which in turn led to ‘adverse psychological effects and depression’, which in turn meant that he was unable to recruit new clients and contacts and charge them £225 an hour. On top of that, he was no longer able to ski, play football or play tennis. He was probably also unable to play Monopoly, which can put a terrific strain on a ruptured quadriceps tendon, especially when you are losing. The accountant lost in a big way and ended up having to pay his legal costs. I have been brooding about this for some time and would now like to tell him that I share his pain, even in the area of my quadriceps tendon, which was practically the only part of my body that I didn’t injure in the accident that still haunts my life.
Interesting that the grape victim should mention skiing, because it was while I was skiing in Switzerland that I sustained an injury entirely due to the carelessness of an organization from which one might have expected more. Not more than £300,000, perhaps, but something. I typed this script without using my thumbs, and here is why. About twenty years ago, both my thumbs were almost dislocated in a skiing accident. If the accident had not happened, I could have typed this script more quickly, and could have typed another in the time saved, thereby restoring my confidence, not to say replenishing my bank balance. I shall be telling the full story of this accident in my fifth volume of Unreliable Memoirs, a work which I am currently composing, to a deadline which I have set according to how quickly, or rather how slowly, I can compose a hundred thousand words using eight fingers.
But a short version of the story will sufficiently indicate that I was blameless in the matter. I was on a black run at Davos and it could be argued that I shouldn’t have been there, owing to my inability to turn in any direction at any speed. But no attempt was made by the responsible authorities to ascertain this fact before I started my descent. And the run was open to the public. There were signs to say that the run was open, and the signs had been placed by those in charge of the resort. The run was needlessly steep. Those in charge had bulldozers available and it was their responsibility to level the mountain during the night. They had not done so and I was doing seventy-five miles per hour when I took off from a bump and landed on my nose a hundred yards further on. The manufacturers of the ski bindings had done their job. With those manufacturers I have no quarrel. The skis came off as they should have done.
But the loops on my ski poles failed to detach themselves from my thumbs as I hit the snow, which was packed tight. No attempt had been made to loosen it and I therefore continued going downhill at high speed in prone contact with the snow, my cries ignored. Instantly I felt an acute loss of confidence, compounded by a searing pain in both thumbs. The loops, which should have been designed to detach themselves like the bindings, put a severe strain on both the intrinsic and extrinsic muscles of each thumb. In both cases, the first dorsal interroseus was irreversibly inflamed, and the flexor pollicis longus was impacted with the extensor pollicis brevis, thereby permanently inhibiting my capacity to reach for my wallet whenever it was my turn to pay for something. I had legitimate hopes that the owners of the resort would be doing that for me from then on, but my case was thrown out by a Swiss German judge who spoke no English except the phrase ‘in your dreams’.
The British judge who so cruelly dashed the hopes of the grape-treading accountant was not necessarily under the influence of the Swiss legal system. The British legal system is still capable of reaching sensible decisions on its own account. Let me overcome my throbbing bilateral pain for a moment and say that the law still has enough majesty to remind us that we are lucky to live in a country with functioning institutions. Nothing will remind the public that if they lived in a country with no laws at all they would be inconceivably worse off than they are now. Most of us have had no experience of living in a lawless society and we therefore find it difficult to imagine.
The British live in a country that has been ruled by law for a long time. What they can’t help noticing is that the law doesn’t always work. When Dickens, in his great novel Bleak House, painted his immortal picture of the chancery court in which your case would remain unresolved for ever, with more and more lawyers taking your money until it was all gone, it wasn’t the law he was against. He was against the law not working.
But the law not working can be quite frightening enough. Admittedly there are newspapers that specialize in encouraging such fears. Often when I read the tabloids I wonder if we might not be living in the last days of the Weimar Republic, until I remember that sometimes when a drunken joy-rider wipes out a family waiting at a bus stop he gets picked up by the police and spoken to quite severely, and might even have his licence withdrawn for a whole year.
But what sometimes saps confidence, induci
ng an adverse psychological condition, is when the legal system consumes vast amounts of public money in proceedings that seem very slow to proceed. A highly vocal cleric, the enemy of his own religion along with every other aspect of British society except its benefit system, which he drew upon to support his large family, ate up hundreds of thousands of pounds in public money before it was finally decided that he was guilty of incitement to murder. But he had declared himself guilty of that years before. He never said that he wasn’t inciting people to murder. He said that inciting people to murder was all right.
The present inquiry into the death of the Princess of Wales will get through at least £10 million of the taxpayer’s money before it reaches its decision. It was a good sign when the court rejected Mr Fayed’s demand that the Queen should be called as a witness, so as to make up for the absence of testimony from Ming the Merciless of Mongo, Emperor of the Universe. But otherwise the inquiry has been an expensive way of establishing that there was never very much to inquire into except an accident. Whatever happened to those poor children in Jersey plainly wasn’t an accident, and getting to the bottom of the matter will be worth all the money it costs, but how much money will be left over for such a necessary thing when an unnecessary one is allowed to cost so much? Or am I all wrong about the public money? Perhaps it is being continually replaced with the limitless funds generated by schemes to charge people for using their cars to deliver passengers at Heathrow when the passengers should be using the Heathrow Express, which will be jammed to the roof because millions more people every year will want to cram themselves into an Airbus A380 and fly somewhere that doesn’t allow an ex-wife to even think of charging £125 million for four years of marriage. In the end, Lady McCartney was not awarded quite that much of Sir Paul’s money, but she certainly wasted a lot of the court’s time.
