Bring back the joys of hypocrisy

In the past, scandals were brushed under the carpet, not splashed across newspaper front pages. A. N. WILSON praises the standards of an earlier age

DOCTOR Johnson said that "courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other". True, perhaps.

But few of us would be courageous enough to run the gauntlet of the tabloid press in full cry. That being the case, another "security", as Johnson would call it, for "preserving virtue" is good old English hypocrisy. Many of us who read the cheap papers must have been struck by the contrast this week between two scandal stories. In the first, the papers decided to get their teeth into TV comedians Dawn French and Lenny Henry, whose marriage, they told us with great authority, had been going through a sticky patch. On one of his theatrical tours, Lenny Henry was supposed to have committed some indiscretion with a hotel receptionist - a "blonde", inevitably. Subsequent versions of the story revealed that Mr Henry had in any event behaved like a gentleman, and the allegations of an affair were untrue. But by then, poor Dawn French had been photographed tight- lipped and in dark glasses, driving rapidly away from her home where she was being besieged by the pack. The particular unfairness of press intrusion on these occasions could not have been better exemplified. Naughty Lenny - (though in this case, not really naughty), might perhaps have "deserved", by some peculiar code of morals, to be "exposed" for doing what 90 per cent of married people do at some stage in their lives. But why should his wife be made to suffer? Even if you assumed that this non-story was any of our business, you could hardly think that the supposedly wronged wife needed extra punishment by being made to run the gauntlet of snappers and door- steppers. No useful purpose was served by printing the story of Lenny Henry in the hotel. None was served by the pictures of poor Dawn, all upset. To print such stories and such pictures was sadism, pure and simple. THE other scandal was much more interesting. Indeed, I found it completely rivetting, scarcely believable. It was the revelation in the Mail on Sunday last weekend that Harold Macmillan had a long-standing affair with ... wait for it, a woman! (The "Dublin-born showgirl Eileen Reynolds".) Harold Macmillan was the last of the dear old Edwar-dians. The grandson of a Scottish crofter, who became a famous Victorian publisher, Macmillan had fought in the First World War, and he dressed, spoke and behaved as he imagined a duke would behave in a novel by Anthony Trollope. There was a strong element of the fictitious about his character. He married the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire. Lady Dorothy, however, fell in love with Bob Boothby, the raffish bisexual MP who, himself, had affairs with rough-trade boys, and was very friendly with the Krays. Imagine, nowadays, if the wife of the Prime Minister was "dating", as we should say in the trade, or "romancing", a gay MP with criminal lovers. The Sun and the Daily Mirror would implode with the shock. In the days of Harold Macmillan, "everyone" knew - those who went out to dinner in London knew, those who sat around in the smoking rooms of clubs knew, and newspaper editors knew. But no one would have dreamed of printing the story in the papers. The one thing they didn't know was that Harold Macmillan was, himself, "straight" - or straight enough to have an affair with a Dublin-born showgirl. It was assumed that having been expelled from Eton for "the usual", Supermac had always been a bit "like that" ever since. Perhaps he was. But, you see, that is the joy of those days, and the misery of now, when only prigs dare to enter politics and squeaky-clean, starched Nanny Blair, the only pure man in England, makes friends with Rupert Murdoch. When scandals were known about, but not written about, you could enjoy gossip. "Everyone knew" that Tom Driberg, chairman of the Labour party and famed newspaper columnist, was the most promiscuous "cottage queen" in London, but even when he performed indecent acts on guardsmen in sentry boxes outside Buckingham Palace, it did not get into the papers. Yet move on 30 years and consider the fate of another journalist in our own day. London dinner tables could regularly be kept in a roar with accounts of the outrageous behaviour of my friend and colleague Paul Johnson, defender of the faith and regular sermoniser about the virtues of family life. But when a paper stuck a tape-recorder to his mistress's underwear, and recorded him howling for a jolly good spanking, all our smiles died. No wonder Paul is calling for a privacy law. The trouble is, it would be impossible to operate a privacy law without protecting scoundrels. The Fourth Estate has a duty to expose the wickedness of those it so often protects - often because they own the newspapers. The law of libel shields the Maxwells and the Fayeds, and a privacy law would make it even easier for them to get away with their misdeeds. Rather than a privacy law, it would be so much better if we rediscovered the joys of hypocrisy. IT is hard to think of any of the scandal stories of the past three weeks which could possibly be said to have served the public interest. In the case of sports stars tricked into admitting a history of drugs, it has a vicious side-effect. While the paper screams with horror at the evil of drug-taking, the impressionable readers see a young man, obviously the strongest and healthiest young man in England, who is supposed to have snorted thousands of pounds worth of illegal substances and can still find enough energy for Rugby and Amsterdam prozzies. A better advertisement for the cocaine habit would have been hard to invent. We are all sinners, as Paul Johnson bravely averred when he was "exposed" as a spanker. The ordinary business of public life simply can't go on if the Press takes it into its head to punish not only the sinners, but their wives and girlfriends every time they can't think of anything better to put on the front page. Wouldn't it be more fun - as well as a challenge to the newspaper editors to improve their shoddy goods - if we went back to the days of hypocrisy?

Copyright 1999
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