See better, Sugar
Sir: We the undersigned wish to condemn Baron Sugar of Clapton’s threatened legal action against our colleague Quentin Letts for calling him a ‘telly peer’ who ‘doesn’t seem to have an enormous intellect’ on LBC on 20 July. According to a letter Mr Letts received from Herbert Smith, Lord Sugar will issue a writ against Mr Letts for libel unless he pays his legal costs to date, donates an undisclosed sum to a charity and gives a written undertaking never to criticise him again.
When journalists have been sued by public figures in the past — particularly by Members of Parliament — the convention has been to sue the newspaper or broadcaster that provided them with a platform, not to pursue the journalist personally. In this way, Britain’s libel laws have been kept on a level playing field, since few individual journalists can afford to fight a legal battle on their own. However, Lord Sugar has dispensed with this convention. No corresponding action has been threatened against LBC, which means that if Mr Letts decides not to bow to Lord Sugar’s demands, he faces potentially ruinous costs a proportion — as much as a third — of which he wouldn’t recover, even if he won.
The absence of a First Amendment in Britain means that we depend to a great extent on the observance of legal convention to preserve our free speech. If parliamentarians are now going to threaten to sue individual journalists personally, members of the press will be inhibited from scrutinising them in future. This is a particularly dangerous development, given how many journalists are now working as freelancers.
We urge Lord Sugar to withdraw his threat so we can continue to write and speak freely about public figures.
Roger Alton, Matthew d’Ancona, Liz Anderson, Martin Bright, Jeremy Clarke, Nick Cohen, Nicholas Coleridge, Lloyd Evans, James Forsyth, Julia Hobsbawm, Rachel Johnson, Dylan Jones, Mary Killen, India Knight, Rod Liddle, John Micklethwait, Fraser Nelson, Matthew Parris, Stephen Pollard, Hugo Rifkind, Andrew Roberts, Alan Rusbridger, Sebastian Shakespeare, Paul Staines, Sarah Standing, Mary Wakefield, Toby Young
Lost sovereignty
Sir: Your correspondent Mr Tom Sackville (Letters, 1 August) assures us that ‘We are still a sovereign nation.’ Under which soundproof bell jar does the gentleman reside? No country, 75 per cent of whose primary legislation is enacted and enforced not by its own elected government but by an unelected regime in a foreign land, and in whose councils the country has an 8 per cent voting bloc, can achieve the first criterion of sovereignty.
Still, in politics as in journalism a comforting myth will always trump a disagreeable reality. So let us simply not mention it.
As for the American extradition treaty, you should compare it to the European Arrest Warrant which is far more draconian. No proven facts nor prima facie case are required. A European examining magistrate (not a government) need only issue the arrest warrant upon a deposed allegation. Then follows the EAW. Against this there is no appeal (Mr McKinnon has been in appeal for years) nor any British court hearing at all.
Compliance is mandatory and the accused must be transferred (under duress if need be) to the magistrate’s jurisdiction where he may be held in remand in custody virtually sine die. This was passed without a debate being offered to, or demanded by, our ‘sovereign’ parliament and effectively abolishes the right of habeas corpus. Nowadays, gentlemen, John Bull does what he is damned well told.
Frederick Forsyth
Hertford, Herts
Drama lesson
Sir: I’d like to correct a misapprehension that could be caused by Joan Collins’s Diary (1 August). It is not the case that any acting student at Rada requires a degree to enter the Academy — or any academic qualification at all, including GCSEs and A-levels. All our actors leave with a BA (Hons) validated by King’s College London (which is the reason why they need to be 18 on entry), but the course has no formal written component and is every bit as practically based as it was when Joan studied here, though I must confess very little class time these days is spent on personal grooming. Being a BA course enables us, like most other UK drama schools, to secure public funding for the actors and technicians of tomorrow, most of whom would otherwise struggle to pay the fees and the cost of living in London.
I would like also to reassure readers of The Spectator that while students at Rada may possess native accents from Glasgow, Manchester, Ireland and Wales (not to mention the US, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka) and often use these accents in their everyday lives, when addressing visiting speakers, and also, if appropriate, in their acting work, they are all still taught Received Pronunciation in the expectation that their careers will demand the same versatility that Joan’s has.
Edward Kemp, Director
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London WC1
Rhyming slang
Sir: David Cameron is not the first to have got into trouble over the word ‘twat’ (Editorial, 1 August). Robert Browning famously thought it was an article of nun’s clothing: ‘Then, owl and bats,/ cowls and twats,/ Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,/ Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!’
J.M. Dyson
London NW3
Coarse language
Sir: In the mid-1970s I was teaching in a very rough area. One morning a girl was suspended for the day, sent home with a note saying she had been ‘swearing at her teacher’.
Soon after, her mother burst into the head teacher’s room, shouting, ‘How dare you say my f***ing daughter is f***ing swearing? She never f***ing swears.’ The head teacher replied, ‘But that is just what you are doing now.’ Mother: ‘That’s not swearing! Swearing is taking the Name of the Lord in Vain! I’m just using coarse language.’
Can Dot Wordsworth advise?
Alan Moore
Leeds, Yorkshire
Stolen gags
Sir: In The Spectator for 22 July 1955 the results of Competition 281, ‘In the Dolomites’, were published. Three years later, at the Oxford Union, Gerard Hoffnung read a selection of the winning entries purporting, playfully, that the imaginary letters from an innkeeper in the Dolomites were addressed to his wife and to him.
What he did not do was acknowledge the source of his texts (given almost verbatim). The impression his audience must have received was that Hoffnung himself devised the letters. But the laughter his (admittedly hilarious) rendition generated was not the reward of his own inventiveness, but that of others.
Only a handful of people, as far as I am aware, have suspected or noted the plagiarism (and only I think in the case of the response by R. Kennard Davis). As a result Hoffnung continues to be credited (on the internet as elsewhere) as the author of material which he borrowed from published submissions to your paper.
All this happened more than 50 years ago, but I thought I would bring it to your attention. The question intriguing me, and one on which I would welcome enlightenment, is: did (or does) copyright subsist on answers to Spectator competitions?
David Thatcher
Via email
Comments