High life | 4 December 2010

The irony is such that the word itself loses meaning. The ultimate Afghan conman, an oxymoron if ever there was one, is someone Hollywood couldn’t make up. A catch-him-if-you-can type of script wouldn’t make it past the first rewrite. Even ‘based on a true story’ wouldn’t help. If it weren’t for the dead and maimed for life, I’d be laughing my pants off. Just as funny was the timing, at least from my point of view.

I’d gone up to Connecticut to spend the weekend with Graydon and Anna Carter, he being the supremo of Vanity Fair. Once there, I was given a Robert Harris book, Selling Hitler, about the conman who convinced everyone but David Irving that the Hitler private diaries were for real. That particular fiasco saw a hell of a lot of self-important people end up with lotsa egg on their faces.

Typically, it began on April Fool’s Day, 1983, when the distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, by then Lord Dacre, was telephoned by the London Times, told of the greatest historical discovery ever and asked to fly to Switzerland to inspect them. They were in a bank vault and being guarded like Fort Knox. We all know the rest. Trevor-Roper fell for the con, as did everyone else involved, meaning Rupert Murdoch, Newsweek, Stern magazine and most journalists with the exception of David Irving. In fact, Irving was denounced as an historian without merit during numerous press conferences, until even he, towards the end, began to waver and doubt his original pronouncement that the diaries were as fake as Clifford Irving’s (no relation) fake diaries of Howard Hughes had been 11 years earlier.

Again, the irony of it all, as far as I’m concerned.