Instead of looking at the BBC’s behaviour over the Jimmy Savile programme through the red mist of self-righteous hindsight, consider the editorial problem it presented at the time. You have already planned Christmas tribute programmes to one of your most popular contributors of the past 40 years (God knows why he was so popular, but that is the symptom of a wider cultural sickness). Then you hear that part of your empire is investigating child abuse allegations against him. You inquire, and find that, though highly alarming, the allegations do not constitute proof and are not clearly supported by other inquiries e.g. by the police. Obviously you cannot run both the tribute programmes and the child abuse programme. Which do you spike? Surely almost any editor would run the tributes and at least postpone the exposé. He couldn’t can both because everyone would then ask why. Without clear, considered proof (which, even today, does not seem to reach court standard), it would have been crazy for the BBC to assassinate the character of its own hero. So, much as I love attacking the BBC, I decline to try to assassinate the character of its new director-general.
On 15 November, everyone in England and Wales will get the chance to vote for Police and Crime Commissioners. My father, who takes such processes seriously, went off last week to a public meeting in Battle to hear the Conservative candidate for Sussex. Apart from the candidate, a ‘pleasant woman’ who had run a number of dance halls specialising in what my father thought she said was ‘modern jive’, there were two local Tory bigwigs present, one bigwig’s wife, and two other members of the public. That was all. My father is firmly opposed to elected Police Commissioners, on the grounds that they will try to impose repressive policies demanded by an ignorant public. I respectfully disagree, believing that the police are far too free to disregard what matters to the citizen. But it is a perplexing feature of this government that it does or says something good, and then does not follow it through. Elected Police Commissioners are a big new idea. As with all big new ideas, they will be vigorously attacked — look at the disgraceful suggestion by Lord Blair that they should be boycotted. The more reason, then, for their authors to promote them as strongly as possible. Yet there is no free postage for election literature, no help for independent candidates, and no ballyhoo by ministers. The public will intuit that the government doubts its own policy. If it doesn’t bother, it will ask, why should we?
My belief in elected commissioners has been strengthened by the Andrew Mitchell affair. In his letter of resignation, Mr Mitchell finally said what he says he said to the policemen at the Downing Street gates: ‘I thought you guys were supposed to ****ing help us.’ If that is what he said, it is — expletive deleted — a reasonable point. They are indeed supposed to help the people who work in Downing Street. If they shop those people to the newspapers, they are not doing their job. The police are the butt of too many condescending attacks: I wrote at the time, for example, that the Macpherson report on the Stephen Lawrence case was the most systematically unfair public document ever produced in modern times. But — whatever you think of Mr Mitchell — there is something dirty about this conspiracy between the police and the media. The police might have to be less dirty once we elect people to keep an eye on them. At the Tory conference, I chaired a fringe meeting about policing, addressed by the leaders of the three police bodies. One of them complained at how the police were seen. ‘We are even criticised for being obese,’ he protested. I could not help looking round and noticing the wobbling bellies of leading police officers straining the limits of the upright chairs provided. Is it anti-police to want to cut out the flab?
Further evidence about how people now say the letter ‘o’ (see last week’s Notes). I have just heard someone on television pronounce the first two vowels in the word ‘country’ as in ‘Count Basie’, rather than as in ‘Jeremy Hunt’.
For the second year, I have represented the Daily Telegraph as a judge of the English Heritage Angel Awards. The ceremony is a moving occasion, because the people who win have made the old new, against heavy odds. They embody the surviving strength of English provincial culture. Andrew Lloyd Webber sponsors the prize. He is astonishingly learned about our architectural heritage. Simon Thurley, the director of English Heritage, read out a letter from his organisation’s files in which a boy had written to complain about how ancient monuments in the Welsh borders were so decayed. The ‘somewhat unique’ keep of Clun castle was split from top to bottom etc — ‘This is the most terrible state of affairs’. The letter, from 1961, was signed ‘Andrew Lloyd-Webber (Aged 13)’.
The death of the actress Sylvia Kristel brought back to me the atmosphere of 1974. We all rushed off to see the film Emmanuelle, in which she starred. People talked of little else. I remember a clergyman waxing particularly lyrical about the scene in an aeroplane. Then there was the naff wicker chair in which, provocatively, she sat. And there was the end bit, where an elderly Frenchman called, I think, Claude, with distinguished silver hair and a resemblance to Mitterrand’s foreign minister Roland Dumas, explained to Emmanuelle the true meaning of erotic experience. This involved getting together with him in Thailand. He was behind her, and a younger man was in front, and she, poor woman, was trapped in the middle, though possibly I have got the body order wrong. Why did we think this more thrilling than other feeble pornography? There was Emmanuelle, Emmanuelle 2, Beautiful Black Emmanuelle and, in Private Eye, Emmanuelle Goes to Neasden. It captured the spirit of the age somehow, but what was that spirit?
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