The Dispatches programme which entrapped Messrs Hoon and Byers, Patricia Hewitt et al wanted to set them up as villains (which, indeed, they seemed). So it failed to notice the rather sad undertow of what they were saying. Geoff Hoon put it most clearly: ‘There’s nothing in my diary for April.’ Stephen Byers confirmed it when he said, when caught, that he had been ‘exaggerating’. The simple point is that these people are desperate, and virtually unemployed. They are largely pretending that companies beat a path to their door. What Mr Hoon described as ‘Hoon work’ — as opposed to the work for which the taxpayer pays him — is not coming his way in big enough quantities. Once it had heard the MPs state their opening bid for a fee (usually £3,000 a day), the programme should have started to bargain them down. I bet they — the men, at least — would have ended up settling for a free evening at Stringfellows.
Precisely the wrong conclusions are being drawn from the scandal. The talk the next morning was all of how MPs should have no outside interests at all. So the solution to abuse of the taxpayer is that the taxpayer should keep 650 of these people full-time, with their salaries and conditions set by unelected officials and their careers wholly dependent on the party leaderships. In the name of ethics, the final triumph of the political class would be assured.
In the commercial break during Dispatches, I noticed an ad for NatWest. It filmed real children at a real, named school, to show how responsible NatWest was in teaching the young to manage money properly. But is it right that the pupils of a state-funded school are used to promote a commercial interest? Or is it argued that, because NatWest is taking government money, it should become an arm of government social policy? If the latter, why should people working for a bank be paid more than anyone else working for the government? In the wreckage of the credit crunch, a weird new version of the corporate state is being constructed.
In his memoirs, the late Alec Guinness describes what happened when he was acting Father Brown in the film of that name, shooting in Burgundy. Guinness was walking in the dark towards his hotel outside the village after filming, still dressed in his clerical clothes: ‘I hadn’t gone far when I heard scampering footsteps and a piping voice calling, “Mon père!”. My hand was seized by a boy of seven or eight, who clutched it tightly, swung it and kept up a non-stop prattle… I didn’t dare speak in case my excruciating French should scare him. Although I was a total stranger he obviously took me for a priest and so to be trusted. Suddenly with a “Bonsoir, mon père”, and a hurried sideways sort of bow, he disappeared through a hole in a hedge… I was left with an odd sense of elation… I reflected that a Church which could inspire such confidence in a child, making its priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable could not be as scheming and creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudices.’ Guinness later became a Roman Catholic. That was in the 1950s. The equivalent little boy today would be warned against priests, and any priest who held the little boy’s hand might be arrested.
Perhaps that little boy, even then, was wrong to place his trust in a man because he thought he was a priest. Priests have never been automatically better than other people, and sexual abuse of children by some priests, now such big news, presumably took place 50 years ago as well as more recently. So what has changed? It is the difference between a fact known and merely suspected. In his letter to Irish Catholics, just published, Pope Benedict himself says that children suffered ‘sinful and criminal acts’. Once these are admitted and apologised for by the authorities themselves, trust can eventually recover, but in the short term it is undermined. For this loss of trust, the errant priests, and the hierarchy which did not deal with them properly, are to blame. The Pope puts it very strongly indeed: the abuse in Ireland has ‘obscured the light of the Gospel to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing’. But the reaction of most commentators shows an over-righteous refusal to think about what actually happens in any institution. The phrase ‘cover-up’ brooks no argument, but anyone who has ever worked in a school, college, office, regiment, charity etc knows that there are — that there have to be — many occasions when a piece of misbehaviour, even of a serious kind, does not see the light of day. Would it be good, for example, if every student caught with drugs was named, handed over to the police and charged? Would it be right that every drunken teacher should be exposed, rather than helped? Even in the case of sexual abuse, is no distinction to be made between the single aberration of a good person and the repeated pattern of a bad one? Is it always good for the victims themselves for their cases to be made public? There can be no excuse for cover-ups which endanger the vulnerable, but the reputation of any corporate body must always be a real consideration for the people who run it. It misunderstands human nature to suppose that if every case of sexual abuse were published, such abuse would stop. In fact, our current hysterical hatred of paedophiles gives cover for people with an unhealthy interest in the subject. Despite everything, the culture which bred Guinness’s trusting boy is a better one than the suspicion which now prevails.
The Pope’s own analysis of what went wrong is interesting. His argument is simultaneously modern and conservative. He says that the Irish abuse was encouraged by ‘a tendency in society to favour the clergy and other authority figures’. But he also suggests that the relaxation of rules after the Second Vatican Council weakened the Church’s own law-enforcement because of ‘a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations’. Today, people are saying that if only the clergy could marry, they would stop molesting children. Why on earth should that be so? Mightn’t the pre-Vatican II meticulousness about celibacy — the ‘control of the eyes’, the avoidance of the ‘occasion’ of sin, the prohibition in seminaries of ‘particular friendships’ — be more effective?
As the era of huge cuts approaches, it is hard to think of a more socially useful saving than halving the number of officers needed for each police foot patrol from two to one. Then the solitary copper would, for the first time in his or her life, have to stop talking and observe the streets around him.
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