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What
I should say sorry for Boris
Johnson on his
penitential pilgrimage to Liverpool I am
writing this in a cold, damp three-star hotel in Liverpool, and I have to admit
I don't want to go out. Not only is it raining, there is also the chance that I
will be beaten up. As everyone seems to know, I am on a mission to apologise to
the people of this great city, and my heart is in my boots. The operation is
bedevilled with difficulty, not least that no one seems to want to accept my
apology. Local Tories have said that they intend to snub me. The Lib Dem officials
who run the council have made a meeting all but impossible. The police have said
they expect an enormous media circus which rules out a trip to the museums.
There was a plan to sign a book of condolence for the late Ken Bigley, but we
have reluctantly rejected it, on the grounds that it will look as if we are
playing politics with a tragedy. But
what makes Operation Scouse-grovel even more depressing is that I am attacked by
my own troops for embarking upon it. In the journalistic equivalent of the
fragging that Gls used to perform upon their officer, Stephen Glover, our own
media correspondent, has said that in coming to Liverpool I am letting down The
Spectator. He claims in Tuesday's DailyMail that in going to
apologise, at the behest of Michael Howard, the Tory leader, I am acting like a
whipped cur, and that I have compromised the integrity of the magazine. Not
since the 18th century, says Glover, has the editor of a national publication
been treated like the plaything of his political masters. It is a disgrace, says
The Spectator's media correspondent, and shows that I cannot
simultaneously serve two leaders - Michael Howard and last week's editorial. He
ends his piece with words of dark foreboding about the freedom of the press. The
first thing to say is that Glover's piece shows, of course, the fearless independence
of all Spectator columnists. Not only does he beat up Michael Howard and
the Tory party, he also administers a resounding kicking to his own editor
with
whom he had lunch less than a week ago, at which companionable and bibulous
ceremony he requested and was granted a sizeable rise! That's the spirit,
Glover! If that isn't freedom of the press, I don't know what is. It is also in
keeping with Stephen's reputation for detachment that before composing this
remonstrance he actively decided not to call me to find out what I might
actually be saying by way of apology to Liverpool. And finally, as with all
Glover's excellent pieces, it must be conceded that he appears to have a good
point. It
does look odd, on the face of it, that an editor should be making a penitential
pilgrimage at the behest of a party leader.
It is true that when the firestorm of hate began to engulf The
Spectator last week, I immediately thought of travelling to the city to say
sorry for the offence caused, and then vaguely shelved the plan on the grounds
that it seemed unlikely to be taken seriously by the people of Liverpool. When
Michael Howard rang on Saturday to suggest the same idea, I agreed that it
might, on balance, do more good than harm. At that stage I had neither computed
the implied Gloverian threat to editorial independence, nor did I foresee that
Michael's brilliant spin doctors would present this as some sort of disciplinary
procedure, in which the ideal headline was intended to be: 'SHAMED TORY
BUFFOON JOHNSON IN LIVERPOOL GROVEL - IRON
MIKE GETS TOUGH'. It is that
impression, of an editor clicking his heels on the orders of a politician, that
sticks in Glover's craw, and I can seen why. All
I ask of my old friend is what exactly it is that he thinks Johnson the
politician is doing that betrays the integrity of Johnson the journalist. In the
course of his Mail piece, Glover attacks last week's Spectator editorial
for its unwarranted slurs on the people of Liverpool. He says it was tasteless
to drag in the Hillsborough tragedy, and that we should have got our facts right
about this appalling event, in which 96 people died. He is right, and the only
question is why he thinks it necessary to attack me for agreeing so exactly with
his views. It may be that there are welfare-addicted Liverpudlians who answer to
the characteristics we described in the leader but it was wounding and wrong
to suggest that this stereotype could be applied to the city as a whole. It was
sloppy to repeat the old canard that the Hillsborough tragedy was caused by
drunken fans, when the inquiry report found no evidence for this whatever. To
judge by the huge mail I have received, that mistake caused real offence and
hurt. Faced with such anger, any editor would feel obliged to make amends, and
that is what I do now. It
is true that if I were simply an editor, I would confine this apology to a short
balanced letter. It is true that I am in Liverpool because I am additionally a
politician; but my apology is different in scale, not in kind, from any other
qualified editorial apology. Johnson the politician apologises for and refuses
to apologise for exactly the same things as Johnson the journalist.
Michael Howard, Stephen Glover and the people of Liverpool are quite
right to object to parts of the article, but in so far as Michael Howard says
the article is 'nonsense from beginning to end' I cannot agree. To do so would
require me to perform a kind of auto-prefrontal lobotomy. Whatever
its mistakes of facts and taste, for which I am sorry, last week's leading
article made a good point: about bogus sentiment, self-pity, risk, and our
refusal to see that we may sometimes be the authors of our misfortunes. The idea
occurred to me when I was driving a child to a football match, and listening to
the England-Wales game, where it was the intention to hold a minute's silence
for Ken Bigley. I listened with mounting disbelief and disgust because instead
of keeping silent the crowds started to jabber, swear, jeer and catcall. After a
few seconds the referee gave up in embarrassment, and blew the whistle for the
start of the match. The following day I could find nothing in the papers about
this horrible event, and I brooded on the causes. How could people behave so
thuggishly? The crowd's reaction showed that there was a falseness here: the
ceremony required people to show an emotion that - manifestly, alas - they did
not feel. Suppose
the crowd had been asked to hold a minute's silence for those who died in the
war, or the victims of an IRA atrocity. That silence would have been interrupted
by nothing more than a cough. So a large part of that crowd was in a sense
rebelling against an imposed sentiment; and
that made me think of an editorial on the culture of sentimentality in modern
Britain, which is allied to the culture of victimhood, and I wanted a piece on
it, not because I wanted to insult the people of Liverpool, but because I
believe we have a serious problem in that we tend these days at every
opportunity to blame the state, and to seek redress from the state, when things
go wrong in our lives. Yes, it was tasteless to make this point in the context
of Ken Bigley's death, and I am sorry for any hurt this has caused his family.
But when a member of the late hostage's family said that the Prime Minister
has Mr Bigley's 'blood on his hands' that was nonsense. Only those who killed
Ken Bigley had blood on their hands, and it should not be taboo to say so. It
is important to make this point about our tendency to blame the state, because
we live in an increasingly atomised society, where the state does more and more
and where means-tested benefits multiply, and where good human emotions and
affections that might once have been directed towards neighbours and family are
now diverted into outbursts of sentimentality. We are in some ways as callous in
our treatment of old people as any country in the world; and yet we are so
sentimental about non-human beings, and so tyrannical in our sentimentality,
that we are about to become the first outpost of civilisation to ban hunting. We
are so ready to see ourselves as victims that we have an increasingly
hysterical health-and-safety compensation culture in which the chief culprits
are scaremongering journalists, cowardly politicians and muddled judges who
ought to throw out the attempts by lawyers to blame someone else - usually the
state - for the misfortunes of their clients. Such are the views of The
Spectator, its editor, and of Stephen Glover and, I bet, of Michael Howard
as well. I heartily and sincerely apologise for the offence caused by last
week's leader, and for the tasteless inaccuracies with which the point was made.
But I cannot retract the point. Reprinted from The Spectator 23 October 2004 |
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