Francis Wheen on: Hysterical fits of morality. (Guardian May 6 1998)
Many people can quote Lord Macaulay's famous line: "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." Few, I'd guess, have read the essay in which it appears - a brilliant review of Thomas Moore's Life of Byron, published in 1831. But if Tony Blair intends to keep provoking these fits it should be added to the national curriculum without delay.
"Diana's power is born out of emotion," the Prime Minister said a couple of weeks ago, "and there's nothing wrong with that - I'm an emotional person too." It was he who encouraged the beatification of the Princess of Wales, and, more recently, of Linda McCartney, a woman he'd never met. He took time out from negotiations in the Middle East to put an obscure professor in the stocks for doubting if the mourning for Princess Diana was either healthy or justifiable. Now he and his Home Secretary have given their implicit blessing to the the vigilantes and tabloid maniacs who have driven Mary Bell and her daughter into protective custody.
In Straw's case, "implicit" is hardly the word. Last Wednesday he announced that Mary Bell had "compromised her own claim for her own privacy" even though he knew full well that the injunction to which he referred was granted to protect the privacy of her young daughter. His open letter to the mothers of Bell's victims, published by the Sun on Thursday, was even more pharisaical: "We have indeed been trying to find a way to prevent Mary Bell from profiting from her story. That is why I have asked the Government's top legal adviser, the Attorney General, to consider if there was anything he could do...You may have heard some people say that this area of law is too difficult to give people the protection which you and others like you deserve. However difficult it is, the Prime Minister and I know it is our job to find a way through to solve these problems."
Mrs Corrigan and Mrs Richardson were thus led to believe that Straw and Blair would somehow manage to seize the fee paid by Gitta Sereny to her interviewee. Yet Straw should have known, as a Home Secretary and a lawyer, that this was impossible. If he didn't know it, he's a fool. If he did, he's a disingenuous opportunist. Either way, he tipped several gallons of petrol on to a moral panic that was already dangerously ablaze.
If Blair and Straw can't understand the perils of collective hysteria, they should have watched Richard Littlejohn's chat-show on Sky television last week, in which a man who dared to suggest that lynch-law was a bad idea found himself howled down by a menacing posse of Sun readers. When a woman on the same programme revealed that she had shot dead two men whom she suspected of paedophilia, she was given a thunderous ovation. Nothing wrong in wearing your heart on your sleeve, eh, Tony?(Wheen quotes Macaulay at some length.) ...It is good that a certain portion of disgrace should constantly attend on certain bad actions. But it is not good that the offenders should merely have to stand the risks of a lottery of infamy." Or, conversely, a lottery of sanctity - as has happened with the Princess of Wales and Linda McCartney, posthumously idolised by the same people who mocked them as cranks and weirdos while they were alive.
So it is, mutatis mutandis, with Mary Bell. Her crimes were horribly depraved and she duly served a sentence. But the specific offence that caused last week's outrage - her acceptance of money - isn't unusual. Hardly a month goes by without some criminal (Charlie Richardson, say, or Darius Guppy, or Ronnie Knight, or Mad Frankie Fraser) cashing in far more profitably on his notoriety.
The spectacle of hypocritical self-righteousness is no less ridiculous today than it was in Macaulay's time. His only mistake was to assume that these fits of hysteria would always be "periodical". Under the governance of the emotional Mr Blair, they seem to be pretty well continuous.
Julie Burchill
Mark Lawson
Simon Hattenstone
magnificat
David Stafford
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