A brave, noble campaign. But I still don’t believe a man should stand trial twice for the same crime
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
I can’t rejoice over the conviction of David Norris and Gary Dobson for the murder of Stephen Lawrence. I wish I could.
I am sure that both these men have done bad things. It may be that they are guilty of this awful murder, but I fear that their guilt is not proven beyond reasonable doubt. And I am revolted by the fact that the authorities were so shamefully negligent that Norris was severely beaten up by other prisoners while on remand.
If we set out to achieve justice – and I will come back to that – then we must be sure that justice is what we actually get. A show trial in which justice seems to have been done, and hasn’t been, actually makes all our lives worse. If these are the wrong culprits, locked up to make us feel good about ourselves, then we have responded to evil with evil.
Much worse for me, a British patriot intensely proud of our centuries-long struggle for freedom under the law, this whole prosecution is a violation of our heritage. The rule against trying anyone twice for the same crime is essential for liberty. And it is absolute. It must apply even when it makes us weep or vomit to obey it. The rule of law is only any use if it stops us doing things we would really, really like to do. If laws can be overridden by convenience, desire or because of effective campaigning, they are not laws.
Remember Thomas More’s great defence of law in Robert Bolt’s wonderful drama A Man For All Seasons. More’s accuser says he would 'cut down every law in England' to go after the devil. More retorts: 'Oh, and when the last law was down, and the devil turned on you, where would you hide, all the laws being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man’s laws not God’s, and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?'
Then he says quietly: 'Yes, I’d give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.'
We too must give the devil – and the devil’s friends, Norris and Dobson – the benefit of law, for our own safety’s sake.
I am sure of this because I have been to many of the worst places in the world, and the thing they all have in common is that there is no rule of law. They may pretend to have democracy (easy to do; our own democracy is increasingly a pretence). They may claim to have 'human rights'. But with no rule of law, nobody is safe, ever.
Now, the campaign to get justice for Stephen Lawrence and his bereaved, dignified family has been a noble one. When our sister newspaper, the Daily Mail, bravely accused a group of low-life crooks of being his murderers on its front page and dared them to sue, I rejoiced.
This was a good and courageous use of the power of a free press, one that my trade can always be proud of.
It also blew into fragments a smug slander, ceaselessly directed at conservative popular newspapers by ignorant and malicious media Leftists. They sneered from their state-subsidised desks that we were 'fascists' – racial bigots who believed in repression of free debate.
After that front page, this libel simply could not be advanced any more by any thinking or informed person. Better still, it was clear that what really motivated conservative popular journalism was a thirst for justice. But at that stage, thanks to the 1996 failed private prosecution of several of the alleged killers, that was as far as it went. The courts had failed. The guilty must therefore be marked as what they were and shamed.
Others, with quite different aims, then sought to use the case for their own ends. They wanted a politically correct inquisition into the police, already weakened by Left- liberal attacks in the Eighties but still a deeply conservative institution.
And the Blair Government, which despised British liberties, saw an opportunity to smash the ancient double jeopardy rule.
The Macpherson report, a bizarre document that few of its fans have ever read, never found any actual evidence of racial bigotry in the police. That is why it had to dredge up the old Sixties revolutionary slogan of 'institutional racism'. This is a presumption of guilt that has been used ever afterwards to enforce political correctness in the police force.
Thanks to this case, and what followed, have racial killings ceased? On the contrary, they are more common. Are murders and other crimes investigated more thoroughly? Hardly.
This country contains many families, as deeply wounded as the Lawrences, whose losses have also gone unavenged by justice, and who have no hope.
Sickening case of identity theft for Sherlock
If the BBC had not stolen the name of the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, and used it to publicise its soft-porn guns-and-giggles drama series, would fashionable critics have fallen over themselves to praise this slurry?
Perhaps they would. Fashionable critics will praise almost anything. But surely the identity theft is the only thing that holds this crude melodrama together?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s wonderful creation has found a place in the imaginations of countless millions of people. Until very recently, broadcasters and film-makers were content to stay true to the great storyteller’s original. Doyle himself would have enjoyed Jeremy Brett’s faithful and thoughtful version of Holmes.
What changed? Why must Holmes now suddenly be portrayed as a cruel, spiteful figure who is needlessly nasty to small children and unfortunate people? Why must the central character in a 90-minute drama be an unusually depraved prostitute? Why must Professor Moriarty be transformed into something rather like the Joker in a Batman movie?
Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? There’s no sex in the original stories and remarkably little violence. Instead people think, and have conversations. So chuck them in the bin, steal Holmes’s name and Doyle’s idea, and twist them for cheap laughs and perverted thrills.
When British broadcasters come to a turn in the path, and they see one arrow saying 'down' and another one saying 'up', they can be guaranteed to choose the one marked 'down', on and on until they reach the bottom. And then down again.
5 January 2012 3:58 PM
Wait for It
I’m waiting until I write my Mail on Sunday column to deal with a number of current subjects, so you’ll have to wait too. In the meantime, a few more general remarks, as the country gradually returns to its normal course and speed after Heathmas (my rude name for the spurious, pointless New Year holiday, introduced into England by that worst of all modern prime ministers).
Our religious obsessives, meanwhile, might be amused by a small controversy on a weblog site called ‘Big Think’ , or perhaps ‘Daylight Atheism’ , or perhaps both. This began after a Mr Adam Lee criticised something I wrote in my book ‘The Rage Against God’. I have now said all I wish to say there, having been reminded once again of the teeth-grindingly frustrating nature of such discussion. But I will pause for a moment to mention that Mr ‘Bunker’ in an unusually obtuse contribution, misunderstands the importance of the argument about the precision engineering of the universe.
This doesn’t, of course, prove anything. But I have heard otherwise confident unbelievers, asked what their biggest worry is about their own point of view, cite the extraordinarily fine tolerances ( so fine that tiny deviations either way would render the whole thing unworkable) necessary for so many of the functions of the universe as rather disturbing. Of course, we all know that nothing would shake or disturb the certainties of Mr ‘Bunker’, who – if I recall rightly – underwent some kind of mystical (or anti-mystical) experience which he won’t discuss, which convinced him that it was ‘impossible’ to believe in God. This sort of stuff tends to impress engineers more than it impresses other people. Then again, I have a high regard for engineers.
Now, I thought I’d like to discuss a book I have just finished , ‘The World of Yesterday’ by Stefan Zweig. Zweig, once one of the most famous authors in the world, has now almost entirely vanished from view. He was never very popular in Britain but was for many years enormously successful in continental Europe, South and North America. His disappearance, once again, shows how current fame can dissolve into obscurity in no time at all.
His novel ‘Beware of Pity’ was recently dramatized on BBC radio, and there is a mild revival of his works under way. But the point of ‘ The World of Yesterday’ is its detailed description of life in pre-1914 Europe, mainly Zweig’s own home city of Vienna.
Zweig, whose political and social sympathies were very much of the Left, is anxious to portray this world as stuffy and stifling, sexually repressed and hypocritical. He describes his own education as mechanical and dull. No doubt much of this is true, though his dull education equipped him to make his living as a writer,. And seems to have started him on the way to becoming a great linguist, able to speak most major European languages, and to translate works of literature.
But in doing so he also manages to describe the calmness, general honesty and integrity, the extraordinary freedom of travel and the untroubled privacy of that time. When it all falls to pieces, thanks to the First world War, it is clear even to the radical Zweig that something irreplaceable has gone. His description of the departure from Austria of the deposed Emperor Karl, which he witnessed, is filled with a sense of loss, close to bereavement. And who would now say that the old Austro-Hungarian Empire was not a far better master than those who succeeded it?
If I could travel in time, it is pre-1914 Europe I should most wish to see. It is the difference in the actual human condition that would be just as interesting as the lost buildings and works of art, the majestic railways and the almost total absence of horrible motor cars.
People were, I think, calmer, more self-possessed, more easily shocked. The First World War ended that and left us as we are now, far more frantic and intemperate than we used to be. Zweig makes much of his view that the sexual repression of the era caused large-scale prostitution and stimulated smutty pornography. I think there is some truth in part of this. A society which is prudish and which insists on lifelong marriage is likely to have a secret underside where these rules are transgressed.
But what then happened –the obscenity of war in which all modesty and restraint were thrown aside, and then the Babylon of inflation which debauched the lives of millions especially in the German lands (his description of the moral corruption of Berlin thanks to the great inflation is startling) – did not in fact end prostitution or pornography. On the contrary, bot continue to boom despite the virtual abolition of all forms of ‘repression’ and sexual hypocrisy, and the licensing of of almost all types of pornography, with one notable exception.
And would the various reform movements of the pre-1914 era, for healthier lives, more exercise, less constricting, not have continued towards their goals without a war, perhaps attaining them without anything like as much collateral damage being done?
I think one of the most interesting might-have-beens in history is the fate of Europe if the 1914 war had never taken place. It’s fashionable now to say that Britain, at least was on the brink of revolution anyway, thanks to Ireland and the labour unrest. But I’m not convinced. Could any resolution of the Irish conflict have been worse than the Easter Rising of 1916 (impossible without the war) and what followed? Couldn’t Britain have reformed herself in many important ways without war, and done it better because the national wealth wasn’t squandered on war?
And what about all the people – the talented, the dutiful, the best-educated, the healthiest, who went off to die between 1914 and 1916 in the original volunteer army? Don’t we still miss them?
It’s clear from Zweig’s book that continental civilisation before 1914 had, in many ways, reached a level that it has yet to regain nearly a century later. The approved version these days is that war brought huge technological and social advance (the then French Ambassador to London, Paul Cambon, said after 1918 that Britain had undergone an actual revolution during the war, and this was certainly just as true in the 1939-45 war). But aren’t we inclined to see the ‘liberation’ of women from ‘domestic drudgery’ 9and their transfer to industrial and commercial drudgery)) as an unalloyed good, just as we tend to view universal suffrage as automatically wonderful, and the much-increased level of state intervention in daily life as broadly beneficial.
But were they? Did we take the right turning? Few blessings are unmixed, most come with curses. And the price we paid, in lives and health, for these revolutions, was colossal. Was it worth it?
As I suspected they might, my criticisms of the BBC’s ‘Great Expectations’ drew more comment than anything else I said on Sunday.
Given that the prosperous world trembles on the lip of a great precipice, with a real prospect of permanent and irreversible economic decline, is this reasonable?
Actually, yes. Books such as ‘Great Expectations’ were part of the great moral revolution which made this country prosperous, ordered and civilised. They are crucial to our civilisation. Like all great moral books, it makes the reader envy the good characters their goodness, and want to emulate them . It made us recognise the good and the bad in ourselves - in fact Dickens ceaselessly did this, probably because he was himself struggling all the time against his own cruelty and selfishness, and loathed these things in others. I can never make up my mind as to whether ‘Great Expectations’ or ‘David Copperfield’ is Dickens’s finest book. Literary types have always rather despised Dickens because he was ‘sentimental’ , which of course he was. But so are most of us.
A good modern example of the influence of books for good is Patrick O’Brian’s fine series of historical novels set in the Napoleonic Wars. Having read them, almost any thoughtful person will be a better human being, thanks to his or her encounter with Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin. Both men have great virtues (both also have terrible weaknesses, Aubrey – a genius at sea or in battle - becomes a hopeless fool on land and in time of peace). Like Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, the two together make one first-rate human being, a little like a marriage but without the sexual element. The reader, consciously or unconsciously, longs to meet with their approval.
I am just about to embark on reading ‘Great Expectations’ again because, while furiously checking the text to see if there is any justification for the BBC travesty, I realised how much of the book I had forgotten since I last read it, and how much the David Lean film now overlays the text in my mind. Lean, for instance, completely omits the nasty character of Dolge Orlick, while making much of the wise and delightful Biddy.
Lean is, I think, truer to the spirit of the book than the BBC, who played up Orlick (He’s a much more 21st-century type, whereas there are not many Biddys around today. But it’s not as if there are not plenty of other horrible people in the book) and, as far as I could see, completely got rid of Biddy.
But both versions are unwilling to reach Dickens’s original bleak conclusion, in which there is no hope of Pip and Estella marrying. Public reaction persuaded Dickens to write a second, alternative ending in which the reader can, if he wishes, believe that the two will eventually wed. The closing words are plangent and haunting ‘the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her’. But they are directly preceded by Estella’s flat declaration that the two ‘will continue friends apart’. I think there’s no avoiding the fact that Dickens saw the story as a tragedy with no comforting ending, in which people destroy themselves through vengeance, snobbery and dishonesty.
And yes, why on earth did the BBC change a perfectly good pork pie, which makes sense in the plot, and is lovingly described before its disappearance is noticed, into a mutton pie, an entirely different comestible? I can’t imagine that Mrs Joe would have served a mutton pie cold (ugh) and one gropes for any reason for meddling. You might think it is meant to show that the writers were cleverer than Dickens. But as they aren’t, it doesn’t.
For instance, the opening of the book, in the churchyard cannot really be altered, because much of the dialogue between Pip and Magwitch doesn’t make sense anywhere else. So why shift the encounter to a bridge over a stream, where the gravestones cannot be seen?
As for the character of Joe Gargery, the whole point about Joe is that he is full of humour, forgiveness and gentleness . Everyone should read his description of his own awful childhood, crammed as it is with deep, gentle forgiveness of his own appalling father, combined with a determination not to repeat the evil done to him, which explains his otherwise inexplicable tolerance of his wife’s shrewish behaviour. Then (this is very early in the book) there is the description of the game he and Pip make over eating the meagre bread-and-butter ration allowed them by the ever-furious Mrs Joe. It is just the way a patient and light-hearted person would deal with such a difficulty, and it is very funny.
And the day when Joe comes to London to find Pip transformed into a an awful little snob is as a result one of mingled pain and hilarity – not the rather boring and obvious scene of sullen reproach portrayed in the BBC version. As I asked so often in my complaints about the new version of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’, why take so much trouble to change things of this kind, when it would have been easier to leave them alone?
Increasingly, I think it is a justified fear on the part of the writers that, as they cannot do better than the previous version, and may well do worse, they will alter the story so that they are never actually put to the test, and cannot be directly measured against those who have gone before.
But look at what is lost here – perhaps one of the best, most sympathetic yet devastating denunciations of foolish class division that has ever been written or (in the Lean film) performed.
In fact it is really the evisceration and transformation of Joe Gargery which is much the worst thing about the new version, especially if you combine it with the crude agitprop alteration of Herbert Pocket into a Marxist-Leninist’s idea of a snob, so much less subtle, and so much easier to ignore, and so much less interesting, than Dickens’s funny, clever approach to the same subject . In the end, the messing about with Miss Havisham is, by comparison, trivial. You might have expected them to get the accents wrong, to get Jaggers wholly wrong (though what a loss that is) , to make Wemmick far grimmer than he is, to introduce a non-existent brothel and who knows what other silly changes.
I suppose that really such people don’t like Dickens because he isn’t an ideologue and he won’t be dull. For many years the literary critics simply ruled him out of their ‘Great Tradition’. It has recently been fashionable to make much of ‘Bleak House’, not in my view an especially fine novel, though the opening is a joy, because it is as close as Dickens got to writing a ‘literary’ novel, that is to say one which it is a bit of an effort to read, and in which not very much happens for quite a lot of the time. I speak as someone who has repeatedly tried, under ideal conditions, to get past page 20 of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and has found himself completely unable to do so. My eye starts wandering round the room, reading the conditions of carriage on the railway ticket I’m using as a bookmark, or the corner of the sports page of an old newspaper on a nearby armchair – yet I never read the sports page.
In fact, one of my last conversations with my brother involved him urging me to try ‘Pride and Prejudice’ again, (and also to make another attempt on ‘Middlemarch’, another of my failures, though oddly enough I stormed enthusiastically through ‘Silas Marner’ after finding it in a fading but beautifully-printed old edition in a secondhand bookshop in Norwich one winter afternoon).
Anyway, I suppose it’s more or less true to say , while the pre-1914 generation who shaped this country’s customs, morals and attitudes until very recently were formed by Dickens, (with the Bible and by John Bunyan’s now-forgotten ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ in the backs of their minds) , modern Britain is formed by TV and soap opera. Apparently the New Britain cannot tolerate the continued existence of the old one, and , since it cannot wholly forget Dickens, has resolved to remake him to suit the world of Big Brother and the gap yah.
This is greatly important. The furniture of your mind, especially the stories and poems that are there, makes you incapable of some actions and thoughts, and capable of others. I think anyone who has *read* ‘Great Expectations', and has allowed its characters to come to life in his mind, will be kinder, more forbearing and less vengeful – as well as less inclined to classify people by their external appearance – than anyone who hasn’t.
I also think that characters encountered in print live much more fully in our minds than characters who have been largely created for us by TV or films. Also, the more we get used to having the work done for us, the less we are prepared to do for ourselves. I don’t think anyone in this generation, that is, born since colour TV invaded children’s bedrooms, let alone since the arrival of computer games, is likely to make the effort needed to read their way into old-fashioned children’s books such as the Conan Doyle historical romances that I have always loved so much.
As to why the older Pip could not have looked like a 21st-century male model , there are several answers. One, the TV version of the older Pip bore not the faintest resemblance to the younger one and seems to me to have been chosen by the casting executives precisely because of his extraordinary physical beauty, even though this was in defiance of any justification for this in the text or in the younger Pip’s appearance. This sort of thing, extreme and rather chilly physical beauty, seems to be good for audience figures, as in the recent bizarre and excruciatingly dull film of ‘Alice’ ( also little to do with the original books) which appears to have been a box-office success. But the face of this actor also seems to me to be quite unmarked by the earthy experience that would have given shape and mobility to the face of a man who had worked for years in a village forge. I know nothing of the actor involved, but I would be surprised if his personal background turns out to contradict my belief.
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
The New Year has always seemed to me to be a time for enjoying a bit of gloom.
So in the spirit of hearty pessimism, I’d like to take you forward 30 years, for an imaginary peep into the pages of the ‘China Daily’ of January 1, 2042. You can judge for yourselves how imaginary it really is.
'Cabinet papers issued today by the state archives of the People’s Republic cast an interesting light on the final years of the country formerly known as Great Britain. Younger readers should know that, 30 years ago, this once-important nation (now dissolved) occupied the vacation islands, famous for their mild climate and their picturesque historical theme parks, which lie off our far western coast.
'A memo from Prime Minister David Cameron to his deputy, Nicholas Clegg, runs in part "...and thanks so much, Nick, for your continuing self-sacrifice in our joint cause. I’m so sorry you have to put up with those moronic cartoons portraying you as the junior partner when – as we both well know - this is a liberal government in which I am happy to let you get your way.
'"I am especially grateful for your recent performance, a fine piece of acting. The dim old buffers who still vote for my party, however many times we let them down, were genuinely taken in, and thought a) that I had struck a blow for Britain in Brussels and b) that you were angry about it."
'There are also memos to the Interior Minister of the time, Theresa May, congratulating her for "sounding as if you really mean to do something about crime and immigration" and a ruder one to the Justice Minister, Kenneth Clarke, chiding him for "letting the cat out of the bag: it won’t do, old boy! Can’t you just be satisfied with getting your way? There’s no need to gloat in public."
'A letter from Mr Cameron to Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish government, is strangely friendly, given Mr Cameron’s frequent public assertions that he was against Scottish independence. Experts from the University of Shanghai have concluded that Mr Cameron secretly wanted a Scottish breakaway as the only chance of his party ever again winning an Election on its own.'
The China Daily continues: 'No trace can be found of any serious plans to reform the country’s disastrous state schools, nor to curb its out-of-control welfare system, known to be widely abused by criminals and to encourage parasitical sloth.
'As for the economy, the archives contain only a plaintive note from the Finance Minister to the Premier, bearing the words, "There’s no money!"
'The documents make it plain that the governing class of the country formerly known as Great Britain had no idea how to cope with the problems they faced and were mainly obsessed with public relations. In the light of this, the events of the next 20 years should have come as no surprise.'
I don't recall Dickens writing an Estuary English soap opera
Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is one of the best books ever written. David Lean’s 1946 realisation of it is one of the best films ever made - not least because so much of its dialogue is taken direct from the original.
So why is the BBC’s new adaptation so astonishingly, disappointingly, ridiculously bad?
It is because the BBC is so full of people who simply refuse to admit that they have anything to learn from the past. In their world, all drama must be either Doctor Who or EastEnders (or in this case a combination of the two).
Pip Pirrip, raised in a blacksmith’s cottage, could not possibly have grown up to look like a male model. Herbert Pocket was never a vicious snob. Miss Havisham was a yellow-skinned, deranged hag, not a self-harming young woman.
Estella was an unattainable beauty - not a stroppy person with the adenoidal voice and the scowling visage of an affronted North London social worker.
Perhaps above all, Joe Gargery was a man of almost saintly goodness and humour, rather than the glum and self-righteous person in this TV travesty, who always looks as if he’s just off to a Chartist meeting.
I reread the opening chapters of the book to reassure myself about this and was repeatedly convulsed with laughter and moved close to tears. The TV version produced no emotion at all and resorted to incessant loud music to tell us how we should have been feeling.
The vandals behind it also managed to insert a scene in a brothel - perhaps they can tell me where this occurs in the book. Dickens, being a proper writer, managed to envelop the foul figure of Bentley Drummle in a cloud of evil without any such crudities.
And the script was full of modern soap opera language, often in Estuary English quite unlike the speech of the time – ‘con man’, ‘close the deal’, ‘he owes me’.
Yes, of course you need to make changes when you adapt an immense book into three hours of drama. But you need to stay close to the truth of the original, or you are destroying it. Something similar is now happening to Sherlock Holmes thanks to the half-witted cinema versions. In an age when few read any more, this third-rate stuff is in danger of replacing greatness with cut-price hogwash.
* * *
A Canadian judge has ruled that a teenager was under the influence of an ‘antidepressant’ when he knifed a close friend to death.
Judge Robert Heinrichs was told in his Winnipeg court that the killer (also a user of cannabis and cocaine) grew more irrational once prescribed the ‘antidepressant’.
‘He had become irritable, restless, agitated, aggressive and unclear in his thinking,’ the judge said.
‘In that state he overreacted in an impulsive, explosive and violent way’.
Now off the drug, he was ‘simply not the same in behaviour or character’.
It is a painful case, but it underlines the urgent need for a proper inquiry into these widely used pills.
We're making North Korea worse
Small politicians try to look big by exaggerating the size and the danger of their foes. The West’s ridiculous attitude to North Korea is an example of this.
I have been there, and can report that this bankrupt, starving statelet is so poor it cannot even warm its own government buildings and must have used up much of its petrol reserves to stage the funeral of its deceased leader.
Its rulers are trapped in their palace. If they show weakness, they will be torn to pieces by their hungry, disillusioned subjects. Above all, they need a way out. If we do not help provide one they will, in the end, have to collapse into the arms of China.
Why should we want that? Yet we continue to portray this sad survival as a major power and adopt a high moral tone in our dealings with it. Yes, it can still do harm – but it is much more likely to do so if we maintain our current policy.
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