Spectator, The: Letters

A sorry tale

Sir: If Michael Vestey had bothered to ask me, he might have written a more accurate piece than the farrago he produced last week (`You may be experiencing some interference', 5 December).

It is untrue that Richard Ayre visited me `that night and discussed the apology that should be delivered'. The letter to Peter Mandelson was my own idea, and the first that Richard Ayre knew of it was when I told him the next day. It was not delivered `early in the morning'. It was not 'a grovelling note of apology': I did not think I had anything to apologise for.

If he had called me, I could have explained all this to Mr Vestey. I would also have told him of my personal belief that people's private lives are their own affair, unless they either make them public property or the private life affects how they do their job.

I expect that, in the finest BBC tradition, Michael Vestey had to hand in his reporter's stopwatch when he retired a few years ago. I didn't know they'd taken his phone as well.

Jeremy Paxman Newsnight,

BBC Television Centre, Wood Lane, London W12

Sir: On the evening when Michael Vestey puts me in the Newsnight studio telling Jeremy Paxman to drop a grovelling note to Peter Mandelson, I was actually at home. I watched Newsnight and did not talk to anyone about it until the next day. Whatever Jeremy wrote, he did it unprompted by me or anyone else so far as I know. Anyone who knows and admires him as I do will find the suggestion that it was a 'grovel' laughable.

As for whether I was `acting on the orders of . . . Sir John Birt', I wasn't acting for anyone. Damn it, I wasn't even acting! Sir John has never spoken to me about the Newsnight incident, nor have I heard from him about it directly or indirectly. Sorry to disappoint.

Richard Ayre BBC News, Television Centre, Wood Lane, London W12

Michael Vestey writes: I must accept Richard Ayre's statement that he was not in the Newsnight studio on the night of the Paxman-Parris interview, despite information I had to the contrary, as well as that contained in Mr Paxman's letter. Following his example I might even hand in a note of apology on his doorstep. However, Mr Ayre's letter thickens the plot. It is a pity he fails to elaborate on the precise circumstances of Mr Paxman's letter to Peter Mandelson and the memo he composed with Anne Sloman banning any mention of Peter Mandelson's name in the news coverage of the incident. I, too, find it hard to imagine Jeremy Paxman grovelling, but this is the impression given by the whole absurd affair. I agree entirely with Mr Paxman's view that people's private lives are their own affair, but in his questioning of Matthew Parris he invited his interviewee to name Cabinet ministers who were homosexual, thus sparking the controversy about Mandelson.

Incidentally, I was too young to retire from the BBC. I left it voluntarily to do other things, and after the way in which this incident has been handled I am very glad I did so.

Wiggery-pokery

Sir: On the question of whether Wilson framed Wigg by inducing the police to arrest him on a false charge of kerb-crawling, I must reiterate that Lord Wigg told me many times that he believed it was so. I found it hard to believe, but the police were unable to produce any witnesses or any other evidence, and were irrationally hostile to him.

Wigg's executor, Roy Roebuck, suggests (Letters, 28 November) that Joe Haines is wrong in alleging that Wilson put pressure on Wigg to make him remove criticisms of Lady Falkender from the autobiography which Wigg published in 1972. Haines erred in giving the publication date as 1974, but was otherwise entirely accurate.

These are the facts as given to me by Wigg and as I recorded them at the time:

After he had completed the MS, Wigg sold it to the Thomson Organisation which was to serialise it in the Sunday Times. After Lord Thomson had been approached by lawyers acting for Wilson and Marcia, Wigg was asked to make certain cuts on legal grounds. He refused and was then told that if he insisted on retaining the offending paragraphs, he would have to indemnify the Thomson Organisation for L50,000 to cover possible libel suits. In addition, legal fees would probably total L20,000.

Appalled by this demand (then huge), Wigg approached his old friend Lord Shinwell for advice. Shinwell immediately offered him a cheque for L5,000 plus any other help he might be able to afford later. Having sized up his resources, Wigg had to give way.

Mr Roebuck's statement that Wigg did not probe the sexual peccadilloes of politicians is quite untrue. Wigg told me that he was doing so, with assistance from MIS, on orders from Wilson. His activities against some fellow Labour MPs even infuriated some Tories. As I recorded at the time, the late Sir Hugh Fraser, a Tory Minister, told me how he and several other MPs had warned Wigg that if he did not stop harassing a certain Labour MP (later a lord) who had a mistress, they would expose his activities. Wigg then desisted.

Having admitted to being Wigg's executor, Mr Roebuck, whose name was never mentioned by Wigg to me, might explain why papers in his possession for 15 years, since Wigg's death, should have taken so long to catalogue. It was Wigg's wish that they be made available for examination five years ago. He might also give an assurance that the papers have not been 'weeded'.

Chapman Pincher 16 Church Street, Kintbury, Hungerford, Berks

Sir: Roy Roebuck's lengthy letter can be summed up in five words: Wigg didn't tell him everything. Galling that must be, but Wigg was always secretive.

However, I'm glad he asserts that Wigg didn't probe the sexual peccadilloes of politicians or anyone else. I was a political reporter in Wigg's most active days and I have a distinct memory (obviously false) that, apart from John Profumo, Wigg was closely interested in the downfall of the Tory MP, Commander Anthony Courtney, who was caught in bed with a KGB agent. Roebuck would remember Courtney well because he gained his only parliamentary success at his expense.

In view of Roebuck's unrivalled experience in the field, I'll accept, though few others would, his further denial that Lords Wigg, Wyatt and Wakeham were failed politicians.

But when, in a typically irrelevant aside, he says that my biography of Robert Maxwell `excited factual criticism', he should have been more careful of his own facts. I never was a member of `Tunbridge Wells Urban District Council', if such a body ever existed. I did stand, successfully, three times in an adjacent town; my majority on the third occasion was greater than Roebuck's over Courtney and, unlike him, I didn't need a Liberal to let me in.

Joe Haines 1 South Frith, London Road, Southborough,

Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Russian roulette

Sir: If I read Richard Lamb right (Letters, 21 November), he thinks that Chamberlain should have gambled the future of Britain upon a single-line railway from Romania to Czechoslovakia. The notion that this railway line would have carried the Soviet army and its equipment to Czechoslovakia in the time required and the numbers necessary is a quaint one; presumably the Germans would have left it alone, and no doubt the Russians would have performed rather better than they did against the Finns in 1940?

For most of the nations of central Europe the Soviets were just as much of a threat as the Nazis, and only Englishmen of a certain generation can still believe that the Russians were part of the solution to the problems of that region rather than part of the problem. Lamb may, in retrospect, think that British lives should have been gambled on a single-line railway and the word of the Romanian foreign minister and of the Soviets, but no doubt if Chamberlain had done so and failed, Lamb would be excoriating him for taking such risks.

What Alan Massie's article (`The war for a worse world', 7 November) has reopened is the debate between those who still hold a Whiggish view of 20th-century British history - the two world wars were righteous and inevitable - and those of us who take a more sceptical line, suspecting that Britain's involvement in the Great War was both unnecessary and unwise. 1914 was a turning-point in British history. For the first time in a century Britain committed herself to a kontinentalpolitik for which she was not equipped; she was no better equipped for it in 1938. Chamberlain's real folly was in interfering in a region where Britain could exercise no influence. Churchill discovered the price of allying with the Soviets, even if it was the Poles and others who paid it. The Russians were indeed coming - the problem would be getting them to go!

Professor John Charmley University of East Anglia, Norwich

No thank you

Sir: Karen Robinson stopped short of telling the full story of her party (`No return to sender', 28 November).

What I want to know is, did she receive any thank-you letters, notes or even telephone calls over the two or three days after the event? For the lack of these is, in my experience, becoming increasingly widespread as an even more pernicious lapse in manners.

Am I alone in feeling hurt when, having gone to a great deal of trouble to entertain and having seen my guests off with fulsome thanks and praise, there is a deafening silence afterwards? Call me old-fashioned but I like to send thank-you notes and have always assumed that others did too. Basic good manners, my mother used to say.

But no, along with the failure to RSVP before the event, party guests these days also think it's all right not to bother to drop a quick note afterwards. In these days of emails and faxes it should be even easier. What is the world coming to? Perhaps Mary Killen can explain.

Annie Gurton 12 Penrose Terrace Penzance, Cornwall Guardian of sobriety

Sir: Peregrine Worsthorne (`As I was saying', 21 November), in reminiscing about his days on the Daily Telegraph in the 1960s, contrasts the characteristic writing and drinking habits of journalists on that paper with those of journalists on the Manchester Guardian.

Manchester Guardian journalists did not always confine their bons mots to print in the way he suggests. I remember that my father W.P. Crozier (editor 1932-44) used to circulate brief and courteous memos to his young leader writers. Among them was one indicating that he would like to talk to them during the pause in the evening's work before the first edition came up. This ran, '. . . and by at your desk I do not mean in the Thatched House'.

Mary Crozier Flat 1, 12 Priory Road, Kew Gardens, Surrey

The bottom line

Sir: I appeal to your American contributor Mark Steyn, whose witty articles I much enjoy, to refrain from bowdlerising the English language by using the word 'ass' for the Anglo-Saxon 'arse': `Dan Burton easily won re-election, kicking the pert silkcamisoled ass of . . . Bob Kern, a dragqueen' (`Clinton yes, transvestites no', 7 November).

Those not well versed in the American language may well find this unintelligible. On the other hand, I wonder what the average American makes of the biblical story (Numbers xxii) that Balaam was spoken to by his ass!

Charles Rubens 12 Bracknell Gate, Frognal Lane, London NW3

Without prejudice

Sir: You must have been hurt by Robin Wight's unwarranted slur (Letters, 28 November). He wrote that biased journalism is `most unlike' The Spectator. Were that the case you would have few subscribers.

I buy The Spectator for spirited prejudice. I am rarely disappointed.

Peter Bazalgette 29 Kensington Park Gardens London Wll