James Fox

It was for services ‘to exports and ecology’ that Sir James Goldsmith was nominated for a peerage, and then demoted to a knight by the Scrutiny Committee, in what is bitterly remembered as the Wilson Honours List. Was there a connection between Sir James’s elevation and his year-long battle to punish Private Eye and jail its editor, Richard Ingrams – an effort which was supported by Wilson and Lady Falkender, both victims of Ingrams’s harassment, and which petered out in a relatively painless settlement in 1976? Ingrams’s theory is that there was such a connection.

The readers of the Italian weekly L’Espresso (swaying in the breeze like a field of ripe corn) were treated, in their issue of 20 January, to a new form of journalistic entertainment – a media package for the Eighties. Wrapped into the cellophane cover was a gramophone record, featuring a conversation between a member of the Red Brigades and Aldo Moro’s daughter, in which she is given one last chance for her father’s release. This is followed by another conversation – the last in a series of calls from another of Moro’s captors, ‘Professor Niccolai’, telling Moro’s best friend, on the day he was killed, where to pick up the corpse. You hear the friend sobbing and making great efforts to speak. He is told that Moro’s last wish was that he take the news to Moro’s family. ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘You can’t,’ says Niccolai, as if discussing a grocery delivery. His bureaucratic style creates a repugnant sense of cruelty and inhumanity as he gives directions: first left, second right, the body is in the boot. ‘Va bene?’

In a recent letter to the Times, Lords Hailsham, Drogheda, Carrington, Goodman and Weinstock, and Messrs Roy Jenkins and James Prior, said they felt it was a good time, in view of the new publicity about the Ward case, to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord Goodman had drafted it, even though it comes from his office. (It was Hailsham who said in June 1963: ‘A great party is not to be brought down by a woman of easy virtue and a proved liar.’ Something of a sting at the time.) The idea conveyed is that history is an oubliette down which you can throw episodes you would rather have forgotten. But the Profumo case, which should be called the Stephen Ward case, will not go down. The longer it is around, the uglier it gets. It is a shocking story, which will continue to discredit its participants, all the more so for as long as they pretend, like Lord Denning, that there was no injustice perpetrated against Stephen Ward, or say that these new revelations are ‘invented’. No doubt to Ward’s posthumous amusement, Denning is currently reported to be arguing for libel protection for the dead.

There is enough forensic evidence lying around to construct any number of theories, from either point of view. Was it, or was it not, Lord Lucan who murdered the nanny Sandra Rivett? In the 13 years since she was found in the US mailbag at 46 Lower Belgrave Street in London there has been no new evidence. Patrick Marnham’s only novelty is the evidence from Taki, the Spectator gossip-columnist, to the effect that he knew Lucky Lucan had a powerboat and had made dummy runs with an eight-stone sack to the coast. That fits with Lucan’s remarks to Greville Howard some weeks before the murder that he planned to drop his wife’s body into the Solent. As for the Lucan ‘set’, once so besieged and worried for its survival, this has long since been amalgamated into the Thatcher revolution. It’s a pity that neither of these books has a history of the store of rumour that grew up around the affair – the brutal witch-hunting stories that passed as truth, and are secure in the popular culture. They told us something of our rather nasty ways of dealing with the unexplained or inexplicable. It was indeed that line of venom which led me to ask about Lucan’s wife Veronica. These inquiries led in turn to a fierce reaction from the Lucan supporters, and to the hounding of Dominick Elwes. ‘They simply hadn’t realised what an unsympathetic appearance they gave to the rest of the world,’ writes Marnham.’