LAST POST

For the five or six generations of solitary, sedentary boys in the middle of which fell my vintage (the baby boomers), the hobby par excellence was collecting stamps. Philately, as we preferred to call it, could be enjoyed alone on a long winter evening or with others, particularly when engaged in the cut-throat business of “swaps”.

There were plenty of tangential benefits that surely trumped whatever – other than burning off energy – was to be gained from being out playing football or cowboys and indians. Stamps from abroad opened up foreign parts in a unique way at a time when television was still in its infancy. Significant events and figures from the diverse pasts of diverse nations were apt to be commemorated on stamps. Present national and international events were marked also, and culture, science, industry and other important enterprises were reflected on postal issues. Finally, the philatelic artwork itself gave one an appreciation of design and the particular skills of miniaturisation. So a stamp collection was a guide to geography, history, art and current affairs in little. It did just what John Reith’s BBC was designed to do: educate, inform and entertain.

A typical Commonwealth issue of the kind 1950s little boys collected

Like most collectors in that period, I began with British and Commonwealth stamps, the ones most readily available on envelopes that came through the door. But I was drawn to European stamps, so many of which had an elegance you didn’t find in the rather drab and restrained home issues. Then I had a lucky break.

My mother had golfing friends who turned out to have a serious stamp collection. The husband, Henri Castel, was a Frenchman who had been brought up by an English guardian: there were intriguing rumours of an improper relationship. Henri was glamorous and charming with thick, black, wavy hair and a Günter Grass moustache. The little finger was missing from his left hand: in his account, it had been bitten off by a horse when he was serving in the cavalry. I happily swallowed this version. He seemed to me a hugely romantic figure and I was hopelessly smitten.

No less glamorous – if a little forbidding for my taste – was his German wife Hildegard. Everyone remarked upon her facial resemblance to Dietrich, although in truth this was a touch far-fetched. Nevertheless, a German woman living in an English market town less than a decade after war’s end was, to say the least, something of a novelty, and if, by relating her to an acceptable German, the locals found a way to accept her, so much the better.

Hilde’s father had possessed a huge and – I would hazard – internationally significant collection of German stamps that, some time in the early years of the cold war, Henri and Hilde managed to smuggle piecemeal out of East Germany and bring to England. These were the treasures to which Henri introduced me during our regular Saturday mornings at his parlour table in their beautiful townhouse. With a generosity that, in retrospect, makes my head spin, he passed to me many fine items from his own and his father-in-law’s collections.

The Reich Chancellor at his peak

With Henri’s encouragement, I built my own German collection. Hitler remained a palpable bogeyman for several years after the war and there was a curious frisson in owning miniature portraits of him issued in the years of his pomp. There was no sense, though, that Henri and I were keeping some flame alive. Far from it. We were dealing objectively with the historical objects that happened to be available to us. For a school open day, I prepared a potted history of twentieth-century Germany illustrated with stamps from my own collection. By mutual consent, Henri gave me no assistance with this, save for his comprehensive enthusiasm when it was finished and ready to show. I duly won a prize.

My own instincts embraced French and Dutch stamps quite as much as German, and Henri helped and encouraged these parallel collections. As with any collecting field where the items are contemporary as well as historical, the new issues need to be systematically added if the collection is to remain sharp. Though I had built serviceable historical cores to my collections, the various intrusions attendant upon growing up prevented my keeping them up-to-date. The Saturday morning sessions dwindled. I suppose I was eight when they began and twelve when they ended.

The Castels had slipped away from the centre of my life when my mother told me that Henri had dropped dead on the golf course. I remember that my emotions were curiously detached, that I had somehow sensed that such a treasured mentor would be snatched away. I guess I was then about 16, Henri probably in his early 50s.

I still have the stamp collection. Would it be worth anything? Collecting is very subject to the vagaries of fashion and to quite external factors. In a world where so much of what we deal with is digital, stuff that you can hold is less favoured, but that may not always be so.

An archetypal French classic

I have added little to the German, French and Dutch collections for years. But I have systematically kept my British collection current by purchasing the new stamps as they were issued, a set to keep mint, another to post to myself so that they acquire postal franking. Though the Royal Mail makes a great fuss about the delights of philately and puts out special issues in ever increasing numbers, most of the management decisions made concerning postal services over the past couple of decades have militated against the collector.

British stamps were graphically modest and infrequently issued before the 1960s. Then suitable occasions for special issues began to be found: the Post Offices Savings Bank centenary, the European Postal and Telecommunications Conference, the ninth International Lifeboat Conference. In 1964, the first commoner was depicted on a set of British stamps when the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth was marked. By this time, a modernist was overlord of the postal service.

The post of Postmaster General dates back to 1823 and it had cabinet rank. Among distinguished PMG’s were Austen and Neville Chamberlain, Clement Attlee, Charles Hill and Ernest Marples. The last holder of the office, before it became Minister of Post and Telecommunications outside the cabinet in 1969, was the notorious John Stonehouse.

From 1964 to 1966, the PMG was the MP then known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn. At this time, the organisation was called the General Post Office (GPO) – my mother used to say “I’m just going down to the General”. The GPO was a government department and, as its effective chairman, Tony Benn greatly expanded the scope of commemorative stamps and encouraged the recruitment of contemporary graphic artists.

A special stamp of 1966, yet to be updated

New structures such as the Forth road bridge and the GPO tower were depicted and the first themed set, of British landscapes, was issued. The death of Churchill was marked – a real departure this and not without controversy – and a third commoner, the poet Burns, was celebrated. The battles of Britain and Hastings were memorialized and (another populist touch) the football World Cup, which England hosted, was the subject of a set, followed by the rush-release of an amended stamp to mark England’s win. Finally, 1966 saw the first issue of Christmas stamps, an annual treat ever since.

The art of postage stamp design, with a few vulgar exceptions, has been upheld by successive manifestations of the postal service until quite recently. In 1969, the GPO ceased to be a government department and was converted into a nationalized industry. Twelve years later, it was divided into Post Office Ltd and British Telecom, the latter of which was subsequently privatized.

The division of the telephone service from the postal service had an immediate and deleterious effect. Vandalism of public phone boxes had become epidemic but you always knew that you could find a working callbox inside a post office. With the split, public phones were ruthlessly ripped out of post offices and, until mobiles made the callbox redundant, finding a working phone was even harder.

What is now called Royal Mail Group is a public limited company wholly owned by government. At vast expense, the group changed its name to Consignia about a decade ago, then paid belated attention to what everyone told it and, at more vast expense, reverted to the title Royal Mail. This absurd gaffe, over which no resignations were evidently required, is an indication of the sorry state into which the administration of the postal service has steadily plunged.

The motto of the Wells Fargo company was “the mail must get through”. Whether by stagecoach, steamship, railroad, pony express or telegraph, Wells Fargo delivered the fastest way. Much more than the post service in Britain, the US mail was a mission, a crusade, an absolute. It remains true. Go to New York’s main post office by Madison Square Garden: its customer service is a model of its kind.

There’s a celebrated legend carved on the frieze of the New York post office: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”. My American friends report that this is not exactly an accurate account any longer, however. Mail between the UK and the US does get through in good time; but internal US mail is notoriously delayed.

A First Day Cover, another Royal Mail scheme to squeeze income from collectors: FDC's are too schematic and unwieldy for my taste

The UK post has perceptibly declined in my lifetime; it has also lessened at each of its government-decreed changes of status. In my childhood, any item posted early in the morning to an address in the same town (or marked ‘local’) would without fail arrive by the second delivery the same day. If a parcel were too big to be accommodated by the letter box or it had to be signed for, the GPO would move heaven and earth to get it into your hands at the earliest opportunity, calling round again and again until they found you at home or coming to some arrangement with a neighbour.

None of this survives. The second delivery was never a fully national service. Sydney Smith, the great clerical wit whose life only extended into the Victorian era by eight years, loftily dismissed a rural retreat he had visited as “a place with only one post a day … in the country, I always fear that creation will expire before tea-time”. But second deliveries everywhere died out some years ago. In 2004, the Royal Mail announced the formal end to second deliveries. “Some customers will see little or no change to their current delivery times” claimed a round robin over the signature of the Sales and Customer Services Director. Indeed, daily deliveries were by then so delayed, especially in London, that they arrived later than second deliveries had done a generation earlier.

Thereafter, our post in the west country arrived some time between 10:30am and noon, extending now to as late as 2:30. I hate it. Until 2004, I was wont to open the mail with my breakfast. Now, because the moment has passed, it gets left unopened in my study, sometimes for days on end. Bills go unpaid and reminders get issued. Special offers expire. Replies to the few personal letters that now arrive are tackled later than I would choose.

More important than all that, the sheer pleasure of receiving post has withered away. And how disappointing not to get your cards before departing for school on your birthday. It is inevitable that email has supplanted letter post. I can read an email within moments of its birth. That’s a big plus, of course. But there are down sides. With a few exceptions, the writer will have dashed off the email and not read it through so it will be strewn with errors. And it almost certainly will not get bequeathed to Harvard. Shall future generations be treated to fat volumes of The Collected eMails of Will Self or The Annotated Texts of Paris Hilton? I doubt it. But unlike the scorned “snail mail”, it does get through (technical glitches permitting).

Without announcement, the Royal Mail abandoned another part if its service in 2003, a part more subtly significant. It tore up its collection timetable. For decades, postwomen and men emptying postboxes had diligently indicated so doing by changing a small white enamel square slotted into the box’s face just above the posting aperture. So, if you arrived at the box to post your letter and the black numeral on the enamel square said 2, you knew that you were in time for the second pick-up at (say) 11.15am, as indicated on the timetable displayed on the box. This was critical for attempts to catch early collections whereby you confidently expected next-day delivery.

A Christmas FDC issued from the Welsh village of Nazareth

With the timetable gone, the enamel squares went too. Now you could not tell if the box-emptying had been performed to time. In fact, there was nothing to say that the box had been emptied at all, let alone when it was emptied. All that was displayed was a formal last collection time and, as I soon discovered by occasional observation of the postbox nearest our house, this time was a mere approximation and might be missed by twenty minutes or more either way. So you might post a letter at 5.35pm, expecting it to be collected at 5.45pm (as advertised) and so be on its way that day to its destination, unaware that the collection has already been made at 5.25. And your letter was still lying there, perhaps until after 6.00pm the next day.

In the face of evidently influential criticism, the post office did restore a crucial part of the publicly revealed timetable. Now the boxes at least carry a square indicating the day on which the next collection will take place. So, if it announces ‘Wed’ when you post your letter at 5.47pm on Wednesday, you can hope that it will be collected shortly. Whether there is any more than the one advertised ‘last’ collection each day, we cannot guess.

Of course, as a public concern, the Royal Mail is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. Sustain a loss – £120m last year – and it’s inefficient and a drain on public investment. Make a profit and it is creaming it at the public expense. The only way the company can win back its good name is to break even by performing efficiently. If the public feels that it is dependable, whether it turns profit or loss is secondary. Meanwhile, successive governments’ fetish for privatization will ensure that Royal Mail loses its most profitable services to ruthless competitors.

From my philatelic point of view, the 1950s and '60s made up a rosy era. Every tiny village had its own circular date stamp (CDS) with its name included. In philatelic philosophy, CDS’s were thought much the most preferable franking on a specimen that was termed ‘used’ (which is to say franked and then soaked from the envelope, allowed to dry and mounted on a gummed hinge in an album) as opposed to mint (unfranked and with its full original gum on the reverse and so preserved in a slip-in album). I favoured used stamps for, unlike the pristine and rather soulless mints, they had seen life.

You soon learned where the franking machine was most likely to deposit the postmark on the envelope, so you could position your stamp to catch the CDS. In any case, much franking was still done by hand and, as postal staff looked in a kindly way on stamp collectors, the hand franking was usually performed with care. In order to give my collection variety, I got into the habit of posting stamps to myself on trips away from home (or persuading others to do it for me) so that the places franked onto the stamps were many and various.

Queen drummer Roger Taylor made history in 1999 as the first identifiable living commoner not marrying into royalty to appear on a British stamp

Eventually the Post Office saw that the franking could provide a promotional opportunity. Accordingly, slogans began to appear alongside the CDS’s – POST EARLY FOR CHRISTMAS was a famous one. For a while, even commercial advertising was permitted but I suspect that firms found the variable legibility of the messages something of a liability and this was dropped.

But changes in methodology rendered posting stamps for franking a less and less satisfying method of building one’s collection. Postal depots closed down and mail travelled ever longer distances to be sorted. The localities with their own franking identity dwindled in number. Now they encompass whole cities and counties, even regions. Most depots have installed inkjet printing, which does not use CDS’s at all but simply franks a city or county name and a date.

And the Royal Mail no longer has any feel for stamp collectors’ wishes. When I first lived in London, I shopped for new issues at the block-long post office in St Martin’s Place. Its philatelic department was a whole wing with its own entrance, and its staff handled the stamps wearing white gloves. But that was long ago. The philatelic dept became a Prêt and collectors’ concerns are dealt with at one window on the main strip. Elsewhere, all the philatelic counters that used to serve collectors in large post offices outside London have closed. The only way to be sure of obtaining all the new stamps is to pay regular visits to St Martin’s Place or to order by post from the Philatelic Bureau in Edinburgh.

The number of new stamps has burgeoned. There have already been thirty-four (34!) issues to mark the imminent London Olympics/Paralympics. The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee will add substantially to the understandable but still huge accumulation of issues featuring the royal family past and present. Miniature sheets and multi-page booklets of otherwise unavailable stamps add to the cost for the collector who is a completist.

The entirety of special issues for the London Olympics of 1948

As for franking, if the machine misses a stamp, nobody cares and the envelope is delivered without franking. In recent years, I have been obliged to post the same envelope seven, eight, nine, even a dozen times to secure a franking. Worse, some misanthropic sorter will blithely score through the stamp in biro, rendering it useless as a collectable item. As the stamps I post to myself are priced well in excess of the amount required for postal use, the philatelic aim of the posting is obvious. That some sorters take a perverse pleasure in spoiling the stamps is clear, for they sometimes wield their biros even if a stamp has been successfully franked.

One of the sets issued ahead of the 2012 Olympics

I wrote to the Royal Mail’s official organ for stamp-collectors, the British Philatelic Bulletin, about this disheartening development. My letter was passed to Royal Mail Customer Services, whose agent’s response could be summed up with the word “tough!” At any rate, she felt that the matter was “outwith the control of Royal Mail” – the use of “outwith” indicates that Royal Mail headquarters is in Scotland. It seems it is possible to send one’s stamps under separate cover for franking with pictorial images that are permanently available but such a service thwarts the desire to have a collection that looks authentic, as well as adding substantially to the cost of collecting. (Anyway, there’d always be some bugger at our local depot who decided to spoil my stamp with its special franking, just for the pleasure of it).

And now Royal Mail has delivered the coup de grâce. At a time when we are all obliged to economize – some of us more than others – the proposal to send the price of stamps through the roof is the last straw. The plan is that first-class post should rise from 46p to a minimum of 50p – and Royal Mail would prefer a lot more. Even this minimum rise is 8.7 percent or 5.1 percent above the inflation rate. Of course other postal rates would follow suit.

With competition pressing in from every side – private enterprise delivery, digital communication – Royal Mail appears to have decided that suicide is the best course. The only unique aspect that remains is the philatelic one. But as Royal Mail prices itself out of the postal market, so it is squeezing collectors out of the hobby. I for one simply cannot afford to avail myself any longer of the combination of the glut of issues and the dwindling of attention to collectors’ needs. After nearly sixty years of pleasure, I am giving up stamps.

OH, SAY, CAN YOU SEE?

Here are ten sets of important and urgent questions for right wing Americans.

1: What do you understand by the term ‘Socialism’? Do you imagine it is simply a synonym for ‘European’? In what ways do you believe President Obama – or any previous American president or indeed any current world leader – is or was a Socialist? (Write on one side of the paper only).

2: The party of Adolf Hitler called itself the National Socialist Party (hence Nazi). Was Hitler actually a Socialist as you understand the term, though? Could (for instance) Hitler, Trotsky, Gorbachev, Castro, Mitterand and Blair all be deemed Socialists? Is it possible for Obama simultaneously to be Socialist and Hitler-like? Discuss with illustrations.

Images like these are all over the net and the current health debate in the US

3: According to a Facebook entry by Mrs Sarah Palin (the former governor of Alaska and apparently thought to be a significant political commentator in the United States), the President intends to introduce a new health care system whereby senior citizens and the disabled “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’, whether they are worthy of health care”. Never mind the carelessness with which Mrs Palin describes the disabled as “standing”; what do you imagine would in practice be the function of these death panels? What kind of public servants would agree to serve on a death panel? (“Hello, darling, how was your day?” “Oh, I had such a long afternoon on the death panel. Do you know we condemned 127 seniors and six autistic children to the electric chair”. “Poor darling, you must be quite exhausted”).

4: What do the letters NHS stand for? What does the NHS do? How many death panels does it fund? Do you really and truly know anything at all about the NHS? Have you seen any English people with teeth lately?



5: What do you think is the domestic political status of Daniel Hannan MEP? As he is a member of the European parliament, doesn’t that make him a European and hence a Hitler Socialist? Does the fact that his views were immediately repudiated by the leadership of his party mean that they are in some way unrepresentative? In any case, if he works in continental Europe, how much contact does he actually have with the NHS in Britain?

6: Does it trouble you at all that as many as 45 million American citizens have no health insurance and therefore cannot afford to seek treatment when they are ill or injured? Have you ever heard the pathetic appeals for help that are routinely broadcast on some public service radio stations? Isn’t there quite an embarrassing dislocation between the fact that the USA is the richest and, you don’t tire of telling us, the greatest nation on earth and the lack of a health system that tends to people who need it. Would you want a fire department that only came out to douse fires at premises that could show up-to-date fire cover, a police department that looked the other way if your policy protecting you against muggers wasn’t fully comprehensive?

Of course if you went through all the pix of any public figure – Ann Widdicombe, say – you could always find one that seems to mirror some gesture of somebody else's

7: How much cash has the health insurance industry put into your campaign? Does it ever occur to you that insurance is the most corrupt, self-serving industry in the whole capitalist system, little more than a form of sophisticated casino operation in which, as everyone knows, the house always wins? What do you say to this proposition: that the president wants to establish a public health system because he believes that Americans will benefit from it and that it is the right thing to do, whereas the insurance companies want to preserve their businesses because they make a vast amount of profit? Does that really sound like a fantasy to you?

8: Don’t you know that there is already a huge public sector in the American health system, just as in many other services you take for granted? Do you think that, unless you were a multi-millionaire, you would survive in a totally free market that had no public provision and no public regulation?



9: Isn’t it a little bit anti-American to attack your own president and government in the terms that you have been employing lately? Anyone being so extreme about Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes would have been denounced as unpatriotic. Isn’t it time someone did a comprehensive exposé of the shock-jock fascists, the Fox News bigots and all the other detritus of the American commentariat who have no compunction about spreading the wildest of lies about anyone with a decent thought in their heads?

10: And finally, are you fucking insane? (You may need health care).

You can play this game with anybody

(PS: This posting is a little late; my server has lately been experiencing difficulty both contacting and maintaining contact with blogger.com. I don’t know why – no other internet address presents such a problem).

FARAGO and FARAGE

Mr Cameron calls confidently for a general election. Opposition leaders do that, you may remark, only when they are comfortably ahead in the opinion polls. They also demand that the national leader debate with them on television. If Gordon Brown had the wit, he would offer to debate with Mr Cameron only on condition that Mr Cameron, to whom the extreme right wing parties are the greater threat, undertake to debate on television with the leaders of UKIP and the BNP. You may rest assured that Mr Cameron would not agree to do so. Such an offer would expose the essential emptiness of Mr Cameron’s challenge.

But Mr Cameron should be careful what he wishes for. There is much evidence of the electorate being in a mood of “a plague on both your houses, including your second homes and those you have flipped”. The Sunday Times hazards that more than half of the sitting members will have been replaced (“swept away” is how it is characterised) when we know the results of the next general election: 325 is the curiously precise figure. Labour currently has 349 members taking the whip and there is no suggestion that all of those “swept away” will number among them: far from it.

Long before that election, on June 4th to be precise, there will be elections for the European parliament and for many local councils. The commentariat is increasingly convinced that these elections will hit Labour very hard – though Labour cannot proportionately fall a great deal further – but will also deplete the Conservatives and to a degree the Liberal Democrats (who, remember, were overtaken by UKIP in the popular vote last time round).

This is a dangerous moment. The liberal intentions of the Weimar Republic were swept away on popular sentiment for a break with the past that the National Socialists seemed to represent for Germans in 1933. Thereby, Adolf Hitler came to power and Europe was in the grip of cataclysm from which it would not begin to recover for a quarter of a century. It must be contemplated that UKIP or an unholy alliance of UKIP and the BNP may be in a strong position after the June elections, perhaps holding the balance of power on – or even (unthinkably) running – councils. Stranger things happen.

So Mr Cameron’s summer 2009 election would not necessarily produce the unassailable Tory majority that he fondly imagines. Perhaps the Commons intake of BNP and/or UKIP members would be so great that the Tories could only take a ruling role by going into coalition with either or both of these parties. In such a case, the Tories might need to ditch Cameron in favour of some leader more amenable to the extreme right: Eric Pickles, for instance. There’s your nightmare scenario, then: Pickles as Prime Minister, Nigel Farage as Foreign Secretary, Nick Griffin as Home Secretary and – oh, let’s see – Sir Fred Goodwin as Chancellor. Bring it on, Dave.

If it is because he is mindful of these possibilities that Mr Cameron has re-opened the Conservative candidates list and invited political greenhorns (not his phrase) to offer themselves, he is making a terrible mistake. We have seen how carefully-vetted, long-term members of the Tory party – and the other established parties -– have nonetheless treated the rules with cavalier disregard. How much more unmanageable the Tories would be if their big tent were to embrace a whole new self-chosen band of delegates with nothing undisclosed beyond their outsized egos. That way madness lies.

For an alternative script is being written: Get Me into Office – I'm a Celebrity. In this one, the likes of Esther Rantzen, Richard Branson, Joanna Lumley, Simon Cowell and Susan Boyle sit in a cabinet of National Government and solve all our problems by the application of star-power common sense. Don’t imagine that this is any less horrifying than the prospect of the BNP hosting – rather than merely being invited to – Buckingham Palace garden parties.

Celebrities entertaining political delusions are nothing new. Back in the 1960s, the crimper Raymond (said Raymonde) Bessone, known to one and all as Teazy-Weazy, decided he was going to stand as a Liberal candidate in the general election of 1964. Bernard Levin cordially invited him onto That Was the Week That Was to give a political account of himself and proceeded to destroy him with a ruthless despatch that took the breath away. Teazy withdrew from the candidates list the next day, understanding (as modern celebs may not do) that discretion is always the better part of valour.

In these days, celebrities are actively encouraged on all sides to imagine that they are omnipotent and all-knowing. They are not these things. Politicians – at least in this country – are moderately able to acquit themselves with a certain conviction because they toil long and hard in the foothills of political fame before becoming recognisable politicians. If celebrities don’t understand that, they should be made to do so. Jeremy Paxman should submit them to the Levin treatment: “So, Ms Rantzen, do you favour the structural, the well-specified or the reduced-form model of macroeconomics?”

What’s more, the bona fides of these arrivistes should be scrutinized at least as closely as are those of the parliamentarians to whom they consider themselves so morally superior. I’d like to hear, for instance, Sir Alan Sugar and Carol Vorderman harried into full disclosure of their financial arrangements before they get to put themselves forward as candidates. If the electorate are willing to allow themselves to be bedazzled into elevating people “off the telly”, they should have the opportunity to see all the feet of clay that lurk beneath the red-carpet gowns of celebs just as surely as in the publicly subsidized footbaths of MPs.

Meanwhile, the right wing parties are no whited sepulchres either. Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, has been unguardedly bragging of how he has got through £2million of expenses and allowances while sitting as an MEP in the Union from which he campaigns to withdraw the UK. This money has been spent, he reckons, on “the best of causes”. Meanwhile, members of his party who sit in the European parliament have a juicy record of dipping their hands in the till, including one jailed and another soon to be tried for money laundering. The BNP have had their collective collars felt too. Their elevation would be so constructive for relations with nations where young fanatics go to be trained as suicide bombers, wouldn’t you say?

The two embarrassments caused this last week by the BNP member who sits in the London Assembly ought to give people pause. At a moment when the committee charged with securing England as the venue for the football World Cup was discovering the thinness of its non-white composition, the BNP assemblyman turned up, perfectly legitimately, at the launch. His presence obscured the message that the committee wanted to send to the world. The same tribune of the people was given to understand that an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party would shortly follow and he made it known that he would be taking his leader, Nick Griffin, as his guest. More outrage and diplomatic discomfort. But this is the price of democracy. If the people are going to elect undesirables to represent them, those means by which they have traditionally carried out such representation cannot now be denied to them just because the establishment doesn’t find their participation comme il faut. The electorate need to have made clear to them all the implications of the way they vote. It’s no good using your ballot paper to make a protest and then regretting the result of your gesture. If you want to punish Labour or the Tories or the Lib Dems by voting Green or Workers Revolutionary Party, you may well find that your effective abstention from the important question has only succeeded in putting into the Commons a bunch of airheads and fascists.

LOSING YOUR SHIRT, BLACK or OTHERWISE

I cannot imagine that I would hit it off very readily with Max Mosley. The president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile has always moved in worlds that would bore me as much as they would repel me: motor-racing, engineering and right-wing politics. Mosley was born into the latter; his parents married in 1936 at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Reich Chancellor Hitler the only other guest not present in the role of witness. His father was Sir Oswald, the 6th Baronet Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists (known as the Blackshirts), and his mother was Diana Guinness, third of the celebrated Mitford sisters. After World War II, during which the Mosleys were interned, Sir Oswald attempted to rekindle his messianic political career and launched the so-called Union Movement in 1948.

From his teens, Max Mosley was active in the Union Movement and often acted as an advocate and apologist for his father’s views and political actions. When the Union Movement collapsed, he tried to forge a career as a Tory politician but found that his name counted against him. Given the alleged Nazi role-playing involved in the evening of sado-masochism that was the centre of Mosley’s just-concluded court case against the News of the World, it may be surmised that his name still carries a large degree of baggage.

The tabloid splashed its story in March under the headline ‘F1 BOSS HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH HOOKERS’. In this bizarre sentence, ‘F1’ means Formula One, the type of motor racing that the FIA administers, and ‘hookers’ (a somewhat outmoded term, it might be thought) means the five women who supplied Mosley with sexual favours for payment of £500 each. One of the ‘hookers’ also took £12,500 from the tabloid for secreting a camera into the ‘orgy’ (the results of which, I understand, could be temporarily admired on the tabloid’s website) and a further £10,000 from Sky News for an ‘exclusive’ interview. The News of the World and Sky News, it will be remembered, are both owned by that noted family man, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch organisations therefore paid the woman 45 times more for her cooperation than did Mosley for her sexual services. Perhaps the term ‘hooker’ needs to be re-examined.

In a further strange wrinkle to the case, the husband of the wired-up ‘hooker’ was obliged to resign his post as a result of the publicity fall-out from the case; he was an employee of MI5. The now out-of-work spook may feel that he is harder done by than anyone else caught up in this curiously English affair.

Mosley himself decided to tough it all out. He called an Extraordinary General Meeting of the FIA and won a comfortable if not resounding vote of confidence. His term had already been artificially extended and has been marked by recurring controversy and bad feeling, so Mosley cannot have been sure that he would carry the day. In the event, many voices influential in the sport and its administration have been raised to advise him to resign. He has not so far done so and I cannot say that I blame him. To resign now would be to hand a suggestion of moral victory to the tabloid, even while it is licking its wounds at the record £60,000 damages and a substantial slice of the £450,000 costs.

Mr Justice Eady very properly articulated the point of law upon which the case hinged: “The claimant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to sexual activities … carried on between consenting adults on private property”. This was the nub of the case against the paper, whose reporters had clearly made a gross invasion of Mosley’s privacy, without ensuring that there was a watertight justification in so-called public interest.

What Mosley chooses to do with his privacy is nobody else’s business. The tabloid tried to dress its synthetic outrage (read: “glee at a juicy story”) with high-horse stuff about Nazis. Eady found “no evidence that the gathering [sic] … was intended to be an enactment of Nazi behaviour” and saw “no basis at all for the suggestion that the participants mocked the victims of the Holocaust”. Nor indeed ought it to matter a tuppenny damn if he had found such evidence. No victims of the Holocaust would have known of the ‘orgy’ if the tabloid had not reported it. People may strike whatever political stance they care to in private, without fear of reprisal or penalty.

The tabloid’s editor, Colin Myler, issued a statement outside the high court which declared that “taking part in depraved and brutal S&M orgies does not, in our opinion, constitute the fit and proper behaviour to be expected of someone in his hugely influential position”. He said Mosley had been guilty of “serious impropriety”, the kind of orotund pronouncement on the sexual behaviour of others that we haven’t heard uttered by anyone save with satirical intent in forty years. The hypocrisy of scandal-sheet editors knows no bounds. Myler wouldn’t know fit and proper behaviour if it jumped up and bit him in the leg.

The editor also declared that “our press is less free today after another judgment based on privacy laws emanating from Europe”. If the press is less free to spy on adults disporting themselves in whatever way they choose, then good for European legislators. But it is another intriguing aspect of this case that the Murdoch press, always anti-Europe, sees the judgment as a stick with which to beat Strasbourg while the Union Movement, in which Mosley cut his political teeth, was an early advocate of a Europe united into one superstate.

‘The freedom of the press’ and ‘the public’s right to know’ are two of the most abused rallying-cries of the modern era. The press is only as free as the international capital that controls it will permit it to be. Journalists are constrained by the writ of the proprietors fed down to them through editorial control. The duties of the press are more socially significant than its trumpeted but compromised freedoms. And the public has no right to know merely out of curiosity or prurience. There was nothing in the News of the World’s sting on Max Mosley that had any merit. It was another example of Oscar Wilde’s sly characterisation of “the English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” [A Woman of No Importance Act I]. At least Mosley got the result denied to Wilde.