by Clive James
Postscript
I was going to say, ‘If only I’d been right,’ but in fact I was more right than not: after 2008, the big money never did look quite so respectable again – not, at any rate, when men without principles were using it to buy themselves a background. I was wrong, though, to suppose that the bankers and executives would get the point. After the Western governments bailed out the financial institutions with public money, the first thing the financial institutions did was to revive the bonus system, on the principle that arbitrageurs or whatever their French name was would never try hard unless they were overpaid. To put it briefly, the banks gave even more of our money to the very breed of grifter who had been busy losing it. But who knows, there might be something to the idea that nobody will knock himself out playing electronic percentages unless he is rewarded with enough cash to buy a Lamborghini and rebuild his girlfriend. We can be sure, however, that the oft-stated assumption behind huge salaries in the public corporations – that those same executives would be able to earn even more in the open market – was moonshine. The BBC was already a bad example and later on the bad example became blatant. Once there had been a whole romance attached to the idea of working devotedly for small reward. The romance depended on the ability of the system to pay a public servant in prestige, honour and perhaps, upon his retirement, a small sandstone bolt-hole in an Oxbridge college. The cash nexus had put an end to that, and it would have been hypocritical for a performer to complain: we, after all, were keen enough to get the market price. But there were limits.
They were set higher, but they had always been there, just as there had always been wide boys who thought it smart to break them. For anyone who had been alive long enough, Bernie Madoff was very familiar. Once he had been called Bernie Kornfeld, and back in the sixties he’d had television programmes made about him – the BBC was especially respectful, as it too often is in the early stages of a scam. Bernie Kornfeld’s scheme for doubling your money was an early form of Bernie Madoff’s split-conversion strategy. Journalists and TV front-men who flew to Switzerland to catch the pearls of wisdom as they fell from Kornfeld’s lips would have done better to stay home and do an elementary cash-flow analysis of how his companies were set up. But scepticism was in short supply even then, and lately it has been in retreat, overwhelmed by a millenarian urge to believe.
Scepticism got a bad name after climate change acquired religious status, but really scepticism is not the enemy of science, it is just the opposite of gullibility. Old enough to remember that the global warming scare had been preceded in the 1970s by the global cooling scare – some of global warming’s star figures, such as Jim Hansen, had been in on the earlier boondoggle – I also noticed something familiar about the mechanism by which a putative menace was to be warded off with government money. The putative menace might or might not be a phantom, but the government money definitely came from the taxpayer, and there were whole regiments of Bernie Madoff types on the alert to take their cut for handling it as it flowed out of the public coffers and into oblivion.
2009 – SERIES ONE
THE SPEEDING JUDGE
Dates of show: 27 and 29 March 2009
In a case which has deep resonance for Britain and the entire civilized world, the whole of Australia has been glued to the media in recent weeks, following the story of an eminent judge who has ruined his reputation because he tried to lie his way out of a speeding fine that would have cost him about £36 sterling. At the age of seventy, he is about to go to jail for a minimum of two years because he failed to cough up thirty-six quid at the right moment. On the face of it, you can’t call his disaster a tragedy. A tragedy, according to classical principles, is a fall from high degree because of some great flaw. Marcus Einfeld, the judge in question, was certainly of high enough degree: none higher. Queen’s Counsel since 1977, Australian Living Treasure 1997, United Nations Peace Award 2002, the list goes on. He retired a few years ago but he has continually been brought back to judge important cases about refugees because the Australian legal system can’t do without his experience and prestige.
Or anyway it couldn’t. In 2006 a speed camera in Sydney caught his silver Lexus doing 6 mph over the limit. At this point we have to forget about the dizzy speed of the car and try to slow down the thought processes going on in his head. There he is, at the top of his profession, with a national, indeed international, reputation for wisdom. This is the man who was the founding President of Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission. In 1987 he headed the Commission’s inquiry into the living conditions of Aborigines in the border area of New South Wales and Queensland and he wept openly at evidence that a young Aborigine boy who had been denied a proper rugby ball had played instead with an old shoe.
Those were famous tears, and there is every reason to think that they were sincerely felt. As a judge of great matters of justice, Marcus Einfeld had deservedly been revered for many years. He had a right to think of himself as the very incarnation of the law. Now here he was, with a speeding ticket in his hand, facing a fine of a paltry £36 for having exceeded the speed limit by a lousy 6 mph. And right there the fatal error begins to take form. It wasn’t so much the £36 fine. He could afford that. It was that the penalty points would bring him closer to losing his licence. Somehow the top judge and national treasure didn’t see himself in a position where he was not allowed to drive.
Unusual, that. Many seventy-year-old men of his exalted rank are very content to be driven, rather than having to do the driving. They have a man with a cap to drive them, so they can say, from the back seat: watch out for the speed cameras, Bruce. Perhaps Marcus Einfeld is one of those strange men – there are thousands of them in every country and they are nearly always men – who need to have a driving licence just so that they can get points on it, who think that the whole purpose of driving is to drive as far over the limit as they can and still get away with it, and still keep going for as long as the licence lasts even if they don’t get away with it.
But the judge was only 6 mph over the limit, which scarcely made him a boy racer. He must have thought the prospect of getting yet more points on an already point-scarred licence was an awful lot of inconvenience for practically nothing, and he must also have thought – and here the other half of the fateful mental pattern comes into play – he must also have thought of how easy it would be to get out of it. All he had to do was say that someone else was driving the silver Lexus that day. So he said he had lent the car to an American friend, Professor Theresa Brennan. Satisfied, the magistrate dismissed the case, and the judge walked free. In just such a way, King Oedipus believed himself to be in the clear when he left Corinth.
If he – I mean the judge, not King Oedipus – had said that he had lent the car to an Australian government secret agent whom he could not name without rendering him vulnerable to attack by terrorists, Marcus Einfeld might still be enjoying his place at the top of the heap, admired by all. But Professor Theresa Brennan was an actual figure, who could be traced. When a newspaper did trace her, it turned out that she was no longer in existence. At the time of the speeding incident she had already been dead for three years.
It was probably already too late for Marcus Einfeld to save his career. Yet he might conceivably have climbed relatively unbesmirched out of the hole he was occupying, and even drawn some sympathy for the depth to which he had dug himself in by telling one of those little fibs that almost everyone tells over small matters. But like President Nixon in the Watergate scandal, the judge, although trying to cover up an infinitely smaller crime – dodging a £36 fine instead of okaying acts of black-bag espionage against a rival party in clear defiance of the Constitution of the United States – the judge chose to go on digging himself further towards the centre of the earth.
He said he didn’t mean that Theresa Brennan. He meant another Theresa Brennan. A Greek chorus at this point might have said that the judge was anything but a natural liar, because he lied so very badly, ju
st like most of us. Further proofs of his amateur status followed in quick succession. Finally, in a skein of inventions that we needn’t bother to unravel, he managed to implicate his own mother, aged ninety-four, when he claimed to have been using her Toyota Corolla that day, so he couldn’t have been at the wheel of his silver Lexus.
Alas, there was security camera footage to prove that his mother’s Toyota Corolla had not emerged from the garage of her apartment block between daylight and dusk. We were left with the thought-picture of a team of trained investigators examining a whole day’s worth of CCTV footage to establish that a Toyota Corolla had remained stationary throughout. With that thought-picture, and with the thought-picture of a man of true stature with his life in ruins.
Did any of this really matter? Well, obviously the original offence didn’t matter much. At 6 mph over the limit, the judge wasn’t going to hurt anyone. And the first lie shouldn’t have mattered much either. People really do lie all the time. Often they lie to protect themselves, sometimes they lie to protect their loved ones, and there is even such a thing as a saving lie, a lie that wards off the dreadful consequences of the truth. Ibsen wrote a play about that, called The Wild Duck. None of this means that lying is a virtue. Almost always, it’s a vice, to be avoided. But it’s a universal vice, and its prevalence is the very reason why any properly functioning legal system has a harsh law against perjury, because a court is where the lies have to stop, or there can be no justice.
And what the judge did was knowingly to put himself on the road to perjury. He was on the road at only 6 mph over the limit and he could have stopped himself by coughing up thirty-six quid, but there was an inner momentum. Just why that should have been so is a question he’ll be occupying himself with for the next two years at least. Everyone else will be thinking about it too, but his will be easily the finest mind concerned with the subject. He doesn’t need me or anyone else to tell him that a judge who commits perjury, over no matter how trivial a matter, has sinned against the spirit of his profession.
That’s why his case really is a tragedy, and not just a farce. It’s a tragedy because he not only fell from high degree, there really was a tragic flaw: a capacity to forget, at the critical moment, the central ethical precept of the calling to which he had given his life. Suddenly, belatedly, and for almost no reason, he put himself in the position of a doctor who is arraigned for selling body parts, and, because he was selling only fingernails, defends himself by saying it hadn’t been him that sold the fingernails, it was Professor Theresa Brennan, or another Theresa Brennan, or his mother at the wheel of a Toyota Corolla. The doctor wasn’t supposed to be selling anything, so he should have owned up.
But the judge doesn’t need to hear that from me, or from any other of the thousands of Australian experts – editorial writers, television commentators and philosophers of all descriptions – who are now picking this matter over. The judge is already hearing about it from himself. He’s hearing about the fatal road that led from the speed camera to the truly tragic climax, which wasn’t the moment when one of his fellow judges had to send him down for three years, two of them without parole. The tragic climax came when the distinguished Judge Marcus Einfeld found himself on the telephone to his mother saying: ‘Mum, remember how you lent me your Toyota that day?’ and she said, ‘Marcus, what have you got yourself into?’ And suddenly he was a little boy again, as all men are when the truth they must face is about a mess of their own making.
Postscript
Though Caesar never got around to explaining exactly why his wife had to be above suspicion, we generally take the maxim to be true. Caesar stole money to pay bribes but he was clean compared with Pompey and very clean compared with, say, Lucullus. Tyrants do better when not hampered by greed. Hitler is an arch example. He knew exactly how to corrupt others (a little-known aspect of his control over the Wehrmacht generals is that he bribed them with land grants) but he was not interested himself in amassing wealth or even in living well: he left that to Göring. More keen year by year to fulfil his role as a grasping clown, Göring carried on almost as if Hitler had written the script in order to profit from the contrast. Similarly, Robespierre had an advantage over Danton in being less concerned with money. Danton’s penchant for embezzlement not only gave Robespierre useful evidence with which to destroy him, it took time that he might have spent preparing his defences well in advance, had he been so minded. Take enough examples like Hitler and Robespierre and you start wondering if personal integrity might not be a public danger.
But of course it isn’t: not in itself. Whereas corruption probably is, to the body politic if not the individual. One says ‘probably’ because a state entirely without corruption is hard to find. Australia, despite its history of ‘bottom of the harbour’ scandals and the occasional instance of an entire police force on the take, comes close to being clean. We can guess that might be so because in Australia a case of a corrupt judge is always even more surprising than it would be in America. But in comparing the liberal democracies with one another, it is always important to remember that even the most corrupt of them doesn’t begin to approach what the old Soviet Union used to be like. Concentrated use of the state’s immense powers of judicial violence allowed for some areas of business that were relatively free of corruption – the state could, after all, build a space station – but in everyday life, for anyone not a member of the nomenklatura, the only way to get anything done was to break the law. In such an atmosphere, scruples sound like principles, as I suppose they always should. A correspondent pointed out that 6 mph extra in a 30 mph zone mattered. Thinking about it, I had to agree.
HIGH-PRICED PORN
Dates of show: 3 and 5 April 2009
Very few voices have dared to speak up in defence of the Home Secretary’s husband, but let mine be one of them. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is in an invidious position. Before I start defending her husband, Richard Timney, let me be blunt about just how invidious that position is. It always looked unduly cosy that the Home Secretary should claim forty thousand pounds a year of public funds to pay Richard Timney to run her constituency office.
Though it is common practice for parliamentarians to employ their spouses, the Home Secretary’s employment of her husband was bound to draw scrutiny to her broad interpretation of what constitutes a legitimate expense. A bedroom counted as a primary home. It looked even more unduly cosy when her husband started claiming his expenses, including the purchase of a bath plug and a home entertainment system. Some might have thought, the modern world being what it is, that although the bath plug might be morally neutral if used responsibly, the same might not apply to the home entertainment system: and so, indeed, it proved.
While the Home Secretary was away on official business, on the evening of 1 April 2008 at 11.18 her husband watched an adult entertainment movie and on the evening of 6 April at 11.19 he watched another adult entertainment movie. Since these movies were available only on subscription, he had to pay for them. He charged the payment to the public. The fact that the Home Secretary’s husband watched pay-for-view pornography in her absence, and the further fact that he then charged the payment to the taxpayer: these facts were made public by a tabloid newspaper which can be said to have some expertise in the matter, since the fortunes of its proprietor were largely made in this very business of adult entertainment.
It is doubtful if the Home Secretary was entertained at all when she found out that this story was going to be made public at the very time in her career when she has legislation going through parliament to regulate such adult-entertainment matters as businessmen putting visits to pole-dancing clubs on expenses as if they’d just been to the pub. Tough on pole-dancing, tough on the causes of pole-dancing: it’s a New Labour policy in the grand modern tradition, which takes a moral view that includes the economics, or, if you like, an economic view that includes the morality. Either way, when you hold the position of Home Secretary and have been so outspoken on the topic
of adult entertainment on expenses, it isn’t the best moment for headlines to be telling the world that your husband has not only been watching porno movies, he has been off-loading the cost of doing so on to the tax-paying public.
Her husband has dropped her in it. Some would say that she was already in it, because she has patently never been able to judge the effect of an expenses claim in which a principal item is a salary for her husband’s efforts in running her constituency office, a salary with an expense allowance down to and including bath plugs. But he has dropped her further in it, as if that were possible. If she was already in it up to her lower eyelids, he has now stood on top of her head. From where her fringe was previously visible, bubbles are coming up, and it’s all his fault. Is there no one to speak for him?
Let me be the one, because it just so happens that I know the truth about pornographic movies. As a professional critic of the media I have always felt it was incumbent on me, as a public duty, to keep up with developments in all the means of expression however disreputable, so for purposes of research I began checking out the adult-entertainment channels in hotel rooms all over the world. If I was filming in Hawaii or Tokyo or Berlin I would switch on the adult-entertainment channels late at night to see what was on offer and make notes.