She told me she was sure that Arnold had no sexual life. She also told me that at a New Year’s Eve party, as the guests in his apartment were looking at the heavens for a fireworks display in nearby Regent’s Park, she asked him if he believed in God. His answer was: ‘It can’t be an accident.’
It was in 1992, after a party in Gael’s memory at an art gallery close to the Tate, surrounded by her colourful landscapes on the walls, that Goodman gave me one of my best stories. He had asked me at the memorial meeting if I was free to join him afterwards for supper at the Savoy. When Lord Goodman invited one to dinner, one was always free, especially if you were a newspaper editor.
Not only did Goodman have his own table at the Savoy Grill, he had his own, specially adapted, entrance for his wheelchair. During dinner, we talked about the royal family, who were in the news at the time over their various marital discords. When I mentioned Prince Charles and wondered how he could cope with being King if it meant he had to mute his strong opinions on so many aspects of life, Goodman suddenly said: ‘He doesn’t really want to be King.’
‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘are you sure about that?’
Goodman replied: ‘I saw him only this morning.’
This, of course, was five years before the death of Princess Diana, and long before he could have any public relationship with the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles. When Goodman came out with this bombshell, it was one of those moments when an experienced journalist knows not to say too much, or indeed anything at all, in case it provokes a response like: ‘Of course, you won’t be publishing any of this, will you?’ So I kept my mouth firmly shut.
Back at the office, I told one or two senior editors what I had heard and they agreed it was an excellent story. But we couldn’t see any way to check it out or follow it up without inviting a crushing Palace denial or a demand by Goodman not to publish it. Since I couldn’t reveal my source to anyone, it was hard for the news desk to know how to judge it. I said I would publish on my sole responsibility.
The story led the front page with the headline: ‘Charles: I Don’t Want to be King.’ No other paper could pick it up because the Palace, as I had expected, steered them away from it. A Palace press secretary asked to see me on the following Tuesday and we had lunch at the Garrick Club. After going round and round for a while, with me unable to tell him my source, I said: ‘I assume you would like us to publish your official denial?’
To which he made a careful reply that astonished me: ‘I am not at liberty to comment on whether the story is true or not. That is not why I am here. I am here to complain that the headline suggests that Prince Charles provided you with the story himself. We would like you to make it clear that he didn’t.’
So we published a correction to make that point clear, and that was that.
• • •
David Astor and Lord Goodman became best friends around the time I joined The Observer in 1966. A couple of years later, David was persuaded by the outgoing chairman of The Observer’s trustees, Ifor Evans, to pick Goodman as his successor. In return, Goodman persuaded Harold Wilson to make Evans a life peer. In 1970, Astor pushed for Goodman to be chairman of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association (NPA), in which role he spent six laborious years trying (and mostly failing) to talk sense into the printing unions.
He had a low opinion both of the print union leaders and of the newspaper owners he represented. He described the NPA as ‘the most impossible body of men that could have been assembled outside the League of Nations’ and once said to me: ‘If I was to choose a cricket team of the most unreliable villains I’ve ever come across in my life, some of the newspaper owners would be on there. Max Aitken would be opening batsman.’
Aitken was the war hero son of Lord Beaverbrook. Like his father, he was an indefatigable womaniser, but unlike his father a hopeless newspaper man and, according to Goodman, ‘absolutely impossible, quarrelsome and boorish’ when drunk, which he was quite often. The only time I met Aitken he advised me to print The Observer in one large unit rather than in separate sections – advice which I did not regard as sensible.
His most stupid decision had been to deny the editorship of the Daily Express to David English in favour of one of his drinking chums, Derek Marks. English immediately left to join the opposition Daily Mail group, which he turned into such a powerful rival that it overtook the Express and never looked back. The Express group went into serious decline and Goodman arranged for it to be sold off in 1977.
Once, in a time of industrial crisis, the head of the print union NATSOPA (the National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants), Lord Briginshaw, was away on holiday, but said he would meet Goodman if the chairman would be willing to travel to his holiday address. Goodman replied: ‘Please tell Lord Briginshaw that nothing would please me more than to meet him on a high cliff-top overlooking the sea.’
Arnold and David spoke every day, often several times a day, mostly about politics or newspapers but also about good causes for which Goodman sought Astor’s support. David really believed that Goodman was a cross between a saint and a genius and Goodman probably thought the same about him, saying he was ‘as big-hearted and liberal a man as can be found on this earth’. They both had a touch of genius in their different ways, but Astor was the more saintly of the two.
Much has been made, notably by Private Eye, of the attempts by Lord Badman, as they called him, to bully newspapers out of carrying stories that might embarrass his commercial clients or Harold Wilson and the Labour government. Goodman denied strongly to me that he was ever ‘trigger-happy’ over libel and argued that he invariably advised clients against suing newspapers. Instead, he frequently extracted apologies and damages without going to trial. The ‘fear of Arnold’, as it became known in newspaper offices, was often enough to make editors back off.
He once persuaded David Astor to remove from The Observer an article about a drunken George Brown, then Deputy Prime Minister, who had allegedly asked the wife of the French ambassador to sleep with him. When she declined, he protested that she had surely accepted such invitations in the past. She is said to have replied: ‘Yes, but not before the soup.’
In my time as editor he never asked me to spike any story, but I have to confess that his Saturday telephone calls still set me on edge. He would sometimes ring up on a fishing expedition to find out if we were planning to write about someone he knew – never in a menacing way, but one always sensed that menace might have been just been around the corner if I had refused to tell him or had warned him that we were about to insult or even criticise a client of his.
I used to take the opportunity these occasions afforded to sound out his views on some current political issue and frequently found his comments helpful, especially when he quoted what government ministers had told him, though in considering his views one had to remember which of many public or private bodies he was currently engaged to represent and lobby for.
He had a rather contradictory attitude to press publicity. He liked being famous but he heartily disliked being written about. On the issue of press freedom, I concluded, Goodman was a firm believer – but not so firmly, perhaps, when he himself, his friends or his clients were involved.
I got the feeling at our Sunday evening soirees, especially towards the end of his life, that Goodman had doubts about some early legal victories he had won and which had damaged his relations with the press. He certainly seemed to wish to defend his conduct in these cases and significantly titled a chapter in his memoirs, ‘Professional Misgivings’.
One case that clearly still worried him was against The Spectator. Although it took place long before I knew him, two of my deputy editors, John Cole and Anthony Howard, had covered the case and both had remained heavily critical of Goodman’s role. He had been acting on behalf of three senior Labour luminaries – Aneurin Bevan, Richard Crossman and Morgan Phillips, the party secretary – who were accused by the magazine of being drunk at a conference in Venice.
Even though Phillips, in particular, was shown to have been extremely drunk, the Labour figures won the case and were awarded damages, chiefly because the judge, Lord Goddard, had a grudge against The Spectator and shamelessly intervened on the politicians’ behalf.
It wasn’t surprising, of course, that Goodman should have been invited to help Labour Party figures, but I could never understand why he had played such a central role in exonerating the prominent Tory, Lord Boothby, from charges brought by the Labour-supporting Sunday Mirror. The paper had accused an unnamed Tory peer of being involved with the Kray twins and of attending sex parties with the gangsters. Boothby was widely supposed to be the peer in question.
Goodman helped him draft a letter to The Times denying that he was homosexual and that he barely knew the Krays. He then demanded damages of £40,000, a record for the time, and the Mirror climbed down and paid it, even though they had incriminating photographs in their possession that would have justified their story. They didn’t produce these photographs because they also implicated a leading Labour figure, Tom Driberg, a promiscuous homosexual.
It was established later that the story was not only true, but that Reggie Kray regularly procured young boys for sex for himself and for Boothby. Why, then, had Goodman become involved at all in such a sordid affair – and did he not know that his client was guilty as charged?
Murky waters, indeed, in which Goodman later regretted having dirtied his feet. I heard him describe Boothby as ‘the most corrupt man in London’. The harsh truth could not be evaded, however, as I suspect Goodman himself saw in later life, that in both these cases he had helped guilty men to evade justice.
Jeremy Thorpe was Goodman’s client when he was accused of conspiring to kill a former lover, Norman Scott, to prevent him exposing their brief homosexual affair. Did Goodman know Thorpe was gay even as he drafted public denials for his client? It is hard to believe that he didn’t know, but then he could be very naïve in matters of sex and was generally inclined to accept the word of important people.
Eventually he was able to hand over the case before the trial of Thorpe and his alleged co-conspirators to Sir David Napley, on the grounds that he had greater experience of criminal law. I sensed that this was a great relief for Goodman and that he wished he could have washed his hands of the whole affair much sooner, when he discovered that Thorpe and some of his unscrupulous friends, such as Peter Bessell and David Holmes, were taking steps to silence Scott without letting him know. Goodman and Napley were so obsessed with keeping their communications secret from the prying eyes of the press that they invented false names for themselves: one was ‘Gooseberry’ and the other ‘Loganberry.’
In the event, the prosecution case was torn to shreds by George Carman, Thorpe’s QC, in the first of his famous cases, with the undisguised support of the judge, Mr Justice Cantley. When the news of the acquittal was received in the Observer office, I heard Alan Watkins, the political columnist, mutter in disgust: ‘Class justice.’ Goodman himself always believed, or claimed to believe, that Thorpe was wholly innocent.
The end of the trial, however, did not end press speculation about Thorpe’s role in the affair. I became involved when I was persuaded by my friend Tom Rosenthal, the publisher, to buy what became known as ‘the Pencourt Papers’, written by journalists Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtier. They had been working on a BBC documentary about Thorpe, but Goodman persuaded the BBC to drop it. They had continued on Thorpe’s trail as freelances when they received a surprise invitation to meet Wilson, in his final period as Prime Minister, at his house in Lord North Street.
It was clearly a bizarre occasion and the thought occurs now that Wilson might have been in the early stages of the Alzheimer’s disease that eventually overwhelmed him. Not long after this I heard Wilson make an embarrassing and wholly inappropriate speech at a dinner given by Lord Weidenfeld in honour of a visiting Israeli political figure. Wilson went on about the two British sergeants who had been murdered by Jewish terrorists in a wood in Palestine in 1947 until he had to be interrupted and taken to sit down.
Wilson was mysterious with Penrose and Courtier, describing himself as ‘the big fat spider’ who would keep supplying them evidence about the sinister role played in British affairs by agents of the South African secret police, with which he had become obsessed. He claimed that they were working against him and against Thorpe and wanted to help the Liberal leader. He supplied very little, if any, further information about this supposed South African plot, which seems to have been a figment of his imagination.
It seems strange that he didn’t call in his own security services to help him find out more. The reason he didn’t, of course, was that he suspected that they too were also working against him – a suspicion which turned out, after the Spycatcher case, not to be the paranoid delusion it might have seemed, but the simple truth.
I published some Pencourt stories about Thorpe and also Wilson’s fears about MI5, but we held back on some of their more sensational allegations (most of which, it has to be admitted, turned out to be true). Goodman’s biographer, Brian Brivati, claims that the paper ‘threw away a series of scoops’ because I had been ‘got at’ by my chairman.
The more prosaic truth is that we didn’t publish them because my news desk, led at the time by Robin Lustig, was troubled about the lack of convincing evidence, and I had to establish a basic principle in handling Pencourt material that no more of their stories should be published unless we had stood them up with our own research.
I never discussed the Thorpe case with Goodman until many years later. I sensed then that he wished he had never become involved. The case had brought out two of his less exalted qualities – his naivety about people’s sexual lives and his compelling need to be on the public stage.
• • •
Wilson’s resignation came as a complete shock to everyone, provoking speculation, much of it unfounded, as to why he had decided to go. We now know that it was his fear of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and a promise he had made to his wife Mary that he would not remain as Prime Minister for more than two years after his surprise victory in 1974.
On the Friday evening before Wilson’s announcement, Roger Harrison, the paper’s managing director, came into the office straight from a dinner party at Goodman’s apartment. He told me and John Cole, then my deputy, that Goodman had hinted strongly at the dinner that Wilson would be resigning in the coming week.
John hit the phone to all his Cabinet contacts, but he could get no confirmation. It turned out later that Wilson had confided in only a few members of his Cabinet and that John’s contacts didn’t happen to be among them. It was a great story, handed to us on a plate, and we missed it. I tried to ring Goodman, but he had gone to Oxford for the weekend and didn’t return my calls (or didn’t get the messages). For once I would have dearly welcomed his call. The ‘fear of Arnold’ would no longer have applied.
CHAPTER 7
LAJOS
Looking back, I can see that there was always a touch of Stasiland about him. Eastern Europe was his subject and the place where he came from. In those dog days of the Cold War, three decades after the end of the real one, Lajos Lederer carried into the Observer office the exotic atmosphere of intrigue, espionage and faintly hidden menace that will always be associated with that period in the minds of the people who lived through it – not quite saying what he meant, not quite meaning what he said, communicating through an arcane code of nods and winks and whispered hints.
Not that there was anything the least threatening about Lajos himself, who always presented a sunny demeanour to the world. Nevertheless, he had that unmistakable air of a man who knew things, and had seen things, both of which he would rather not talk about. Had Orson Welles met him (which wouldn’t surprise me, actually, since Lajos seemed to know everyone), he would surely have cast him as one of those quirky Viennese characters in The Third Man who won’t, or daren’t, reveal the secrets trapped behin
d their wary eyes.
It is difficult now, at a time when airlines offer cheap holidays to all parts of what President Reagan called the ‘evil empire’, to remember the grip the Iron Curtain countries had on their people in those four sinister decades after 1945. The restrictions on travel and other freedoms; the secret police; the informers; the show trials; the torture; the propaganda; the covert operations – like the one in which a Bulgarian exile was stabbed to death with a poisoned umbrella in a London street; the problems for Western governments and for the media in finding out what was actually happening within those closed societies. It was the day of the spy – and of journalists like Lajos Lederer.
Come to think of it, there was a touch of espionage about our first serious encounter after I became editor in the mid-1970s. Until then, I had seen Lajos merely as the benign and rather handsome white-haired old man who had a bizarre habit of handing out sweets to the staff. On this occasion, when he popped his head into my office, he found me looking preoccupied. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. I hesitated before replying because Lajos had a reputation as an office gossip. Then, for no reason I can think of, except perhaps the look of genuine concern on his face, I decided to confide in him. It turned out to be one of the best editorial decisions I ever made.
Lajos immediately saw my predicament when I told him of my concern about an unexplained management meeting upstairs, and offered to help. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said, and disappeared for a while. He reappeared in my office with a reassuring smile.
‘You don’t have to worry. They’re not talking about you, or about editorial matters at all. They are worried about the printers, who have threatened to go on strike.’
‘How on earth did you find out?’ I asked.
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