In 1887 when Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister and his nephew, Arthur Balfour, was Chief Secretary for Ireland, Balfour was about to introduce a Coercion Bill in the House of Commons. To help the Honourable Members’ deliberations, THE TIMES published allegations of criminal misconduct by Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Nationalist Party, The allegations provided “proof” that he had encouraged the1882 Phoenix Park killings of Lord Henry Cavendish, the then Chief Secretary, and Thomas Burke, his Under-Secretary, the most Senior Civil Servant in Ireland.
The “proof” was supposedly written by Parnell but a Commission of Enquiry proved it was a forgery by a mercenary Irish journalist, Richard Piggott. Piggott had one redeeming feature not too common amongst his shameless successors. He shot himself.
Parnell’s reputation soared amongst honest Englishmen, whilst both the reputation and the circulation of THE TIMES dived. It was almost ruined. As late as the 1940s it was attempting to justify its conduct.
Today it maintains that Frank Foley, an MI6 agent accredited to the British Embassy in Berlin, risked hi life to save Jews from the Nazis when he was safely billeted with the Embassy before the outbreak of war in 1939. In fact Foley and Guy Liddell of MI5 who flew in from London at the NAZIS’ invitation spent many days in early 1933 in the Party’s HQ transcribing names of persons the NAZIS disapproved of, lest they surface in Britain or her Empire. British spooks bugged the -phones and steamed open the letters of the (Jewish) historian Eric Hobsbawm for the next 80 years. He can hardly have been the only one to get such attention.
Hobsbawm used occasionally meet a neighbour of his, Michael Foot when waiting for a bus. ThE TIMES maintains that Foot was a Soviet agent and a traitor to Britain, although, when the SUNDAY TIMES published that lie Foot successfully sued it for libel. Its source was a Soviet spy who went on the British Secret Service Payroll and apparently found it profitable.
In 1981 when Tony Benn was a candidate for the leadership or deputy leadership of the British Labour Party THE TIMES published the lie that he had substantial overseas property. Benn was a former Cabinet Minister and a Member of the Privy Council and the following day the first letter in THE TIMES was from Tony Benn refuting the lie. THE TIMES apologised. I’m not sure if the vote had been taken by then. Anyway Benn didn’t win.
At the time THE TIMES was attempting to defend a blatant lie it had carried in its front page coverage of the funeral of Bobby Sands, All fatalities in the “troubles” were inflicted by Republicans was its story. All the victims were Protestants. I had asked THE TIMES, very politely, to correct its story, and received a lying brush-off from its Managing Editor, an alumnus of Balliol College Oxford and a former officer in the Brigade of Guards. I then made a complaint to the Press Council, which, in cahoots with THE TIMES, sought to wear me out with volumes of irrelevant and obstructive bumpf. But I persisted and the Council vindicated my complaint, but in such weasel words you might imagine that Republicans had inflicted all the deaths suffered and that others suffered who were not Protestants.
The Editor of THE TIMES back then was Mr Harold Evans.His fellow Editors gave him the accolade “Editor of the Year.”
Years rolled by and, in pursuance of peace in these islands, Taoiseach Albert Reynolds prevailed on President Clinton to overrule the Anglophile State Department and arrange for an American Visa for Irish Passport-Holder, Gerry Adams. Bill Clinton owed the British Government no favours, for the Home Office had scoured its records to find anything to scupper Clinton’s campaign for the Presidency. But the British Embassy in Washington as nothing if not industrious. It recruited ex-TIMES Editor Simon Jenkins who told White House staffers that the IRA had killed “3,000 Britons since 1969.” It was an updating of the earlier lie. But why an American President, in a capital named for a rebel who had killed rather more Britons, should have been shocked had the lie been true, I can’t imagine.
Adams got his visa and Albert Reynolds’ was vindicated. But the success of the Peace Process long rankled with Jenkins.
George W Bush was no peacemonger and but he was a man after Simon Jenkins’s heart. He snubbed Gerry Adams about 10 years later. Jenkins rushed into print to gloat, revealing that he had lied to White House Staff in order to scupper the Peace Process.
It pleased Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth to confer knighthoods simultaneously on Harold Evans and Simon Jenkins to the unanimous applause of Britain’s national papers.
Had Richard Piggott had as brass a neck he’d probably have earned a peerage.
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