The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 18

18 OBSERVER SUNDAY 3 JUNE 1990 Richard Ingrams Chelsea Bridge House. Queenstown Road, London SW8 4NN 071-627 0700 AS THE Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, continues his brave atternpts to find some way out of the Ulster impasse, the most compelling reason for a British disengagement of some kind remains the terrible corruption of our institutions that has taken place as a result of British governments trying to maintain the status quo. It is all reminiscent of Vietnam, albeit on a much smaller scale. In that case, too, the Americans insisted that they could win an unwinnable war and in the process resorted to lies, black propaganda and all kinds of skulduggery with the encouragement of a corps of sycophantic columnists. The loss of national morale is still very evident in America.

The latest little episode to cast a blight is the hearing into the convictions of the Maguire family being presided over by former Lord Justice May. The only possible course for such an inquiry, to take would be to uncover an explanation as to how six transparently innocent people were found to have traces of explosives on their hands and how, on the basis of apparently incontrovertible scientific evidence, they were sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. But that is not how the inquiry is proceeding. For a start, the lawyer representing the Director of Public Prosecutions is not even prepared to accept that the convictions of the Maguires were 'unsafe'. It has also transpired that the incriminating tests which discovered nitro-glycerine traces on the hands of the accused were carried out by a young apprentice scientist who was only 18 at the time.

Sir John May, however, has no powers to compel him to attend the inquiry and the scientist has chosen not to do so. Slaow tHalls aire molt ttlae Bflrittislhi way Lord Shawcross, Britain's chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, argues against putting elderly war criminals in the dock now. and it is a big if I cannot believe that justice will be seen to have been done. The unprecedented lapse of time, the lobbying, the political and religious pressures, the pre-trial publicity and the fact that the whole weight of Government and Parliament has, at enormous expense, been directed against these few men because they are already. believed to be guilty, can hardly be without their effect.

How can the jury approach their task with open minds? The lobbyists, now fearing defeat, are putting it around that it would be unconstitutional for the Lords to defeat A time to hold our nerve ON A visit to West Germany last December, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, warned that British servicemen were now more at risk from IRA attacks on the Continent than in Ulster. The brutal murders of the past week, and in particular the gunning down of two young Australian tourists, have shown that it is not only military personnel who must be considered vulnerable. Security sources have been warning for some time that this phase of the IRA's terrorist campaign is likely to continue and may even escalate. The IRA has made no secret of the rationale behind its activities. Spokesmen for the organisation have repeatedly said that the objective is to sicken public opinion in this country in order to build pressure on the Government to withdraw from Northern Ireland.

Security successes against the IRA in both parts of Ireland mean that it is now easier for the terrorists to operate abroad, particularly if they are prepared to extend their targets to include wives, children and innocent tourists. The IRA has also discovered that murder committed on the mainland or on the Continent attracts a great deal more media coverage in Britain than killing policemen and members of the Ulster Defence Regiment in Northern Ireland. In this context even the murder of the two Australian tourists can be excused, as they were with sickening words of commiseration for the families by Gerry Adams, as the kind of 'regrettable mistake that is the fault of the British Government for inducing the war in the first place. There is another pressing reason why the IRA should want to escalate its campaign just now. It is one of which Peter Brooke is well aware.

The political news from Northern Ireland is more hopeful than it has been for over a decade. While everyone involved remains resolutely cautious, there is the possibility that talks could take place between the political leaders in the province that would lead to a stable devolved administration. Thorny issues If that were to happen and the prospect is still a long way off it would pose the most serious threat to the Provisional IRA. Although Peter Brooke hardly made himself popular for saying so, most Ministers who have served in Ulster know that the IRA cannot be defeated by military means alone. That will only be possible when political structures are set up in the province which command the confidence and support of both communities.

The process currently under way has the backing of both the British and Irish Governments, but, as Peter Brooke has constantly stressed, it needs very careful tending. In this context it is in the IRA's interests not only to heighten tensions between the two communities in Northern Ireland but also to sour relations between Britain and the Irish Republic. Since the Anglo-Irish agreement, and particularly in recent months, there has been a noticeable lessening in the recriminations which used to be hurled back and forth across the Irish Sea. Even on such thorny issues as the extradition of IRA suspects to stand trial in Britain, the Government has been careful not to offend Irish susceptibilities, calculating rightly that it will be easier for Mr Haughey to tighten up the existing loopholes if he is not seen domestically to be under pressure from Mrs Thatcher. This new improved atmosphere could easily change, however.

If there are more IRA atrocities in Britain the Government may be tempted to adopt draconian measures in order to be seen to be doing something. There could be a backlash against Irish people living and working in this country, for example by increased use of the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The problem with this, as Paul Hill's story on our Review front illustrates, is that it can lead to miscarriages of justice which haunt both countries for years afterwards. At times of heightened tension it is important that both the Government and the public hold their nerve. If the effect of the IRA's campaign is to damage relations between Britain and Ireland in a way that threatens progress towards a political settlement in Ulster then the terrorists will have scored a dreadful victory.

Locked horns WHATEVER one thinks of Mr John Gummer's clumsy handling of the situation, there is little doubt that the French and German bans on British beef imports are nothing more than illegal protectionism. In the absence of any real effort by the Commission to enforce its own rules, our EC partners can hope to spin out their defiance for weeks or even months, long enough for their farmers to recapture the share of the market lost to British imports. Mr Francis Maude, the Foreign Office Minister, has implied that Britain will not encourage a trade war over the issue. 'We don't go in for he said last week, 'we go in for obeying the Mr David Curry, the Agriculture Minister told French television viewers that Britain could have banned French eggs, cheese or Perrier recently but had not. The pressure to engage in retaliatory measures will undoubtedly increase if the illegal bans on British beef are not lifted within the next few days, but it is a temptation that should be resisted.

The interests of all EC countries in the successful working of a common internal market are much greater than a spat over beef. It should be forcefully pointed out to the French and German governments that unilateral action of the kind their Agriculture Ministers have taken is a direct threat to the future development of the Community. Either there is mutual trust and agreement or there is not. The judgment of the veterinary experts advising both the British Government and the EC Commission in Brussels is that there is no danger to human health from eating beef. If other EC governments for their own purposes choose to disregard this advice, they must realise that what they are doing is not protecting their own consumers but threatening the very future of the THE HOUSE of Lords will tomorrow discuss on second reading a Bill already passed by the Commons intended to alter the law retroactively to permit prosecutions to be brought against a small number of British subjects suspected of having committed horrible murders of Jewish victims while they were German soldiers in German-occupied territory 45 years or more ago.

'To what extent Gentiles can gauge the suffering of Hitler's victims from the moment of being collected from their homes in the middle of the night to being forced into the gas chambers is something I cannot So wrote a Jewish correspondent to me recently. While we of other or no religious persuasions must certainly never forget the Holocaust, I have to agree that we tend, as the years go on, to recall it with less horror and repugnance than the Jews themselves. Previous discussions of the matter in the House of Lords suggest that they may disagree with the proposed legislation, although I suspect that the SO speakers who have put down their names may be fairly evenly divided. It is certainly a matter of grave importance and difficulty. I am sure it will be discussed responsibly and without bitterness in the spirit shown by my Jewish correspondent for he went on to say, 'Retribution is both evil and futile.

This is England. We do not indulge in show trials, however fairly conducted. The House should throw out the Is he right representing, as he may well be, a minority of his community? I have been unable to escape some interest in the matter because I had myself some association with the policy and conduct of the prosecution of war criminals after the war. My formal responsibility as Attorney-General was, only for the prosecution of the so-called major war criminals at Nuremberg. The prosecution of the minor criminals (a misdescription, for their individual crimes to be relieved of the nightmare of, the past.

The majority of the war criminals will find safety in their numbers. It is physically impossible to punish more than a fraction. All that can be done is to make Of course, it is open to Government and Parliament now to abandon the policy of the Attlee Government, although all political parties agreed with it at the time. The question is, would such a change be wise? Would it be right to assuage the assiduous lobbying which has taken place by so grave Na step, long after the event? My own view is that so to do would inflict a grievous blot on the tradition and integrity of British justice. First of all, there is the lapse of time 45 years or more since those crimes were committed.

There is no statute of limitations prohibiting such trials after so long a delay. There has never needed to be. Then it is proposed that the procedure of the trials should be altered, to make it easier for the prosecution at the expense of the defendants. Thus, preliminary proceedings before the magistrates are to be done away with, and the very procedure for giving evidence on oath in the presence of the jury is to be altered. The witnesses will, of course, all be old and may be unwilling to travel.

Their evidence is to be taken by video or television, a method hitherto only very occasionally used in the case of children. Most of that evidence will be as to identification. That is always the most fallible sort of evidence. Even when it is a question of identifying seen four or five days before, it is recognised as most unreliable and capricious. I have great respect for the common sense of British juries.

But if any case comes to trial by virtue of this Bill IT IS good news that Mr Kevin Taylor, the Manchester business man whose friendship with John Stalker caused the latter to be suspended as Manchester's deputy chief constable, is to sue James An-derton and Greater Manchester Police for malicious prosecution. Mr Taylor, whose book The Poisoned Tree is published this week, claims that the police only went after him in the first place in order to discredit Stalker by association. Meanwhile, James Anderton, the Chief Constable of Manchester, has apparently still to respond to a 'request' by the Director of Public Prosecutions to look into the Taylor affair. The request, made four months ago, is, according to a spokesman, 'still being con- sidered'. It may seem extraordinary that when a trial has been halted because it has been shown that the police lied in order, to obtain evidence, it' should be left to the whim of the Chief Constable concerned to decide whether or not to look into the matter.

In the face of such official indifference, and the lack of any political concern on either side of the House, it is once again left to an individual to sue. THE DEBATE about the Press Council's ruling that the word 'poof, and 'poofter', should be out-of-bounds to all decent journalists is still reverberating through the corridors of Fleet Street. It is all part of a campaign by militant homosexuals to dictate the vocabulary. On the whole their campaign, has been very successful. Despite mutterings from a few old Daily Telegraph die-hards, the word 'gay' is now used in most reports in the press or on TV although, as I have observed is nothing to stop this word eventually acquiring the same offensive connotations as words like -queer or poof.

It is also noticeable how' many reports nowadays; use the expression 'homosexual community' when referring to homosexuals. There is, of course, no such thing as a ho-, mosexual community in the sense of a group of people sharing certain traditions or living in the same locality. There are only a number of homosexuals, all of widely differing attitudes, living all over the place. But the expression 'homosexual community', suggesting a persecuted racial minority, helps to lend respectability to the cause. In writing about these matters I shall be accused of something called 'homophobia'.

This is another useful word from the point of view of the gay rights campaigners, as it helps to propagate the idea that anyone who is disparaging about homosexuals (on moral or religious grounds, for example) is the victim of a deep-seated psychological disorder. fections during the war years; then she won over the Americans in 1949, with the triumphant opening night of The Sleeping Beauty in New York. She and Michael Somes took the reputation of the Royal Ballet around the world in guest appearances for 10 years before she did the same with Nureyev. She loves Panama and chose to retire there with her husband on their ranch, surrounded by cattle and dogs. The part of herself that is not a ballet dancer belongs there.

Now that Tito has gone, she may wish to reforge her links with the ballet world: the trust fund will enable her to travel more freely and take up invitations to coach, if she wishes. (She is due to return soon to coach the Royal Ballet). The last thing in the world she would want is pity. She had a marvellous career; and when it was over, she channelled her capacity for love into caring for her husband. Her life in the Panamanian countryside may be simple, but the congruity of ballerina as cattle-breeder was caught in a recent photograph by Snowdon, which showed her in a haze of dust stirred up by her white cows: Giselle among the wilis.

the Bill. Not so. Members of the Commons were not voting to express the party political opinions they were elected to represent. They were, on a free vote, expressing their individual views. If the Lords vote against the Bill there will no constitutional crisis.

I end as I began, with a further passage from the letter of my Jewish correspondent, who I found was'a respected and experienced solicitor, himself driven out as a refugee from Nazi Germany. 'I he wrote, 'our family lost 21 members in the Holocaust. We have no desire to be burdened with a rehash of a sordid episode, unique in its extent though not in its essence, of bestiality and sadism. 'We do not require "further and better particulars" and our judges ought not to be encumbered with presiding over a ghastly chapter of contemporary history As to the effect of deterrence, a recital of names: Amin, Gadaffi, Saddam Hussein, Khomeini, Ceausescu, Pol Pot et al He echoed a great man. said Mr Churchill in 1948, 'is of all satisfactions the most costly and long drawn out; retributive persecution is of all policies the most pernicious.

Our policy should henceforward be to draw the sponge across the crimes and horrors of the past hard as that may be and to look, for the sake of all our salvations, to the were often of enormous gravity) was, under a Royal Warrant, the duty of the Army and assigned to commands. Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, asked me to hold an informal watching brief and keep him in touch with how matters progressed. And they progressed exceedingly badly. I attempted to lay down a target which involved proceeding against an 'irreducible minimum' of at least 10 per cent of the 10,000 criminals listed as within the British Zone, by April 1946. The target was disregarded by those responsible and had to be extended.

I told the Prime Minister that at the then rate 'the trials would go on till the crack of doom'. In the meantime, however, public sentiment was undergoing a marked change. The British public were not happy about victors' justice. In September 1946, Winston Churchill was to say in. a speech in Zurich that 'there must be an end to retribution.

We must turn our backs upon the horrors of the past and we must look to the By November the Cabinet agreed that we should discontinue the trials. I was in New York at the time a fact which I mention because the Minister of State at the Home Office carelessly stated that it was my decision. Not so. But I went along with it. I was compelled to agree with Lord Wright, the senior and much-respected Lord of Appeal who was chairman of the UN War Crimes Commission and the strongest protagonist of full and speedy punishment of war criminals' and traitors.

He had said and his words are very relevant now 'Once it is felt that the idea of an international rule of law and its suitable endorsement has been established with the support of sufficient precedents, humanity is glad her, identified with her, wanted to protect her. Asking anyone to explain why she is so special is like asking a lover to dissect the charms of his beloved. The tributes to her in the gala programme from spellbound colleagues agree that she eludes description. Her particular magic has been that of a small bright figure on a large stage, who draws even the furthest spectator into an emotional closeness that eliminates distance. The only way to analyse that effect would be to resist the pull and remain out in the darkness, missing the point.

Her first partner, Robert Helpmann, spoke for many when he said in a television interview that watching her dance made you want to cry. I know that when I first saw her in Swan Lake, when I was 14, I was amazed to find my face wet with tears; and the last full-length role I saw her dance, Juliet, with Nureyev as her Romeo, reduced me and everyone round me to sobs. Yet that overwhelming response was elicited by what seemed the simplest of means. Her acting was never histrionic and her technique never virtuoso. Dancing appeared to come naturally to her, as if an arabesque was the most ef- AN UNLIKELY supporter has come forward for the former Soho porn-king Mr David Sullivan, barred last week by the Monopolies Commission from buying a controlling interest in the Bristol Evening Post.

A leader in the Independent attacked the Commission's verdict and described Mr Sullivan, who in addition to making a fortune out of porn has done time for living off immoral earnings, as a 'rough diamond' whose commercial flair, was beyond dispute and who had 'something to add to the gaiety of Support in a leading article from such a respectable source shows the giant strides made by the porn industry in recent years. Thanks to the co-operation of the monopoly wholesalers, big business advertisers, and the support of well-meaning liberals like the Independent's leader-writer, men like Mr Sullivan have been enabled to emerge from the back-streets of Soho to positions of semi-respectability from which they can mount a challenge to the rest of the press. Predictably crying at the decision by the Monopolies Commission, a spokesman for Mr Sullivan complained of double standards and ah old-school tie attitude. He could well have a point. After all, he might argue that all he is doing is continuing along the road first travelled by Rupert Murdoch.

Yet Murdoch is established as our most powerful press tycoon and a close confidant of the Prime Minister, while Mr Sullivan is declared to be persona non grata. briefly imprisoned during one of his attempts at revolution. She writes about the experience with amusement in her autobiography, but semi-farce turned to tragedy in 1964, when Arias was paralysed by a would-be assassin's bullet. All their money had gone into his political campaigns, so Fonteyn had to keep performing to pay for his treatment. She was in any case in great demand because of the extraordinary final blossoming of her career in her partnership with Rudolf Nureyev.

The empathy between them, in spite of the 20-year difference in their ages, created a golden era for ballet. Everybody wanted to see them dance together and nobody was willing to let them go at the end of a performance. He was the perfect foil for her restraint; and she renewed herself through him, drawn again to the Russian core that had always been part of her ballet formation. The legendary status she acquired then, and still retains, is partly due to the romance and excitement of the performances with Nureyev but also to her identification with the Royal Ballet's years of greatness. She first made her way into the public's af Curtain call for our best loved ballerina Jann Parry celebrates the magical genius of Margot Fonteyn, in London last week for a gala tribute to support her in retirement.

FLOWERS rained down on Dame Margot Fonteyn on Wednesday night as profusely as they used to in the great days of her performances at Covent Garden. The Royal Ballet's gala tribute to her touched, once again, the emotional heart of the ballet-going public. She had initially been reluctant to attend the gala, being embarrassed that it was to raise money for a trust fund in her name. She needs financial assistance following the death of her husband, Roberto Arias, last year, and her own illness from cancer. She was eventually persuaded that people who had seen her dance wanted to convey to her, in person, how much pleasure she had given them and how much she still meant to them.

Many of those who could not attend the benefit performance have sent donations, already exceeding the 250,000 the organisers had hoped to raise. At 71, frail but still beautiful, she projects a glamour that intoxicates audiences; yet part of the secret of her appeal has always been her modesty and vulnerability. She has never set out to conquer or seduce: people of all ages have naturally fallen in love with fortless form of-expression: in its way it must have been, for she kept her harmonious line throughout her long career. Ballet, however, is an arduous and relentless discipline. Fonteyn knew how to disguise the effort, both on stage and in class (to the despair of her struggling colleagues).

Restraint was the hallmark of her classical style and of her behaviour in public and private life. Alexander Bland, this Fonteyn as Odette in Swan Lake. paper's ballet critic for much of her career, commented that her temperament, like her dark, exotic looks, was basically Latin and volatile, with an almost exaggeratedly British veneer of self-control. The 'veneer' came from her training under the Royal Ballet's founding figures, Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ash-ton. Her mother was half-Brazilian; and the young Fonteyn grew up in the Far East, with early ballet teachers who were mainly Russians.

She continued, to be coached by Russian emigres (including the great Karsavina) even when she was forging the style that became synonymous with English ballet and with Ash-ton's choreography. The fiery temperament, hidden but not extinguished, may have accounted for the attraction she felt for Tito Arias, the dashing Panamanian diplomat who stole her heart long before he married her in 1955. Through him, she was caught up in the intrigues of Central American politics, hitting the international headlines in 1959, when she was Roast beef as usual at Grantchester. We are not cowards like the French, our Food Minister's word is good enough for me. Jeffrey Archer.

The difference between men and women is communication: women talk more than men. Tracy Edwards. I have always felt there are better things to do than spend the evenings with a glass in your hand with people you don't know or care about. Roy Hattersley. If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Simon Rattle. For us the best time is always yesterday. Tatyana Tolstoya. If he is playing a game then we may be in for difficult times. Life is richer than any teacher.

Mikhail Gorbachov on Boris Yeltsin. Only a small minority of people in each class is seriously interested in art or ideas, while the majority in each class is either indifferent or mildly hostile. Bryan Magee..