The terrorists sit around a television set. A curtain comes down when a woman appears on the screen
Published 03 April 2000
"Her Majesty's Pleasure in relation to young bad criminals should be shown through a judge and not through a politician," I said rather pretentiously at lunch at the New Statesman. I was promptly commanded to write a piece on the Bulger case, the notorious trial of two small boys for murdering a smaller boy. I got a copy of the judgement of the European Court of Human Rights, and I wrote my argument. The trial judge had recommended a tariff of eight years for "retribution and deterrence". The Lord Chief Justice had raised the recommendation to ten years. The former home secretary had fixed 15 years, and he wrote of the strong public feeling for a heavy sentence, shown in particular by 20,000 coupons from the Sun newspaper calling for a whole life tariff. Before my piece could be typed out, though, Jack Straw made a statement in the House of Commons saying what I thought I was going to say. Let a judge fix the tariff: the Home Secretary will be bound by him. The law was to be altered accordingly. There have been endless appeals in the Bulger case, summed up in speeches in the House of Lords, where Lord Steyn had said: "In fixing a tariff, the Home Secretary is carrying out, contrary to the constitutional principle of the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary, a classic judicial function." "The imposition of a tariff", said Lord Hope, "which is intended to fix the minimum period in custody is, in itself, the imposition of a form of punishment." The European Court, including the eminent Scottish judge, Lord Reed, said almost precisely the same as the English courts and found a breach of the convention. In his statement to the Commons, Straw was putting it right. The moral is to put off writing a piece for the NS - sometimes it will all sort itself out.
The other day, the Evening Standard published an article praising the paintings of Ray Scobie, who has served a long prison sentence and now lives in Lincoln. His work came to my attention through the Koestler Trust for arts in prison. During his 16 years in prison, Scobie, still a young man by my standards, taught himself to paint extraordinary and powerful self-portraits. He is perhaps the leading prison artist of the day. I have a remarkable painting of him drawing in the garden of an open prison, eyes popping, ears outstretched, curious to be out of doors. Other paintings of his are now in the prison museum near Rugby. It is all evidence of how, in prison, you can use the abundant leisure to advantage and train yourself to earn sensibly when you emerge. Scobie and other ex-prisoners continue to show at the big Koestler display at Whiteleys each September.
I visited the new Palestine, Yasser Arafat's West Bank and the Gaza Strip, to help with a report for the International Commission of Jurists, in Geneva, on the rule of law in Palestine. Gaza is an ancient and rambling city, reminiscent of Lawrence Durrell's and E M Forster's Alexandria. In the bars, groups of moustachioed sleek men were conspiring - spies, I vaguely supposed, but into what I cannot say.
The Central Prison of Gaza is well run, on the whole, by an admirable colonel. The prison is a bit squalid, like most prisons, but prisoners get daily exercise and training. As you walk around, they smile and make remarks in Arabic which give the impression of being friendly and funny - if only you could understand what they're saying. The prison passes the basic test of the inspector: the officers and the prisoners seem to be on good terms. A curious day room is full of apparently fanatical terrorists sitting around a television set where a curtain comes down as soon as a woman appears on the screen.
On the West Bank, there is even more delicious food than in Gaza, much hospitality, and limes with everything - in the water, in the soup, in the fish. I have always had the reputation of being something of a loose cannon, and so became rather proud of getting around these parts, unlike the French Prime Minister or the Pope, without upsetting my hosts. Not much rule of law, perhaps, but wonderful Arabic hors d'oeuvres. It confirmed my belief that I am like Max Beerbohm in one minor aspect. "I am one of the guests," he wrote, and not a host.
I have just returned from the Taj Mahal. Aldous Huxley usually got it right. Piero della Francesca's Resurrection at Borgo Sansepolcro in Italy he fairly described as "the best picture in the world". Breughel's Calvary he regards as the finest of that great gallery of Breughel in Vienna. But once, at least, Huxley got it wrong. He must have visited the Taj Mahal in a very bad temper.
"Architecturally," he wrote, "the worst features of the Taj are its minarets. Those four thin tapering towers standing at the four corners of the platform on which the Taj is built are among the ugliest structures ever erected by human hands . . . Its elegance is at best of a very dry and negative kind. Its classicism is the product not of intellectual restraint imposed on an exuberant fancy, but of an actual deficiency of fancy, a poverty of imagination."
Well, I have just visited the Taj for the first time. A visit is an enormous treat. It is the glorious and moving symbol of a love stronger than death - which is, I suppose, what you want from a mausoleum. The jewelled walls, the towers, the gardens (improbably, the lawns were added by Lord Curzon) make up the most memorable masterpiece. In Agra, where it stands, the melancholy cows on the dirty pavements chew plastic bags until they collapse. But I know no more wonderful spectacle than the Taj Mahal, either across the lake or from its gardens.
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