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Cycle of love, hate and deceit

Premen Addy

IT HAS long been a redeeming feature of British society that some of its patricians, contrary to revolutionary socialist creed and prophecy, have been in the vanguard of causes that many of their peers perceived as class betrayal. No matter, they were th e fine grain of non-conformist tradition, upholders of the individual conscience against the clamour of the multitude if need be, and very much in a peculiarly British mould.

A deep humanism, driven by true Christian charity and humility, laced with vanity and eccentric charm, defined the life and work of Francis Aungier Pakenham, Seventh Earl of Longford, who died last week aged 95. Eminent in the world of literature and pol itics, he was in his time a member of the first post-War Labour government under Clement Attlee, an Oxford don -- having taught politics at Christ Church College -- and head of the publishing house of Sidgwick and Jackson.

He sired a brood of gifted children, among them Lady Antonia Fraser, the distinguished biographer of Oliver Cromwell and numerous other works, and the historian and naturalist Thomas Pakenham. Longford's wife Elizabeth, also 95, a noted belle in her day, is no less extraordinary as an author and public figure. Their wedding, way back in 1931, had the resonance of a P. G. Wodehouse tale.

The bridegroom and his best man arrived at the Oxford church only to find it surprisingly empty. Perhaps, attending wedding ceremonies had gone out of fashion. Consulting their watches, they discovered to their consternation that the bridal party had bee n there a good half-hour earlier. For a moment, they thought the unthinkable. Meanwhile, bride, bridesmaids and congregation waited feverishly at the properly-appointed church next door for the elusive groom. They kept their tryst and pledged their troth and lived happily ever after until death did them part.

Longford's wartime apprenticeship in politics was as personal assistant to Sir William (later Lord) Beveridge, Liberal architect of the British welfare state. The younger man's admiration for his mentor was profound, inculcating in him an enduring sense of public service.

Much of Lord Longford's subsequent life was devoted to the welfare of prisoners and criminal offenders. His journalist daughter, Rachel Billington, explained that her father's social work was informed by the Christian exhortation (much favoured by Gandhi ji) to ``hate the sin and love the sinner''. The agnostic A. N. Wilson, novelist and critic, relates how at Longford's 90th birthday ``one man told me, in tears, that when he came out of prison he had not a friend in the world except Frank, whose support and unobtrusive friendship saved his life''.

And there were innumerable ``little unremembered acts of kindness and of love''. Rachel Billington again: ``His friends whom he dined regularly in the House of Lords, ranged from ex-prisoners, the outcome of 50 years of prison visiting, to the grandest i n the land''.

Lord Longford's favourite passage in the Gospels, which he read every day, included words in St Matthew, chapter 25, when the blessed were welcomed by the Lord into his kingdom: ``For I was a hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me d rink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me''. Lord Longford's was a life of suffering love, which he lived to the full.

All the world's a stage

And all the men and women

merely players,

They have their exits

and their entrances...

So said Shakespeare. Exit Lord Longford, enter Mr Louis Farrakhan, leader of black America's Nation of Islam. Mr Farrakhan recently had his ban to enter Britain, on the ground that he would be a threat to social peace, overturned by a British High Court judge in deference to a European human rights convention. In Britain, there is uproar. Mr Farrakhan and his Fruit of Islam bodyguards, in their regulation squaresville suits, white shirts and pink bow-ties, may for all the world look like a performing tr oupe in a Fifties variety show, but their message is anything but anodyne. Mr Farrakhan's anti-semitic diatribes are pure vitriol. Jews were ``bloodsuckers,'' and Judaism was a ``gutter religion''. He hailed Hitler as a ``very great man''.

White people have been denounced with similar ferocity. So what sort of gospel is Mr Farrakhan about to preach in Britain? Will he recommend the establishment of a separate black Muslim state as he has done for America? Will he talk of race war as noncha lantly as others once spoke of class war? Will the fragile peace in race relations in Britain following the recent riots in the northern English cities of Bradford and Oldham survive his corrosive presence? These questions must await his arrival but ther e is understandable concern, especially among the Jewish community, that he will be a force for social division and conflict.

Britain isn't as yet beset by the complex dynamics of American racial politics. Mr Farrakhan may not have the mainstream respectability of the Rev Jessie Jackson or the Rev Al Sharpton, but in the hurley burley of American public life, this one-time Caly pso singer has emerged as a powerful and disturbing voice incarnating the rage of a substantial section of the voiceless dispossessed. Mr Farrakhan's destructive simplicities resonating through high notes of oratorical incoherence are presumably some of his attractions. The appeal to the gut can be as great an emotional experience as one to the heart or, dare one say it, to the head.

Who knows if Lord Longford had been with us a little longer; health permitting, he may have given comfort and counsel to one who climbed giddy heights of power and privilege and then fell from the cliffs to the dark valley below. Jeffrey Archer, popular best-selling millionaire novelist, former chairman of the Tory party, Tory candidate for mayor of London until the past began to catch up with him and forced his withdrawal, businessman extraordinary, charity fund raiser, bon viveur, chancer and storytel ler, who was ennobled by Mrs Margaret Thatcher as the embodiment of Thatcherite enterprise culture, fell ignobly from grace, as a judge sentenced him to four years in prison for perjury and conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare now keeps company with felons who, unlike him, were never members of the glitterati. It is a tale worthy of one of his own steamy plots. And, no doubt, when he has finished serving time he will come up with just such a po t-boiler.

A compulsive liar and trickster, he made it big in the company of the good and the great. He was the social climber par excellence, the role model for the parvenu out to make a fast buck. His father had been a conman, his son has been suspended from trad ing on the stock exchange for malpractice, and his wife, Mary, is a brilliant Cambridge scientist.

Lord Archer fell victim to his own hubris. Rumours about his murky dealings and deeds were rife, but he threatened to sue those who would reveal them. He kept an assignation with a prostitute and when the story broke he promptly sued the newspaper and wo n substantial damages. His wife, extolled for her ``fragrance'' by the presiding judge, took the stand and testified to a marriage made in heaven. Who would believe a working class woman of easy virtue whose every word and syllable betrayed her lowly ori gins? Certainly, not the fount of rough justice, as it turned out.

A decade later, Nemesis consumed his Lordship. The case was reopened as a result of fresh evidence. It revolved round two diaries -- one with genuine entries, the other with spurious dates and times. The secretary, who kept both, spilled the beans. Jeffr ey Archer, Tory card and conference darling, was convicted by a judge who saw through his glass, darkly.

The author, A. N. Wilson, likened Lord Archer's scrawl to the ``work of a clever chimpanzee who could not write at all but had merely learnt to imitate a few letters''. He went on: ``I never felt so strongly the pathos of Lord Archer as when seeing his h andwriting. Whether or not it is true that (to put it euphemistically) he receives help to write his novels, I am sure that he never found the actual physical act of writing easy. His whole life has been a Promethean act of defiance. He chose to become a Tory toff because this was the reverse of what he was; and because he is all but illiterate, he chose to become a writer''.

Sherlock Holmes could have put it no better.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern Asian History at Kellog College, Oxford, is a political columnist of the London-based India Weekly).