You might think that playwright David Hare and Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre would not be on the same side about anything, but both seem to agree that public figures deserve all the opprobrium that gets dumped on them from the sidelines.
Dacre, who’s sixty this Friday, sharing the same date of birth as Prince Charles, has delivered a thunderous speech to the Society of Editors defending the Press exposure of the motor racing mogul Max Mosley’s “sexual depravity.”
Mosley won a case against the News of the World under the privacy clause of the Human Rights Act and Dacre sees this as the start of a sinister campaign by the establishment against freedom of information in the public interest.
Advance reports of the new David Hare play, Gethsemane at the National Theatre, suggest that characters invoked include the Labour Party fundraiser Lord Levy, who faced police questions over the “cash for honours” scandal; and Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister, who separated from her husband, David Mills, after he was involved in a financial scandal emanating from Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.
The difference, of course, despite Dacre’s efforts to defend the “public interest” argument with a rather feeble plea that motor racing is a popular sport and that a wealthy man exploited women for his own pleasure (that’s unusual, isn’t it?), is that Levy and Jowell are genuinely accountable public figures, though Levy’s not an elected one.
And Hare is a satirical playwright whereas Dacre is a moralising Middle England crusader. The gulf was indicated by Levy’s own response to the reports of the play, which opens to the critics tomorrow night. “It sounds as if it’s been written by some smart-arsed Hampstead playwright,” he told the Sunday Times, oblivious to the irony of Hare having beeen knighted by his own New Labour project.
And then he added insult to ignorance by pretending he didn’t know who Hare was: “If this playwright, whatever his name is, wants to take a pot shot, that’s his business,” before suggesting he re-direct his attention to the way the Tories have sought their funders over the years.
The point is that Hare, like many on the Left, feels betrayed by the evaporation of idealism as New Labour went about running its affairs, let alone its foreign policy. He would have expected dodgy practices among the Tories. But I don’t think he’s yet handed back his knighthood. Nor has Dacre accepted one. Maybe it’s only a matter of time for both things to happen.
It’s interesting that Levy and Dacre are as one on the chimera of Hampstead lefties running the media. Dacre couldn’t conclude his speech without a spirited sideswipe at his number one bete noire, the BBC: “It is destroying media plurality in Britain and in its place imposing a liberal, leftish monoculture that is destroying free and open debate in Britain.”
Both men would probably conclude that the presentation of Gethsemane at the National – David Hare’s fourteenth play, count ‘em, on the subsidised National stage – is damning evidence of a conspiracy against sound moral judgement and the sensible opinions of Joe Public, rather than a wonderful endorsement of Britain’s leading contemporary playwright.
Deep down, Levy and Dacre are both suspicious of art. And in dear old Dacre’s case, he sees it as his moral duty to tilt at the windmills of soft liberalism — usually, in his mind, a sign of a depraved lifestyle — in all the creative media. But that’s precisely why most people do work in television and theatre — they are liberals by instinct, intelligence and inclination. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s a fact.
Difficult to put Paul Dacre and David Hare in the same bracket. Dacre sees everything in black and white while Hare tries to see both sides of every argument and paints everything in shades of grey. Nothing wrong with that, but Gethsemane just isn’t a very good play. Is Hare really a satirist? I don’t think so.
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