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| Article11
January
2001 | John Mortimer: 'Why I wouldn't lunch with a government minister'
John Mortimer muses about falling over, foxhunting and free speech. | | by Brendan O'Neill |
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Autobiographical works often reveal the author's inner-most thoughts and secrets - but Sir John Mortimer's Summer of a Dormouse tells us more about the author's socks life than his sex life.
| 'Can you imagine having to call your wife or daughter to help you put on a pair of socks?' asks Mortimer. 'It is rather awful.' Mortimer is getting old and he wants the world to know. At 77, the author, playwright and creator of Rumpole of the Bailey is facing up to the fact that life can sometimes seem like 'one long march to and from the lavatory'. But despite this, his spirits remain undimmed. 'You do the same silly things, you get glasses of wine flung in your face. You're like you always were, except you can't see very well and you fall over.'
| For Mortimer, one of the worst things about getting old is becoming an 'unwilling member' of the government's latest target group - pensioners. 'New Labour is only being nice to us old people because there are so many of us - they want our votes.' He is not surprised that alongside the courting of the 'grey vote' government ministers want to replace the words 'elderly' and 'pensioner' with less fogeyish words that will appeal to the young, and that they have written off the over-70s for not being 'aspirational'. 'It is typical of this government, where everything, even things to do with the elderly, has to be "young" and "new". And it's typical of their hypocrisy, the deception that we are slowly but surely getting used to.'
| 'I think we are gradually realising what New Labour is, and it is coming as a bit of a shock', says Mortimer. 'The areas I am most interested in - the law and civil liberties - are the ones the government is worst on. I don't think they have got a single libertarian bone in their bodies.' In his earlier life as a barrister in the 1960s, Mortimer fought a number of precedent-setting free speech cases and became known for his dedication to civil liberties - now he watches in despair as the government eats away at our most basic legal rights. 'They attack juries, they attack the presumption of innocence - one wonders where it will all end. Soon we will have trial by committee; it will be like a revolutionary court, a terrible idea. We voted for Jack Straw because he said it was ridiculous to get rid of juries and because we very much wanted to get rid of Michael Howard, and now we have "Michael Howard-plus".'
| A lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, and scourge of previous Tory administrations, Mortimer feels 'deceived' by the current government. 'Those upstarts promised to amend Tory wrongs but in fact they've made things worse.' And then, the insult to end all insults: 'I can't think of a single government minister I would like to lunch with….'
| But if there is one thing Mortimer hates more than the government's disregard for civil liberties, it is their desire to 'live our lives for us'. 'What business is it of the government's if I give money to a beggar so that he can spend it on drink or drugs? What business is it of the government's to tell teenage girls, if they're over the age of consent, not to have sex? These are not areas in which the government has got any place.' According to Mortimer, probably the only good thing New Labour has done is introduce a minimum wage: 'I imagine that is a good idea, but it is frightfully low, isn't it? Even that is far too little.'
| Mortimer is most disturbed by the government's 'unhealthy' interest in what we do in our personal and private lives - 'what we eat, what we drink, how we play, how we treat our children' - and nowhere is this clearer than on an issue close to his heart, foxhunting. 'Let me state, I think it is absolutely okay to hate foxhunting and to campaign against it and to persuade people not to do it, and I respect people who take that view. But it is not permissible to say that it should be made a criminal offence and that people should be sent to those ghastly overcrowded prisons just because they partake in a particular sport.' Mortimer has learned the hard way that even this kind of rational approach to the foxhunting debate can land you in trouble. Earlier this year he and his wife were sent death threats, excrement and razor blades through the post after writing a letter to the Daily Mail calling for foxhunting to remain unbanned. 'There was such hostility, I couldn't believe it. Those animal rights people can be the most screeching and intolerant of all. Some people just don't want you to have certain viewpoints, and they certainly don't want you to express them, so they take it upon themselves to shut you up.'
| For a barrister who made his name - prior to the invention of Rumpole - as a crusader for free speech, it is depressing to watch the avenues of what can be said become narrower and narrower. Mortimer says that Voltaire's famous declaration - 'I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it' - could be rewritten to suit our intolerant times: 'I disapprove of what you say and I'll do my best to see that saying it is made a criminal offence.' 'The growing and dread arm of the politically correct regards free speech with a horror once reserved for hallucinatory drugs', he says. 'We are not allowed to make jokes about silly Scotsmen, Englishmen, Irishmen, or say anything insulting about the Welsh.' For Mortimer, this more insidious and creeping attempt to undermine free speech poses even more of a challenge than the legal cases - such as the fight to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover - in the 1960s.
| 'It was clearer in my day: somebody thought something should remain unavailable because it might be corrupting, and then legal men of a certain mind would argue against that decision and for free speech. Today, free speech is looked upon with utter disdain, because we are not allowed to offend anybody or anything - and arguing against the politically correct censors can be a difficult thing to do.'
| One problem, says Mortimer, is that there are fewer 'legal men of a certain mind' than there were in the past - fewer lawyers and barristers who are willing to take on controversial cases and argue for free speech. (And as for the sexy, young, neurotic lawyers depicted in TV's successors to Rumpole of the Bailey - This Life and North Square - Mortimer says 'they are nothing new, even though these programmes are supposed to be cutting edge. Lawyers have always been edgy - they've always had a weakness for strong drink and chorus girls'.)
| Looking around modern Britain, Mortimer sees a lack of robustness: the anti-hunting brigade who would rather block out pro-hunting arguments than stand up to them; politically correct 'watchmen' who want to protect the weak and the vulnerable from strong words and opinions. 'No wonder New Labour wants to look after us, and tell us how to live our lives. You could be forgiven for thinking that we are all rather inept and need a guiding hand.'
| Which is why he is rather pleased about the return of the LM team with spiked, who at least 'stood up to political correctness'. 'If only you weren't becoming a website….The problem with the internet is that something rather awful has happened, where the method of communication has become more interesting than what people are communicating. People should realise that the internet is not interesting in itself - what is interesting is what you have to say.' I assure him that spiked will have something interesting and critical to say. 'Good, because we need it.'
| So what if Mortimer has difficulty putting on his socks? He still has more life in him than many in New Britain.
Brendan O'Neill is coordinating the spiked-conference Panic attack: Interrogating our obsession with risk, on Friday 9 May 2003, at the Royal Institution in London.
John Mortimer's Summer of a Dormouse, is published by Viking. Buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)
Read on:
Fighting talk: Sir John Mortimer and David Starkey
spiked-proposals: Pensioners
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