A man of integrity

has been destroyed

by lynch lust

 

Robert Calder

 

I was startled enough to see the name of Jack McLean in the context of the Leveson inquiry, but fortunately the Arnold Kemp website has put his 1991 text online. Even without that, the idea that the late Arnold Kemp printed what the hacks including BBCaesars imply he printed, is less ridiculous than only the notion that Mr McLean would have written what only the briefest snatch of testimony from the inquiry has been manipulated to suggest. Had anybody who referred to the couple of sentences cited read the whole article? If not, why not?
     Lynch lust?
     If I look further on the Kemp site (and this is not irony!) I do indeed presume I will find Arnold Kemp's denunciation, long ago, of the then extent of decline within the tabloid press. It was well reported both in the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman, as I recall. He gave some forewarning of what has since happened, but would hardly have foreseen not merely the horror of the hacking but its emulation now by hacks supposedly reporting an inquiry which is really a sequel to that earlier denunciation. I hope sombody publishes it, even if a persistence in the media fabrications on what Mr McLean wrote could hypothetically allow the perfectly legal (he has alas been dead for some years) falsehood of accusing Arnold Kemp of gross hypocrisy.
     It's not the case that Jack McLean might simply have done more to re-underline that he was not blaming the victim of the murder. It is possible that he might have done even more, repeat even more, and that had he done so the sub-editing of his column could have excised that as repetitive. He certainly made plain his grief and sympathy for everyone who suffered pain and death as an element of the tragedy. 
     The scarcely imaginable depth of what  the immediate victim's parents have been undergoing is far beyond the experience of many people, but it is clear to at least a few that when things are beyond a certain level of intensity anything and everything causes hurt. Competent reporters might have grasped, even from a reading of the article, let alone other contextual considerations, that the victim's family might have misread a sentence and mis-identified it with various culpable examples of the sort of stuff properly being investigated by Leveson. They are blameless and unblameable, and extension of the slur against Jack McLean is a plain case of hacks not treating them as human beings. Hacks: unthinking bundles of stimuli and responses. If only police firearms units shot first and asked questions later, how much more ripe copy would there be?

 

     Any offence resulting from Jack McLean's article, other than on the part of the legal and other establishments whose practice and norms he was challenging, and which warranted his scrutiny, was certainly accidental and the very opposite of anything his published work could be held to indicate. I have met Mr McLean – only once I should add – a casual encounter at a book launch which extended into a lengthy conversation. If anybody wants to tell me that nobody could be more directly hurt by what has happened than that sometimes exploder of complacencies, I have no reason to doubt it. The number of issues raised in that one article overall is actually an indictment, not the only one in Jack McLean's published work, of an enduring poverty of public debate in Scotland.
     The grief of two devastated parents has only been compounded by the obscene stupidity I witnessed on television. The imputation of misfortune now to Jack McLean is clear, the heartless and mindless incompetents content with a misrepresentation of this man of undeniable integrity, honesty and hatred of hypocrisy. Pavlov has given a good account of the behaviour of actual rats. They are indifferent to human concerns, they merely perform the habitual routine which gets them fed, but there is no pretence that they can read. Further, they will not be discovered in such very senior media positions as some of the sub-Pavlovs of hackery whose patent decline into patterns of stimulus and response hardly bespeaks a consistent regard for intelligent humanity. 
     They have pretended to be reporting the inquiry or broadcasting a report of it, but they're as much its topic as their peers who calumniated Jack McLean's fellow ex-schoolteacher in Bristol. And a proper vindication of Jack McLean could have the potential to cause so much more anguish to other victims of the press than Christopher Jeffries' action in response to the doings of journalists professional only in their hypocrisy.

 

Robert Calder is a freelance author, translator, editor, sometime magazine editor, published poet, historian of philosophy and bass singer