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Published: 19 August, 2010

A CAMPAIGN that is revving up against the coming state visit of the Pope shouldn’t unduly worry Catholics, I am told.

Philosopher and prolific writer AC Grayling, who holds a chair at Birkbeck College in Bloomsbury, is one of several academic luminaries who are lining up against the visit.

Others include the leading scientist Lewis Wolpert, who lives in Belsize Park, and doctor Ben Goldacre.

Grayling, vice-president of the British Humanist Association, had some Christian words about his opponents when I spoke to him on Tuesday.

He “felt sorry” for Catholics who felt threatened by the campaign, which will involve a march and an evening of comedy at the Bloomsbury Theatre. But he added: “A few hundred years ago they would have burned me at the stake, so I can’t feel too sorry for them. Thomas Henry Huxley once said to Darwin: ‘These clerics are like pigs – if you stick one with a sharp stick, all of them squeal. You attack the Pope and everyone else is up in arms’.”

Grayling will debate the issue of whether the papal visit should be a state visit with Catholic journalist Austen Ivereigh and Father Christopher Jamison at Conway Hall in Bloomsbury on September 1.

“The debate will be about whether it should be a publically funded visit,” he told me. “You can’t force people not to believe in religion, but we should recognise that religious groups are self-constituted groups, like trade unions or the Women’s Institute. Why should they be entitled to seats in the House of Lords? In    this debate there are representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Catholic and Protestant religions – and there is me. Between the four of them they represent less than 10 per cent of the population – the proportion that goes regularly to a religious service. 

“This is a functionally secular society and yet the voice of religious people in the public sphere is so amplified.”

Final curtain in Regent’s Park  for film-maker

IT never occurred to me until the other day that a funeral does not always follow someone’s death. 

It became clear while talking to Maggie Black, whose husband John, a film-maker, died recently.

As public-spirited John had donated his body to medical research, he wasn’t buried or cremated.

While relatives and friends celebrated his life at a ceremony at Regent’s College in Regent’s Park – a park he loved – there was no funeral service in the formal sense.

John, a compassionate man, took up so many causes of the past few decades – he campaigned against capital punishment, supported the   Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and marched against the Iraq war.

John, born in Hong Kong in 1932 – his father was a senior administrator in the pre-war colony – moved to Australia at the start of the war. His father, Tom, who was captured by the Japanese, never got over his four years in a camp on the island, and died in the late-1940s.

John settled down in Kentish Town in the 1960s with wife Maggie – he a film editor, she a production secretary. He made films for the award-winning Children’s Film Foundation and worked with such actors as Andrew Sachs – the waiter Manuel in Fawlty Towers – and Keith Chegwin.

After his retirement he could no longer stand living in London and wanted to live in the countryside. But Maggie didn’t so she and John came to an unusual arrangement. He moved to Herefordshire and she stayed in Kentish Town, visiting him once or twice a month.

“We shared everything out – our books, our records, our money,” she told me at her Dartmouth Park home.  

“Friends said how wonderfully civilised it was.”

This lasted 10 years and when he returned to the capital they lived separate lives – he in Archway, she in Upper Holloway. “But we remained, as they say, very good friends,” she said.

In the past few years John set up a popular website about his beloved Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill, covering its history and the lives of artists and writers. He also gave talks to the Friends of Regent’s Park.

Malcolm Kafetz, chairman of the Friends, told me: “John was a real gentleman whose talks were extremely colourful – we shall miss him.”

Medics want day in coroner’s court

IT didn’t surprise me when I read that the firm of solicitors battering away at the government over the death of Dr David Kelly is Leigh Day.

They have led more “multi-party” cases against governments, here and overseas, seeking compensation over malpractice, than any firm I can think of.

They have asked both the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, and the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, to hold an inquest.  

But when news broke a few days ago that Leigh Day’s clients, a group of eminent medical consultants, had sent a report questioning the verdict of suicide on David Kelly, who was found dead near his Oxfordshire home in 2003, the floodgates opened.

Debunking the consultants is the columnist David Aaronovich, who lives in Hampstead, along with other medical specialists who say Leigh Day’s clients don’t know what they are talking about because they are not forensic experts.

More and more medics, it seems, want to get in on the act.

In yesterday’s Times, another professor, Colin Pritchard, said any coroner would have given an open verdict on Dr Kelly – not suicide as delivered by Lord Hutton following his inquiry.  

Questions also hang over why Lord Hutton recommended a 70-year embargo on medical reports on Dr Kelly.  

So far, Leigh Day, whose offices are in Islington, are acting  pro-bono for five leading medical consultants who have asked for an inquest.

But the doctors are prepared to pay for legal work if the government refuses to hold an inquest, I understand.  Leigh Day would have to apply for a judicial review in the High Court, and this step can prove very expensive.

Frances Swaine, who is handling the case for Leigh Day, told me her clients are very public spirited and do not believe Dr Kelly committed suicide in the way described by Lord Hutton.

Evidence before a coroner at an inquest is given on oath – and this, stressed Swaine, did not happen at the Hutton inquiry.