FORUM: Illtyd Harrington - ‘As I Please’

Main Image : 

Published: 3 February, 2011
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

Remember the Jackal was also the Duke of Windsor 

FORGET the green men from outer space. Think terrestrially. For the watchers and listeners are about. CGHQ in Cheltenham detects even the slightest whisper. CCTV probes us in the streets. Telephones are tapped indiscriminately and  the infallibility of DNA is never questioned. Undercover cops are encouraged to join protest groups. The ancient legal rubric on the presumption of innocence has become a doctrine of assumption of guilt.

As the man said: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” A few years after the war I saw an innocent man accused of murdering his wife and child in London being taken from my local police station in Merthyr escorted by two beef-faced Scotland Yard detectives.

After due process he was hanged. His last words to his executioner were: “I swear I didn’t do it Mr Pierrepoint.” Thirty seconds later he was hanged and died instantly.

Timothy John Evans, for it was he, was to be one of the cases that shocked public opinion and led to the abolition of capital punishment. 

His accuser and landlord John Christie was a murderer and a necrophile in 10 Rillington Place. In the New Journal recently Michael Hanratty’s case was revisited. In 1964 I was the Labour candidate for Wembley North and I asked to meet the Hanratty family who lived there. They were still shattered and uncomprehending. A vigorous campaign culminated in the High Court a few years back that concluded that the DNA was correct and a case of mistaken identity not proven. It still disturbs those who respect the law. 

Let me be frank, I regard the Rt Hon Peter Hain as one of the most ingratiating and obsequious of ministers. But I applauded him when he was a young Liberal and organised a campaign against the South African cricket team. Forgotten now is the bizarre charge that he robbed a bank near his home in Richmond. 

It took a fierce defence team to prove that the real criminal was BOSS, the security service of South Africa who had set him up.

Our identity is a fragile thing. In spite of the best forensic scientists a victim of the King’s Cross fire remained unknown for some years. 

Actors are capable of stealing our personality. Take Mike Gambon in The King’s Speech. Sir Michael, as he is now, began his craft at the Unity Theatre in Goldington Crescent. 

In this film he unnerved me by his portrayal of George V. The Irish boy from Somers Town showed true blue blood.

Sir Robert Stephens, the Shakespearean actor who once lived in my house, told The Times he based some of his Falstaff and King Lear from watching me. He even wrote a letter thanking me for 50 per cent of the role.

Frederick Forsyth worked a wonderful trick in creating a birth certificate in The Day of the Jackal. He took the date from a country tombstone thus making the character anonymous.

Edward Fox, the Jackal, subsequently played the Duke of Windsor and carried on the creation of that selfish monarch. At the height of this Fox as King, I introduced him to Angus Ogilvie, Princess Alexandra’s husband at a GLC function. Angus Ogilvy mischievously said: “I married your niece.” The duke was baffled but didn’t demur. Amnesia and dementia and obsessions are terrible things to suffer. Although I know one nonagenarian who is convinced that he is the reincarnation of Queen Victoria. 

A Welsh drag artist caught me off balance in a club recently by appearing as Camilla Parker Bowles. Again, if you can afford it you can be cloned and last for ever. Film buffs were captured in the 1950s by the Invasion of the Body Snatchers – a film that was treated as fiction. Now we can replicate people in the lab. At most main airports now you are photographed and fingerprinted and databased. Ask anyone over 68 for their Service Number and they will repeat it perfectly.

I only once heard Margaret Thatcher tell a story against herself. It occurred at a photo opportunity in an old people’s home. Majestically she approached what appeared to be a somnolent old lady: “Do you know who I am?” she pronounced slowly and loudly. The old girl jerked into life, opened her eyes, looked up indifferently and said: “No dear I don’t, but if you ask the matron she’ll tell you who you are.” 

That feisty old world woman knew perfectly well but was not going to be broken into conformity.