/ 30 September 2011

Memoirs of a spycatcher hold lessons for the ANC

The reputation of MI5 took 20 years to stage a recovery.

England was the land of Argos. Not Argos, Odysseus and Telemachus but Argos, the catalogue store. A place where you could buy almost anything. Things that, in the main, were not available in middle-Ireland, or even left, right, top and bottom Ireland. Mini-sewing machines, deluxe hair-curling tongs (I had just had the obligatory 1986 perm and had no use for this anyway), bouncy castles. Snooker tables for the home Portable synthesisers Fondue sets Useless things.

Which is why, in the mid-1980s, when Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, the memoirs of an ex-MI5 man, was banned in the United Kingdom, the very fact that it was available in Ireland was cause for some smugness. In an Argosless land, here was a commodity that we had and they did not. It was not a sophisticated line of thought, granted. But those were the days when the BBC television weather forecast stopped at the Northern Ireland border and middle-Ireland had more in common with East Germany than with our English neighbours.

For a time there was even an Irish edition of the book, available to people at Dublin airport bookshops as they boarded their flights to London. Signs read: “Last chance to get Spycatcher before London!” And not just Dublin airport; people heading for London from the United States and Australia were sold Spycatcher too. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold.

The book famously told how the first and only rule of MI5 was “Never get caught”. Wright told of moles, assassination attempts, bugging of the Lancaster House negotiations, among others — and acts of criminality by MI5 that severely embarrassed the Thatcher government. Although the book was available in the US, the British government pursued an at times comical court case against the New South Wales government in Australia in an attempt to have the book banned there. The chief witness for the British government would not even confirm or deny the existence of MI5 and the case was eventually laughed out of court.

In 1991 the European Court of Human Rights found against the British government when it awarded large damages to the Guardian, the Observer and the Sunday Times, all of which were challenging injunctions against reporting on the book and its suppression. The court examined the issues relating to national interest, state secrets, the ability of former state employees to publish memoirs and the usual gamut of contentious points you would expect to find in such a case.

But it made a fascinating and profound observation. On the role of the press the court said: “It is nevertheless incumbent on it to impart information and ideas on matters of public interest. Not only does the press have the task of imparting such information and ideas: the public also has a right to receive them.”

The public also has a right to receive them. A point that the press and publishers sometimes forget. Political agency is with the people, now more than ever. That is what is so exciting about the public action against the Protection of Information Bill pustule. After all the years of being misled South Africans are now less likely to be led, cap in hand, to ideas and information deemed “safe” or “in our interest”, or away from information which is “not in our interest”.

Independent publishers in South Africa have a long history of working against pernicious laws. WikiLeaks is a demonstration of the growing devolution of the power of information from the political sole owners to the public; the imagined borders of the marketplace are in flux. It is a powerful combination.

The Spycatcher case was instructive. The reputation of MI5 took 20 years to stage a recovery. British people bought the book anyway and Wright made more money than he could have imagined. Most importantly, the European Court of Human Rights illuminated the agency of the public while defending the freedom of the press.

Maggie Davey is a director of Jacana publishers