Thursday,
November 15, 2001
(Key West, Florida, USA)

A CORRESPONDENT tells me he was most amused by Richard Gott’s review of Churchill’s
War in the New Statesman and particularly by Mr Gott’s view that while the book “should not be left around for the servants to read” he nevertheless would not want to prevent anyone from publishing it.

How very English of him, writes my friend, who reminds me that the same Mr Gott was obliged to resign as
Literary Editor of The Guardian on
Dec 8, 1994 after The Spectator
exposed him as an agent of the KGB. Gott, it seems, was outed by Oleg
Gordievsky.

Gott put a more favourable spin on these events at the time — he admitted innocently taking money from the KGB and accepting their hospitality. The trouble was, he had kept all that a secret. His
Guardian colleagues called him “Pol
Pot” Gott, and published their own version.

The Spectator invites literary luminaries in its latest issue to comment on their books of the year 2001.
Noteworthy is this contribution by
David Pryce-Jones, and his choice is not an English book at all:

“This
year saw an extraordinary libel case.
Deborah Lipstadt called David
Irving a falsifier of history, and
he sued
her for it. It fell to Richard J.
Evans, professor of modern history
at Cambridge, to be the expert witness
providing the evidence to justify
Lipstadt’s judgment. Evans’s findings
in Lying for Hitler (Basic Books,
US$27) scupper Irving once and for all
with an elegance and finality rare in
scholarly books.

Strange to say, no
English publisher has yet brought it
out.”

Well, that is because any English publisher who publishes Evans’s lies within range of the selfsame English law courts knows very well what will hit him.

What do we know about David P-J.? I forget. Oh yes, he’s Jewish. Who would’uv guessed it from his name? But then the same could be said of Robert
Maxwell, born Jan Hoch, and more than a handful of others. Wheatcroft: now what name sounds more English than that? It proclaims its very Englishness in a soft Somerset burr, without a soupçon of venom in its veins.

I MENTION this otherwise totally irrelevant factor, because so far the literary community appears to me to be polarized around that divide. “They” are the ones who call the shots in New York at the Publishers Weekly, Kirkus
Reviews, and the Library
Journal. They were the gang who ambushed my book GOEBBELS.
MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH in April 1996, and wielded their famous bludgeon against St
Martin’s Press of New York.

They were the ones who secretly pressured Macmillan
UK Ltd. And now they are the ones who, across the board, are publicly vilifying me; those of them who are my friends are, in private, contemptuous of these literary loudmouths, but it is the latter who have always succeeded in dragging the former into misfortune — e.g. the tank ditches of Riga — with them.

Yes, David Pryce-Jones.
Double-barreled, and with a “y”. I particularly like the “y” — a nice touch, that: like the “y” that occasionally whines its way into a Smith to produce a somewhat better Smyth or even an infinitely superior Smythe. Ye Olde
Pryce-Jones. Ye Olde Tudor-fronted, oak-veneered Pryce-Jones. But you cannot jump over your own shadow, as the German proverb has it. If you are one of them, you are stuck with it, and you are doomed for ever to behave like one.

Take Stewart Stephen, who was editor of the London Evening
Standard for a dozen years before the admirable Max Hastings, who more than once darkened my doors to come visit me in Mayfair, or attend a cocktail party, took over the editorial chair.

Mr S.S. — how unfortunate to bear those initials, in the circumstances —
decreed that my name was never again to appear in his influential paper’s pages. I know so, because many years ago the young
Standard journalist Mark
Inglefield made the mistake of writing up a story on me, and when he learned of his blunder he was good enough to phone me privately and tell me.

It reminds me that somewhere in my dossier is a note on one Miriam Gross:
Ms. Gross (somehow I feel sure she is a “Ms.”) was once a producer of Channel
Four TV’s “Bookchoice” programme, then slithered into her present post at The
Sunday Telegraph where she is literary editor. She mentioned to a member of my staff that she had instructed that their paper was never again to review a book by me.

TIMES have changed. When that paper was launched in 1962, their gallant first editor Donald McLachlan, a personal friend and former naval Intelligence officer, commissioned a three-part serial based on my book THE
DESTRUCTION OF
DRESDEN.

By 1967 that worthy newspaper’s stable-mate The Daily Telegraph had inserted a page in its secret House Style book, as Private Eye revealed, ordering that I was never to be described as “the historian”, only as “the writer.”
I told the then managing editor Maurice
Green that I cared not at all what they chose to call me; but that, it seems, is the way that these powerful newspapers order things.

In the circumstances, one is quite pleased not to be called a historian, if that is the price that has to be paid. Or should that be Pryce? We know that his hero Evans (right) was paid.
Donald McLachlan must be turning in his grave when he sees what these nasty upstarts are doing. In country after country this self-appointed elite has always acted the same way; and then they bleat “Why us,” when the angry wind suddenly comes blowing the other way across the prairies.

The AP
Wirephoto caption reads:
“hgb-8) HAMBURG, April 25
[1983] (a) English historian David Irving, joining the press conference of STERN magazine as reporter for West
German newspaper BILD, interrupts the conference and shows faked
Hitler documents and claims that
STERN Hitler diaries were also false. (AP WIREPHOTO) 1983
(Loh.string/Thomas Grimm
21625) 334

JUST as I am going to bed, a friend somewhere in cyberspace sends me an article from today’s The Guardian
in London. I have jovially dubbed this newspaper “Deathwish News” as they continue to smear me, although they’ll soon be defending an action I have brought against them in the High Court in London.
Today’s squirt (“Top 10 literary hoaxes”) is poisonous enough to have been penned by
The Skunk himself.

It seems that bestselling author Tom Carew has published a colourful account of his adventures in Afghanistan, but according to the Ministry of Defence, he never served in the S.A.S. “Carew’s stunt,”
The Guardian tells us, “is just the latest in a long line of literary hoaxes,” and it lists the ten biggest. The tenth item is this:

The
Hitler diaries. In 1983 a German
magazine bought 62 volumes of the ‘lost
diaries’ of Adolf Hitler. They
contained such fascinating snippets of
Hitler’s domestic life as “on my feet
all day long” and “must not forget to
get tickets for the Olympic Games for
Eva Braun.”

Historians Hugh
Trevor-Roper and David
Irving were fooled, and the Times
published extracts, but the forgeries
were eventually exposed as fakes, given
away by their historical inaccuracies
and anachronistic inks.

Of course exactly the opposite is true.
I do hope that nobody tells them about their blunder, so that they can find out all about it in court.

Previous
Radical’s Diary
Index
on the origins of
anti-semitism
David
Irving: Torpedo Running (the
exposure of the Hitler Diaries
forgery)