One jab at the truth, Tony

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One jab at the truth, Tony

by Brian Sewell

Read Brian Sewell's column every Tuesday, and on art every Friday in the Evening Standard

A celebrity is "a person who is well known for his well-knownness", the daytime television presenter, the lesserspotted soap star, the subject of the gossip columnist. Even further down, hardly known even for their knownness, are those happy to be humiliated by Dame Edna Everage and Graham Norton, for such exposure is their oxygen, their food and drink, their very raison d'Ítre.

For celebrities of the A, B and C groups, however, none of this should apply (though occasionally it does), for they are in some sense household names and even public property. Roughly defined by example, the Royal Family and the Blairs are A, John Prescott and stars of stage, screen, sport and opera are B, and scientists, academics, philosophers and Lucian Freud are C. Freud departs from the norm; never seen and never heard, we judge him by his work, the only evidence. He sets no moral example, does not preach at us, offers no opinion on the matters of the day and, if he is charitably generous, hides his generosity under a bushel. Others of his category, brought to the fore when perceived to have some relevant authority, have celebrity thrust upon them. Prescott controls his celebrity much less well than Freud, indeed not nearly well enough for a man so accident prone and blind to the incongruities of what he says and does, recalling the dictum of Francis Bacon, his predecessor as a minister four centuries ago, that the ambitious fool is like an ape, for "the higher he clymbes, the more he shows his arse". The contrast with Gordon Brown, austere, severe, reserved, is telling.

As for the A group, the contrast between the Royal Family and Blair is intriguing. The least liked and least respected of the monarch's brood are the Earl and Countess of Wessex, yet when their hope of starting a family was cut short by her ectopic pregnancy, there was no dissembling, no deceit, no secrecy, but a plain statement of the case down to the seventh pint of transfused blood. That is how the nation likes it and the immediate response was a wave of sympathy. Buck House handled a sensitive family matter properly and well, yet if ever there was a case for pleading privacy, medical confidentiality or plain old-fashioned delicacy, this was surely it. Does the nation really have the right to pry into such a very private matter? It does not, but prying was prevented by an immediate openness that prevented speculation too, and the Press behaved as did the wolf with old Isaiah's lamb.

The contrast of the case of little Leo Blair and his measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination made the Prime Minister seem both stiff-necked and pig-headed. Should Blair have given a straight answer to the MP who, in the House, asked him "as a matter of public interest", if Leo had had the triple vaccination so strongly urged on other parents through a Government campaign? His response, "I'm not going to enter into any public discussion on the health of my children", was both churlish and absurd, for neither discussion nor further or future intimate disclosures necessarily followed, and his refusal brought him into direct conflict with his responsibilities as a celebrity.

Celebrities do have responsibilities. They must set examples; they must lend their names and energies to campaigns and charities; they must broadcast appeals for obscure good causes; they must propose and oppose and, when necessary, be seen to do so; and if they have no moral scruples, no charitable instincts toward man or beast and are unmoved by starvation, disease and catastrophe, they must have the good grace to keep quiet and not offend.

Blair may have liked neither the question nor the tone of its asking, and may have thought it a gross intrusion into his privacy, but it was not the moment to huff and puff and stand on principle - it was the time for a straight answer without embellishment and with a plain "yes" there could have been no controversy to set him squawking about speculation " offensive beyond belief ", the hysterical opposite of the urbanity and charm with which Gordon Brown handled the premature birth of his daughter, a truly private matter.

Blair's error lay in claiming privacy instead of recognising that disclosure would be for the public good. Had he been asked if Leo or any other of his sons had been circumcised, had his ears pinned back, his teeth straightened and his birthmarks removed, his sense of outrage would have been wholly justified, for these are matters of private choice and not the subject of his Government's policy or propaganda, quite unlike the triple MMR vaccination about which so many parents have misgivings. We have witnessed too many governments lie, dissemble, cheat and faff in ignorance over mad cow and foot-and-mouth diseases, and we know from these catastrophes that ministers, scientists and civil servants are not always to be unquestioningly trusted. The older among us know that the best medical advice once removed our tonsils and our foreskins without a second thought and walked us round the gasworks if we developed whooping cough; thus we know that doctors are as subject as astronomers to the fashionable whim, and the pronouncements of neither should necessarily be accepted as Holy Writ. Once we even believed the preachings of priests and bishops. We are now right to be sceptical of all authority, for we have example enough to know that authority unhesitatingly gulls, bluffs, hoodwinks and bamboozles us.

With one simple word, Blair could have expressed his faith in the triple vaccine, swept away misgiving and reassured the nation - it was his duty as a celebrity, if not as Prime Minister, to put his shoulder to the wheel.

His difficulty is that he wishes both to be and not to be a celebrity, to be a great Prime Minister and yet to be devoutly loved by the whole nation, and in no aspect of his confused being does he care for adverse criticism. He should take a lesson from Mrs Thatcher, who cared not a damn who loved or hated her and who, though discreetly shadowed by her husband, walked alone. In so often behaving like a celebrity, Blair has blurred the line that could have distinguished the private from the public man and made his family vulnerable. He has a wife forever in the public eye as a celebrity, partying with the execrable Hindujas, persuading the Ministry of Defence to inform young Euan's homework and doing everything that takes her fancy on the periphery of politics. Of Euan we are vouchsafed such carefully managed scraps of creditable news as are likely to erode public recollection of his drunken escapade in Leicester Square. All the Blair children, we were unhesitatingly told, in their enthusiasm for the damned Dome, implored their father to give it his assent. And the use of photographs promoting the Prime Minister as affectionate paterfamilias has grown tedious as an unscrupulous appeal to the nation's notorious sentimentality.

Celebrity at every level brings consequences that can be perceived as both advantage and disadvantage. The celebrity must determine for himself the price he is prepared to pay and stick to it, ranging from the rejection maintained by Lucian Freud to the constant clowning to which we were witness with poor flamboyant Fergie. Blair stands on shifting sands in this particular, the sands of his manifest insecurity, Cherie's evident need to be her own woman as well as his adoring attendant, and the risks to privacy and discretion inherent in three adolescents. The nation holds many an ordinary sinner in amused affection, but from those who are perceived as having moral authority over us, it will not swallow sophistry and cant.

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