| HE WAS the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what he did. And now he won’t be doing it any more. Apologies for channelling E. J. Thribb from Private Eye, but the resignation of Dr Tom Butler does highlight the blinding unfairness of what we find memorable.
I don’t think it is quite so much a story of the unfairness of the media, unfair and unpleasant though we often are. But what made Dr Butler’s accident after the Irish Embassy party so memorable was the deliciously unexpected quality. If Rowan Williams were to win a round of Just a Minute there might be a similar shock.
To all the people who complain that the press doesn’t remember all the good bishoply things that Dr Butler did and does, and there were many, the answer is that, of course, we remember only the act that stood out from the background. That is also the explanation why it is never news if a journalist gets drunk at the Irish Embassy (or almost anywhere else).
NO ONE makes jokes about the fashion police in Sudan. The case of Lubna Hussein, a former journalist working for the UN, who was sentenced to a month in prison for wearing trousers in a Khartoum café and refusing to pay a fine for it, got a great deal of coverage.
I could find only one eyewitness report. The Times had a bylined foreign correspondent, Tristan McConnell in Nairobi, who highlighted some interesting details: “The judge, who was aware of the worldwide interest in the case, tried to be lenient. His punishment fell short of the maximum penalty under Article 152 of Sudan’s penal code, which prescribes 40 lashes and an unlimited fine for women dressed in an indecent or obscene manner in public.
“Ten of the other women arrested with Ms Hussein had pleaded guilty to the charge of indecency already, and been flogged. Unlike thousands of other women arrested in similar circumstance every year, Ms Hussein, a journ-alist who worked for the United Nations, refused to accept her summary punishment.
“At the hearing yesterday dozens of men in traditional Islamic clothing confronted about 150 of Ms Hussein’s mostly female supporters. As the women chanted ‘No to whipping!’ the men shouted that women in trousers were prostitutes and demanded harsh punishment for Ms Hussein. Riot police intervened and about 40 women were arrested and later released. At least one woman was taken to hospital after being beaten.”
The same male thugs appeared in Nesrine Malik’s eyewitness report on The Guardian’s website: “The scenes I saw outside the court which convicted Lubna Hussein were even more dramatic than those during the last quickly adjourned trial. Security forces and female pro-testors clashed again, but a third party introduced itself into the fray — Islamist men who proceeded to abuse the women and rip up their banners while the police joined in the name-calling. . .
“The end of the case has flushed out hardline elements allied with the government, who appear to be relishing the opportunity to vilify the women who have been protesting. The irony is that, on the way back from court, I witnessed several women in trousers freely walking the streets of Khartoum, proving that it was never about modesty but about Hussein’s refusal to capitulate to the authorities’ temperamental and arbitrary invocation of public-order laws.”
THE JOKE with which I concluded last week’s column, about the unfortunate Dino Boffo, has also turned serious. Signor Boffo was the editor of Avvenire, the Italian Catholic Bishops’ paper, who was exposed by a paper owned by Berlusconi’s brother as having been fined by a court for harassing his lover’s wife; the paper called him “a noted homosexual”. The bishops backed him, but late last week he resigned anyway, still protesting his innocence.
Now Richard Owen, The Times’s long-serving and well-informed Rome correspondent, reports: “Catholic politicians are attempting to form a new centre-right party supported by the religious establishment to try to tap into the growing dissatisfaction among the churchgoing public with Mr Berlusconi’s behaviour, and a rift between him and the Vatican.”
This would be one of the most extraordinary comebacks the world has ever seen. The idea that a party backed by the Roman Catholic Church could appear as morally superior to a secular government is not one that British newspapers are well equipped to process.
|
back to Media
previous story
|
next story 
%2313%23.jpg)
