There were a lot of speeches at the Convention on Modern Liberty on Saturday, and many stirring calls for the freedom of speech. All in all, it was a very British occasion: moderate, friendly, well-meaning and incorrigibly decent.
Philip Pullman gave a passionate keynote address, appealing for civilised values such as courage, modesty and honour, but no one – not even Pullman – referred to individual writers on liberty and its issues. No Orwell; no Milton (Areopagitica); no Langland (Piers Plowman), and certainly no Burke or Paine. Moazzam Begg, the former Guantánamo detainee alluded to the international influence of Magna Carta and habeas corpus, but that was about it.
Perhaps I went to the wrong sessions, but I doubt it. The odd thing about British liberty is that we all know what it is – and some of us fear for its future – but it is hard to point to a single volume, apart from the Cambridge University Press edition of the Putney Debates, as the representative expression, in poetry, fiction, or even politics, of what we believe in. It's like the air we breathe, something we take for granted.
Perhaps someone will put me straight on this but, as I listened to various passionate appeals by the convention's distinguished speakers, from Lord Bingham to Brian Eno, it seemed to me that English literary freedom is a bit like our so-called constitution: uncodified, informal, and imprecise, a sprawling corpus of precedent and allusion accumulated across the centuries by all kinds of writers, high and low, from playwrights to scribbling pamphleteers.
Possibly, its strength lies in this very diversity, the Hydra-headed character of our libertarian tradition. You can't extinguish or suppress something that is so deeply encrypted into the DNA of our society. That's a complacent view: the threats to individual liberty and freedom of expression under the current British government are real and sinister. Why else would such an extraordinary coalition of concerned citizens gather on a Saturday afternoon to debate the matter?
I was not always so sanguine, or detached. Thirty years ago, in 1979, just before Thatcher came to power, I wrote a thriller, In the Secret State, about the threat of the state's misuse of our personal data. It got some good reviews and was even made into a BBC film (starring Natasha Richardson in her first screen role) but both book and film are forgotten now. Still, the issues it addressed remain with us and, watching Henry Porter and his guests at the convention on Saturday, it was a relief to see that what used to be treated as the paranoid ravings of a marginal minority seem to have come surging into the mainstream.
As the afternoon wore on, and no one mentioned a book or a writer, I began to doodle a list of thrillers that connect, thematically, to the being discussed.
Graham Greene: The Ministry of Fear
Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent and/or Under Western Eyes.
Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon
Len Deighton: The Ipcress File
John le Carré: The Smiley Trilogy (Tinker Tailor etc)
Graham Greene: The Human Factor
It occurred to me, as I jotted these down, that no one is writing thrillers in this genre any more. Why not, I wonder? It can't just be to do with the end of the cold war, and the fall of the Berlin wall. After all, there's always an enemy within ...
