He's not the megalomaniac that people say he is, you know."Mr Johnson believes that Aitken has received fair treatment from the justice system, but has a number of columnists, including Paul Johnson and Bruce Anderson, who have portrayed Aitken as kind of prisoner of conscience.The Spectator is quick to emphasise that it did not pay Aitken for his literary effort.The Poetry Society in London said yesterday that many people in extreme situations turn to poetry for comfort. However, the Society could not find a spokesman willing to judge whether the mental torture in this case was suffered more by the writer than those who read the poem.. JONATHAN AITKEN might imagine he has much in common with Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde. Both survived demanding maters and difficult Dublin childhoods. Both preened and peacocked around smart London society, with explosive secrets well hidden under perfectly tailored suits. Both provoked their own downfall with libel actions requiring them to fib in court. Yet the comparison seems to have gone to Prisoner Aitken's head.
His archaic and glutinous rhymes from HMP Belmarsh pay tribute to Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" while missing the entire point of Wilde's great cry of anger and compassion. Wilde served two years without remission of the harshest hard labour that a vindictive late-Victorian judge, shocked by his homosexual life, could impose. He served it on a man in poor health - with a courage and dignity that made an unforgettable impact on Governor, warders and inmates alike. Only then, on his release and flight to France in 1898, did he voice his hard wisdom that "all men kill the thing they love".Prematurely, Aitken seeks to present a few days in jug as a sort of spiritual growth-spurt that drags the sinner back to God. Yet his metre is stilted and dull; his diction musty and genteel ("gentle zephyrs", "whispered cadences", "cantors chanting the refrain") It reads like a bad poem of the 1890s. Wilde, in contrast, is modern, simple, fierce: "I know not whether Laws be right/ Or whether Laws be wrong;/ All that we know who lie in jail/ Is that the wall is strong;/ And that each day is like a year,/ A year whose days are long". Aitken tries to sound "poetic"; Wilde writes poetry.And, crucially, Aitken is still blathering on about his precious personal relationship with the Almighty. Wilde learned to care for, and to identify with, the most despised of his fellow convicts.
He deals not in abstract, pious waffle but in concrete compassion for other prisoners; in particular, for the condemned young soldier, "C T W", whose execution for a crime of passion prompted the Ballad.Aitken should learn how to turn all this new-found sensitivity on some teenage crack-dealer or sink estate-bred petty gangster, and to express his empathy in words that belong to our time rather than to a half-remembered hymn-book. Then he might just begin to be worthy to invoke the shade of Oscar Wilde. For the moment, he can only manage arrogant, platitudinous and self-deceiving kitsch.An extract from A Ballad from Belmarsh GaolJudge not, speak not, nor verdict giveFor life's strange road has paths unseenHigh peaks unmapped, strong years to live Unleashed from fear, from sin made clean. DESPITE HER obvious respect and affection for Cardinal Basil Hume, on whom she conferred an Order of Merit shortly before his death, the Queen will not be attending his funeral today. Instead, the Duchess of Kent will represent the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.
Princess Michael of Kent will be the only other royal at the service, although the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York will be sending representatives. The Queen, who by tradition does not attend non-state funerals, has worshipped alongside the Archbishop of West- minster. In July 1995 she attended an ecumenical 45-minute Vesper service conducted by Cardinal Hume to mark the 100th anniversary of Westminster Cathedral.But today she will not be among the 2,000 people expected to gather at the cathedral to remember the man who led Roman Catholics in England and Wales for more than two decades or to watch him buried as he wished - in a simple monk's habit.Cardinal Hume, so often commended for his humility, had chosen a young woman he met in Lourdes 12 years ago to deliver a reading at his funeral mass. As he lay dying of inoperable abdominal cancer last week, he chose Maeve Lynch, 26, a teacher from St Patrick's school, Kentish Town, to give the second reading from the first letter of St Paul to the Corinthians.Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, a practising Catholic, and the Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, will be among the mourners. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, and other Church of England bishops, including the bishops of Peterborough and Birmingham, will also be present.The two-and-a-half-hour mass, meticulously planned by the Cardinal, will be co-celebrated by 500 Catholic clergy, led by the Pope's representative, Cardinal Edward Cassidy..