So Ken Clarke thinks some rapes are more serious than others. Or perhaps not, depending on which of his interviews yesterday you read. And now he is in trouble.
First, Mr Clarke is right. Some rapes are more serious than others. If a sixteen-year old has consenting sex with his fifteen-year old girlfriend, that's rape, and it's a less serious than a rape in which a woman walking home at night is dragged into bushes and attacked by a gang. It's to reflect this divergence in seriousness that guidelines equip judges with such a wide range of sentences.
For what it's worth, I think Clarke was rattled by his interviewer, Victoria Derbyshire, because his new plan to give convicted rapists 50% sentence discount on an early plea could, Derbyshire pointed out, result in some rapists serving as little as 15 months.
Clarke's appeal is that he sounds like a real person, unlike most politicians, who seem to have been produced in a factory specialising in unattractive, evasive, bland middle-aged white men. Here however he sounded like a real person who had not thought the issue through properly, or at least not read his brief. And he was flustered.
But how did the BBC react? Well, I listened to a lot of news coverage from lunchtime until the early evening, and the part of the story which excited them, on Radio 5, Radio 4 and on TV, was the bit about some rapes being more serious than others. The real meat, the admission that what is essentially a cost cutting exercise might lead to convicted rapists being on the streets after not much more than a year, featured only in re-runs of Derbyshire's initial interview.
By late afternoon, when Clarke had attempted to clarify his comments, the news headlines were leading with "Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke has apologised for appearing to suggest that some rape cases were more serious than others". I heard this line again and again, and it is worth a bit of deconstruction.
In the first place, Clarke didn't apologise. Secondly, in none of his interviews did he withdraw from his original position. Thirdly, the BBC's use of the word "appearing" is a time-honoured formula used when the Broadcaster doesn't quite want to commit itself to a particular allegation. "Wayne Rooney appeared to strike the Tottenham defender" might be a characteristic use of the word, even though millions of TV viewers have seen the spud-faced nipper give Jamie Carragher an elbow in the face en passant. But Clarke did not just appear to say the controversial words; he did say them, and the BBC kept playing the tape of him saying them over and over again.
But lastly, "Kenneth Clarke has apologised for appearing to suggest that some rape cases were more serious than others" carries with it, however faintly, two assumptions. One is that Clarke had done something wrong and that an apology was called for; the other, more seriously, that Clarke's original statement - that some rapes were more serious than others - was wrong. This is a subtle point, but it must be right, because otherwise the Corporation would have been reporting that Clarke had apologised when he didn't have to, for having done something right; and that would have been the story instead.
Now of course, when a politician loses the plot slightly on your network, you are going to push the boat out on it, particularly on a slow news day. The BBC could hardly be blamed for that. But as this story kept growing - Ed Miliband in the Commons calling for Clarke to be sacked - I kept wondering, "When are they going to get a lawyer on to find out whether he's right or not?" And the answer was that the BBC had plenty of time for political correspondents, and for politicians of both right and left, but none whatsoever for anyone who might have been able to tell them whether the law really did treat some rapes as more serious than others.
In other words, the BBC extracted a telling admission from the Justice Secretary, ignored it, ran a story instead about another assertion he had made, took no steps to find out whether it was true, reported him as apologising when he had not, and made assumptions about his statement which an elementary check would have revealed were wrong.
Although at the time I engaged in a death-struggle to get out of the profession, I am quite proud that, before I became a not-quite award-winning composer and conductor, I was once a lawyer. If nothing else, it has equipped me with the priceless realisation that, since the media is almost invariably wrong when it pontificates in this field, it is likely to be wrong in most others as well.
Start, fellow-citizens, from the assumption that the media is populated by people who are less intelligent, less scrupulous and less well-informed than you are, and the path to enlightenment is yours.
