Writing With Passion
Sometimes people ask me how I manage to write so much - and so often.
Well, it's quite simple, I feel as if I've got something to say - and as I'll only get one chance at this in life it's really now or never.
Here's a great example of someone - in this case Philip Collins - speaking on a subject he feels very passionate about which shines through in everything he has to say - whether you agree or disagree with his views.
Philip Collins normally writes about serious issues as a regular columnist for The Times, yet here he is telling it as it is - simply, with a sense of conviction and straight form the heart.
Quite brilliant, if you ask me.
Ian Brady is bad, not mad. Let him die if he wants
By Philip Collins
Insanity is difficult to define. But we should not keep the Moors murderer alive just to prolong his punishment
Years ago I would often drive across the Pennines down the M62, the highest motorway in England. The mind plays such tricks but I have a sense of the sun shining until I arrived at the bleak expanse of Saddleworth Moor where the rain fell and a lunar gloom descended. The memory is a pathetic fallacy, of course. I’m letting the weather stand in for the story of what happened up there.
Where I grew up, near Manchester, it was a common sight, in working-class households hardly replete with books, to see a copy of Beyond Belief, Emlyn Williams’s partly fictional story of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. It was a book read by people who didn’t read books. It was all too close to home.
For the first time since the Chester Assizes in 1966, Brady has appeared and spoken in public. He is giving evidence in Ashworth mental hospital, where he has been an inmate since 1985, to a medical tribunal, which is being relayed by video to Manchester Civil Justice Centre. Brady wants a transfer from Ashworth to a Scottish jail. Since 1999 he has been refusing food but, under section 3 of the Mental Health Act 1983, he is being force-fed through a tube, for which there is no precedent in Scotland. It is time to give Brady what he wants. He is atrocious but he is not insane and, if he wants to die, we should let him.
The case turns on whether Brady, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic with delusions and hallucinations, is thought capable of rational thought. Eleanor Grey, QC, representing the hospital, which is seeking to retain Brady, described his anger and his odd tendency to stay up all night and shout at the TV. She said that he had to be denied the use of a pen because of the fear he might use it as a weapon.
The forensic psychiatrist speaking for Brady, Dr Adrian Grounds, replied that his patient no longer requires treatment for mental illness and that his undoubted personality disorder cannot be described as psychosis. Brady does have occasional episodes of hallucination — he had a chat with Laurel and Hardy not long ago — but the psychotic symptoms he displayed in the 1980s have, says Dr Grounds, long since faded away. Patients with schizophrenia commonly decline and Brady has improved. Even Dr James Collins, speaking for the hospital, admits that “he is better, much better and able to control it [his illness]”.
In the everyday sense of the word, it is easy to describe Brady as mad. A teenage alcoholic who collected books on Nazi Germany, sadism and sexual perversion, Brady used to impress Hindley by reading Mein Kampf in the original. Together they tortured and murdered five children between 1963 and 1965 and buried their bodies on Saddleworth Moor. If that’s not evil then it must be madness.
But the shift from the colloquial understanding of madness to the clinical is fraught. Madness is, like God, a category that we invoke to explain the unfathomable. Trying to give madness medical meaning is more difficult. Roy Porter’s Madness: A Brief History shows that the nature and imputed causes of mental illness vary from era to era. Before it became the domain of the doctor, madness was the preserve of the priest. The vengeful and capricious fates and gods were thought to be the source of insanity. The Greeks humanised madness and located it in the body, in the fluids, vapours and humours. Madness then became a deficiency of mind before now we think of it as deriving from malign relationships, usually early in life, usually with aggressive parents.
The truth is that, unlike muscle injuries, we do not know where to find madness, which is defined in the act of naming. Unlike physical illness, mental disease has no test. There are merely symptoms that are given the label of a disease by a doctor. Patients with the same diagnosis will exhibit wholly different symptoms. The disease that Brady denies he has did not even exist until 1911.
Madness, in other words, is complex and variable. Many patients are not either mad or not mad. They move in episodes, in and out of lucidity. The law, however, is binary. The Mental Health Act 1983 contains a risk-averse definition of madness because politicians are scared of a murder committed by an ex-prisoner. This Act is probably the only known instance in which the phrase “health and safety gone mad” actually means something.
But the question at hand is not whether Brady is strange or dangerous or monstrous. There is no question of him ever being released. It is whether he knows his own mind. Being nocturnal is no ground for detaining him in an asylum. Neither is being unable to form close relationships. Brady may well be, as the hospital says, narcissistic and contemptuous of all authority. His insulting claim that his crimes were “existential exercises” that rank lower in depravity than the “crimes” of politicians shows that he lacks the capacity to care about other people. But it does not show he lacks the capacity to care about himself.
I understand the view that Brady should be condemned to live, the better to prolong his punishment. But the mark of the civilisation from which Brady is a monstrous exception is that legal process is based on reason rather than the passions. It is strange to hear a remorseless killer addressed with formal politeness as “Mr Brady” by Robert Atherton, the tribunal judge, but it was the only heartening thing said. It was a reminder that, in matters of legality, Ian Brady will be accorded the equal worth he so carelessly denied to Edward Evans, Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett and Lesley Ann Downey.
It can be hard to fathom Brady’s casual cruelty. The remains of little Keith Bennett were never found. When I reread Beyond Belief, the knowledge that his poor mother, Winnie Johnson, who sought all her life to give him a Christian burial, went to her grave without ever finding her boy, was somehow the least bearable thing in the book. Brady knew the answer but he never said.
That doesn’t mean he is mad. It may be worse than that. Brady is, as Dr Grounds says, “a very astute observer, strategist, calculator”. So give him back his own fate. Call him a psychopath and detach the tube. Let him starve if he wants to. Then, when the bastard is dead and buried, because I am better than that, I shall resist the temptation to celebrate his passing.
