Longford

2001 saw the death of Lord Longford, an alternative obituary by.........................

'Porn-again Catholic, Lord Longford dies'

The Catholic church has lost one of its more silly converts with the death of Lord Longford who will be remembered for his campaign against pornography in which he visited Denmark with the anti-libertarian, Mary Whitehouse in the early 1970s. He also toured the sex clubs that he wanted to close down, presumably to see for himself how degrading they were - again, and again, and again.

The report compiled by Longford and Whitehouse concluded that pornography perverted and degraded people without realising the implications for themselves, having been exposed to much more pornography than most of us will see in a lifetime.

Despite a privileged background, which opened doors for him, most of Longford's efforts ended in failure: he was invalided out of the army after a nervous breakdown in 1940 - the year that he became a Catholic convert; as Minister of Civil Aviation in the Atlee government he mishandled a report of a crash inquiry; as colonial secretary,

Wilson dismissed him in 1966 for failing to master his brief; he accused the Guardian of hounding Jonathan Aitken during his trial. Harold Wilson said that Longford had the judgement of a 12-year-old which was probably accurate in view of his later championing of Myra Hindley as "a good woman, a good Christian woman" and toasting Charles Bronson - dubbed the most dangerous man in Britain - with the words: " I love Charlie, we all love Charlie."

Lord Longford did have one achievement to his credit; in 1947 as
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster responsible for the British zone of occupied Germany he tried to save the Germans from starvation in the difficult period of post-war reconstruction of industry.

Longford's chum Mary Whitehouse

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