The Telling Error (15 page)

When I spoke up for
disgraced sprinter Bryn Gilligan
in my
column
two weeks ago, I expected to be set upon first by
The Times
’s Keiran Holland, Inspector Javert to Gilligan’s Jean Valjean, and then by
all the Usual Cesspits
. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The attack, when it came – the preposterous threat of legal action, no less – hailed from an unexpected quarter: Bryn Gilligan. Yes, that’s right: the same Bryn Gilligan I’d risked the opprobrium of decent folk like you in order to defend. Bryn Gilligan
condemned me
for expressing my support for Bryn Gilligan. (Warning: the rest of this story is the logical equivalent of a painting by Escher. I hope some of you can get your heads round it, because I can’t.)

Why is
Gilligan so angry
with his solitary supporter? Well, apparently because I
called him a cheat
and besmirched his good name, even though he no longer has one. In a
letter to this newspaper
that has to be read to be believed, he accuses me of trashing his character and claims that he is not and has never been a cheat – not even while he was cheating, apparently. On the contrary, he says, he is a principled man to whom professional propriety was, is and evermore shall be of the utmost importance. With specific reference to his ‘
mistake
’ (and to clarify, he is here referring to his ingestion of prohibited performance-enhancing drugs over a period of at least five years) he asks us to believe that he was in some kind of fugue state each time he cocked up by guzzling the ’roids and illegally winning a race. In his own
words
, ‘I had become detached from myself. My actions no longer had any connection with the honourable man I know myself to be.’

You see how it works? Gilligan cheated, but he wasn’t a cheat when he cheated. He was a non-cheat from whom some uncharacteristically devious behaviour had emanated. He had great respect for the rules even while the detached unscrupulous bit of him was breaking them.

If you say so, Bryn. In fact, it was Keiran Holland, not me, who described Gilligan as a cheat and a liar, as I’m certain my column made clear. I don’t intend to withdraw my support simply because Gilligan is no admirer of mine. To remix Groucho Marx, I’d hate to speak up for any cause that would have me as an advocate. I still believe Gilligan has learned his lesson and that his ban should be revoked, however unconventionally he might express his regret. Who could fail to learn, and learn hard, from the experience of being a newsworthy pariah for an extended period of time?

Keiran Holland has of course
seized on
Gilligan’s latest public statement, holding it up as evidence of the sprinter’s dishonesty, and proof of what Holland knew all along: that none of Gilligan’s apologies have been genuine. Once again, I’m afraid, Holland has missed the point as desperately as a man confined to a Siberian gulag must miss the comforts of home.

Gilligan cheated and he knows it. I assume he has no desire to be ridiculous as well as reviled, so why is he objecting to the use of the word? Could it be because idiots like Holland keep forgetting the crucial distinction between sin and sinner, and trying to persuade anyone who’ll listen that Gilligan is not merely someone who has cheated, but ‘a cheat’ – innately and irreversibly, as if it’s in his DNA and he can never change? If we create a climate in which anyone who does something wrong must be branded a scumbag forever, can we really blame those who lie and cheat – which, by the way, is all of us from time to time – for pretending that they haven’t, even after admitting that they have?

Think about how hard, not to mention ineffective, it would be to stand up in public and say, ‘I did something unforgiveable that only a scoundrel would do, yet I’m not a scoundrel and you must forgive me.’ It sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it? Well, it’s one we must embrace if we are to make any progress as a species, because we all do the bad things that only bad people would do, as well as the good things that only good people would do, which is why we mustn’t hold anything against one another. If we want better apologies, we need to be more forgiving – it’s as simple as that.

If Keiran Holland wants to hear Bryn Gilligan say, ‘Yes, I cheated and I’m truly sorry,’ he ought to think about what he himself needs to say first. I suggest something along the following lines: ‘I’m not going to condemn you, Bryn. You cheated, but we all do – especially me, on my wife, with former Labour MP Paula Riddiough – and so I’m not going to write you off and call you “
a worm with minimal integrity
”, because you’re probably a decent guy, or else you have the potential to be one, and I believe in you. You’re a talented sprinter who must have been under a lot of pressure when you made the mistakes you made, and I think you deserve a second chance.’

Speaking of second chances, I wonder if the delectable Paula Privilege is on the verge of deciding to award one to Holland. Does she regret ending their affair, and is she hoping that by attacking me, she might win him back? In a
blog post
two days ago, she described me as a ‘vile, shameless hack’. My crime? Making ‘needlessly personal and hurtful comments about the journalist Keiran Holland’. Notice her distancing use of ‘the journalist’ rather than, say, ‘my ex-lover, who cast aside his wife for me, only to be ditched and left stranded’. Perhaps she would care to explain why it is ‘indefensible’ that I should sneer at Holland in my column while it’s perfectly all right for her to
discard him like a pus-stained plaster
when the better option of
a fling
with an American movie director
presents itself.

Paula, shall we ask Keiran Holland to tell us which of us has hurt him more? I see a pattern emerging here, old bean. Have you forgotten the time you lashed out at me for ‘
maligning’ your son’s ‘educational experience
’, obliging me
to point out
that while I, a stranger, might have maligned it, you, the boy’s very own mother, had been actively sabotaging it over a period of years?

I don’t like to hurt people unnecessarily, but I do like the truth, apart from when it might get me into trouble. And I hate hypocrisy, always. Sometimes the truth stings. Horror writer Reuben Tasker took to his website last week to
express his anger and sadness
at my casual dismissal of his novel
Craving and Aversion
,
winner
of a
Books Enhance Lives Award
. Tasker made a fair point: I ought not to imply that his book is rubbish without having read it. I
apologised
in the comments beneath his blog post and promised to make up for my sloppiness by buying a copy. I have now read it. It’s rubbish: badly structured, pretentious and violent in the way that only a perverted author’s sexual fantasies tend to be. One central character has her ‘waist-hugging ropes of flaxen hair’ cut off and stuffed into her vagina, for example, before the end of Chapter One. ‘Waist-hugging’? Does this woman’s hair grow downward from her scalp like traditional hair or horizontally from her stomach? It makes no sense that this novel won a prize, until we consider that one of the judges was Keiran Holland. How tragic that a man as judgemental as Holland should possess such poor judgement.