Christina Patterson: Poverty, crime and the power of forgiveness

One of the saddest images of recent weeks was surely the mugshot of Bradley Tucker, the 18-year-old from east London who was convicted on Tuesday of murder. The face in the photograph is sprinkled with spots and the upper lip is dusted with down. The eyes suggest fear and defiance. This is a boy in trouble, and trapped.

In one newspaper, the image loomed above the tear-streaked face of Jane Bowden, the fiancé of Tucker's victim, Peter Woodhams. "Peter's murder has affected all our family and friends... like the full force of a tidal wave," she said, in a victim impact statement. "Peter's mother," she added, "hasn't been able to feel anger towards the man who pulled the trigger but can't understand how one person can ruin so many lives. She believes this to the extent that the perpetrator has ruined his own short life, too, compassion that I am unable to understand."

It reminded me of a novel written 60 years ago, which I re-read last week. Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country tells the story of a young black man - impoverished, adrift and in bad company - who kills a young white man. Like Bradley Tucker, Paton's character claims he pulled the trigger out of fear. Like Peter Woodhams' mother, the victim's father finds compassion for his son's killer.

When he heard Jane Bowden's statement, Tucker, who left school at 13 without any qualifications, blinked back tears. "I wish I could take it back," he said. "I feel sorry for his family. I have to face up to what I've done."

That, clearly, is quite a challenge. As Woodhams' mother so graciously acknowledged, the wrecked lives extend way beyond those of Woodhams' fiancé, parents and son. Here is yet another young man who has thrown his life away. Yes, it could have been a white middle-class boy from Brompton Oratory or Eton. It could have been, but it usually isn't.

The traditional Tory view on such matters is that morality is not a matter of background or class. It's insulting to the working classes, they declare loftily, to link poverty and crime. It sounds great, but it's clearly nonsense, as even Saint Dave of the Inner Cities has conceded. The "toff at the top" has repeatedly declared his intent to heal hoodies for the nation. "We have to show a lot more love," he said in a speech on crime last year. And love, luckily, is not something which taxpayers have to fund.

It was entirely predictable that David Davis, the shadow home secretary, should respond to Government proposals on crime prevention with time-worn Tory clichés. He described the plan to assess the "risk of criminality" of children whose parents are drug abusers, or in prison, as "nanny state gone mad". A phrase almost as original as "stable and orderly transition" or "hard-working families".

Quite how he and his boss plan to address the issue of youth crime in the inner cities remains, like so much else in Tory policy, a little unclear. As, indeed, does the fine detail of the Government's proposals. There is strong evidence, however, that a dialogue between the perpetrator of a crime and its victim might play a useful part.

As Alan Paton knew, and as Bradley Tucker has now learnt, it's extremely easy for a life to spiral out of control. One finger on the trigger and so many lives are wrecked. Paton, who believed in the redemptive power of forgiveness, subtitled his novel, "A Story of Comfort in Desolation". It's hard to see the comfort here, but perhaps it starts with Tucker's tears.

Beautiful prose can be popular, too

The other day, at a dinner, the conversation turned to literary taste. "I mean, don't you just think The Da Vinci Code was the worst book you've ever read?" I declared chummily to my neighbour. There was a long pause. "I'm Dan Brown's agent," she said.

It's heartening, then, to be reminded that it's possible to write wonderful books which also sell. At the International Congress of Spanish Language in Colombia on Monday, Gabriel Garcia Marquez recalled how his wife had to sell her jewels to feed their children while he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. The manuscript cost 82 pesos to post and they had only 53. "Afterwards, we realised that we had sent not the first but the second part," said the Nobel laureate. The editor "forwarded us the money so we could send the rest." Sales have now topped 50 million. Fruitful solitude indeed.

* Cultural institutions, like newspapers, have a fine tradition of musical chairs. It's no great surprise, then, to hear that Charles Saumarez Smith, the affable director of the National Gallery, is moving to the Royal Academy. Like Beckham announcing his move from Real Madrid to LA Galaxy, the man who saved the Madonna of the Pinks for the nation declared that he was looking forward to "the challenge".

The real reason for the move, it has been suggested, is "personality clashes" with his chairman, the abrasive QC Peter Scott. Such clashes are a regular feature of the charity world, that peculiar twin-headed phenomenon designed to offer what in the American constitution is called "checks and balances". On the one hand, you have the executive staff, specialists in their field who apply for their jobs on the open market. On the other, you have board members, appointed on a nod and a wink for their contacts and their cash. And the board members are the bosses. A sure-fire formula for friction and fights.

c.patterson@independent.co.uk

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