Dominic Lawson: Maxine Carr and Lady Black: unlikely victims of our misogynistic attitudes

There are two women whose deaths have left the British press feeling especially bereaved. One is Diana, Princess of Wales. The other is Myra Hindley. There have been a number of attempts to portray a succession of women connected to the Royal Family as "The new Diana"; but these have woefully failed to capture the public's imagination in the same way.

When Myra Hindley died in 2002 there was also a large gap to be filled in the soap opera of British public life. For a brief, frenzied period, it seemed a candidate had emerged. Her name was Maxine Carr, the lover of Ian Huntley, a school caretaker who murdered two 10-year-old Soham schoolgirls. The fact that Carr was not involved in the murders - she was hundreds of miles away at the time - was a minor inconvenience.

Carr was guilty of one offence - pathetically, she was persuaded by Huntley to say that she had been with him at the time of the killings, thus providing him with a false alibi. She was sentenced to three and a half years in jail. At Holloway, Carr was given the name of "Myra Mark Two" by other prisoners - I imagine they were Sun readers - and since her release she has been given a new identity for her own safety.

This form of official protection enraged the red-top press still more - they just knew she was "evil". On Wednesday, the Sun had a minor victory in its campaign: it published an alleged taped confession by Huntley, which he recorded before a suicide attempt last year. In it, Huntley claimed Carr had "slapped" him and "ordered" him to burn the bodies of his victims. We need to recall here that Huntley was -is - a sadistic man with a history of abuse against much younger women and that Carr was a submissive character whom he treated almost as a slave.

The police were reported in yesterday's Daily Mail as saying that "Huntley is making a number of wild claims that are not supported by the evidence. Carr has been dealt with in the courts and we have no intention of re-interviewing her over Huntley's latest version of events, which will cause a huge amount of distress to his victim's families. Huntley is playing games with their emotions to suit his own ends."

Nevertheless, this did not prevent the same newspaper from running a piece by the crime writer Brian Masters, portraying Carr in her denial of involvement in the murders as "poised and deadly, a mistress of dissimulation". Masters described Huntley's "feelings" - whatever they might be - as "eloquent", and continued: "What a contrast Carr makes with her Lady Macbeth-like threats and exhortations, if Huntley's new account is to be believed. And why should his comments about Carr's involvement not be believed?" Like the police, I can think of a very good reason why not.

Masters' invocation of Lady Macbeth is very revealing. The idea of the much-misunderstood man led into foul acts by a scheming woman is a staple of literature down the ages - a tradition in which the British press is only the latest, lurid, participant. You don't have to be a feminist to argue that it starts at the very beginning with the book of Genesis: Eve, transfixed by the snake (Satan), persuades Adam to bite from the apple, thus creating original sin, which blights humanity for ever afterwards.

It's not too hard to guess at a reason for the power of this theme in myth, legend and literature. Most men are slaves to their desire for sex, while most women have a greater ability to control or ration their own physical urges. This can - to use the language of the cheap romantic pot-boiler--make men putty in the hands of the women they lust after.

That tired old story is now being trotted out as an explanation of the circumstances which have led Conrad Black to where he now is, on trial for racketeering and money-laundering in a Chicago courtroom - charges of which I very much hope that he will be acquitted. It is widely asserted that Black took money that properly belonged to the other shareholders in his newspaper empire, solely to satisfy his wife Barbara's insatiable desire for frocks and rocks. This trite assumption is given greater verisimilitude by articles portraying Barbara Black - who has not been charged with any offence - as a cross between Cruella De Vil and Mata Hari.

I can only say that Barbara never struck me that way. It is also a preposterous way of assessing the nature of the relationship between Conrad and Barbara Black. Conrad Black was not some impressionable hick from the Canadian boondocks. He was born into a life of unusual affluence; most biographical accounts have him chauffeured in a limousine even as a little boy on the way to school. Barbara was born in Watford.

You might think from some of the coverage that it is not so much Conrad Black who is on trial for the stewardship of his former company, but Barbara Black who is on trial for the wicked crimes of conspicuous consumption and overt sexuality. There is more than a whiff of witch-burning in all of this: it is no coincidence that the intensely puritanical Calvinists were the most enthusiastic proponents of witch-burning in their era.

Barbara Black won't be the last woman to be discredited with the clichéd assumption that the "female is deadlier than the male". The idea that women are more manipulative and devious than men is wired into too many brains - and by no means only male ones. Anyway, this male doesn't believe it. After running a newspaper for 10 years, I gradually formed, if anything, a completely divergent prejudice.

I don't want to cause offence to any former colleagues - well, not all of them - but it seemed to me that the few devious and insincere characters within the office were all men. They were the least able to say openly when they disagreed, but would then spill out their true feelings in the pub after they had left the office. The women employed by the newspaper, by contrast, had no such inhibitions. They were much more likely to criticise my suggestions openly in editorial meetings, but at the same time were intensely loyal - although, unlike some of the men, they didn't feel the need to tell me how very loyal they were.

You would have thought that as more and more women reach senior positions in newspapers - the editor of The Sun is a woman, for example - that the misogynistic tone of the popular press would disappear. How sad to have to report that it seems to have made no difference at all.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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