Humility? Never on Sunday, it seems

WHEN Andrew Neil took his grand leave of absence from the Sunday Times, I wondered how long it would be before his science correspondent, Neville Hodgkinson, did the same.

Last week Mr Hodgkinson resigned to write a book on Aids and HIV, but the acting editor of the Sunday Times, John Witherow, says that there has been no change in its view on Aids. The paper will not suddenly 'accept the orthodox line'. Indeed, Mr Witherow hopes that Mr Hodgkinson will continue to come up with 'new news stories'.

One awaits these new news stories with quiet resignation. Mr Hodgkinson's recent line has been that, given the growing doubts he detects over the idea that HIV causes Aids, there may be a promising area of inquiry into the deleterious effects of poppers. Could the use of poppers by the gay community be responsible for Aids?

'Poppers', amyl nitrate, is a highly volatile liquid, best kept under refrigerated conditions. If there is a widespread outbreak of Aids in such places as Africa and the subcontinent, it would seem highly improbable that this could have been caused by the use of poppers. I know that there are refrigerators dotted throughout the Third World. But are these refrigerators stuffed with poppers?

The answer is that I have already missed the point - the 'unorthodox' position put forward by the Sunday Times and not so far retracted. This is that there is no 'Aids plague' in Africa, and there is no necessary connection between HIV and Aids.

HIV is seen by the Hodgkinsons of the world as merely an orthodox hypothesis, fanatically supported by an Aids establishment driven by its interest in the vast research funds that have come its way. Aids is a lifestyle disease. Where it seems to have been spread through contaminated blood, patients are more likely to have died from the toxic effects of medication with AZT.

From the point of view of the Sunday Times, which held a press conference on the subject in London recently, its espousal of this campaign is an example of fearless radical thinking, heterodoxy, preparedness to fly in the face of world opinion, willingness to think the unthinkable.

But there is a distinction between thinking the unthinkable and believing three impossible things before breakfast. Anybody would be happy to discover that the relationship between Aids and HIV is other than previously thought, or that some piece of orthodox thinking had been overturned. This would be a normal sign that science was progressing.

Only the most cynical of shareholders wants to protect the status of AZT at all costs. If the drug is of no use, or worse, then of course it should be dropped. And how simple life would be if Aids had been caused by the reckless use of poppers.

But all these theories come from a paper which affects to believe that there is no Aids plague in Africa, and one can't help judging a story, at least in part, according to the reliability of its source.

Mr Witherow said the Sunday Times might have been wrong to assert that HIV does not cause Aids, but he added: 'I think we're a long way from being proved wrong.'

I suppose that what he may have meant by this formulation is: we're a long way from admitting we were wrong, but we'll get there in the end - just bear with us, folks, for the next few weeks.

HAVING previously compared the Sunday Times, stuck with its line on Aids, with the same paper when it got landed with the Hitler diaries, I was amused to read its elegant little spoiler yesterday on the Sunday Telegraph's claim to have uncovered five volumes of the notorious Mussolini diaries.

Another 'part' of Musso's diaries was bought by the Sunday Times in 1968, for pounds 100,000, and found to be fake. The present part is apparently the manuscript turned down by the Times a dozen years ago.

So one looks, as one did when the Hitler diaries were launched by Rupert Murdoch, at the historians who have authenticated them. And, hey, one of them is no less a man than Denis Mack Smith. Or so it at first seems. But it turns out from the spoiler that Professor Mack Smith hasn't seen the diaries since 1983, when he was allowed to examine them 'for one night in the Swiss mountains'.

And so history repeats itself, first time as farce, second time as farce. Lord Dacre (Hugh Trevor-Roper) was allowed brief access to the Hitler diaries, also in Switzerland, also in 1983, but in a bank vault. It appears that Professor Mack Smith was taken up a mountain.

Future historians should be taught as part of their basic training that if someone lures you to Switzerland and takes you either down into a vault or up into a mountain and thrusts a manuscript in your hands and says, 'Is this genuine or not? You have one night to decide,' you should reply: 'Please may I be allowed to go home? Please, please may I be allowed to go home and live a quiet life?'

ONE THING these Musso diaries share with the Hitler diaries is a tendency to exculpate. The Hitler diaries were acquired with a condition that the first published extracts should tell the story of Rudolf Hess. Hess had not deserted the Fuhrer. Hitler knew all about his planned trip to Scotland, approved of it, thought that Hess was a great chap, etc, etc.

The Musso diaries haven't been published yet, but already they are exculpating Musso: Musso thought Hitler a fanatic, Musso thought Mein Kampf unreadable, Musso didn't really have anything against England, etc, etc. Those who take the diaries to be genuine apparently believe their author wrote with an eye on posterity. The exculpation is autograph.

If you take them to be fakes, it's easy to imagine the motivation for cooking them up. There are always people who look back wistfully to the achievements of a fallen dictator and seek to reapportion blame for the mistakes. It wasn't Hitler - it was the people around him. It wasn't Musso's fault - it was all Hitler's fault.

Professor Brian Sullivan, who speaks for the Musso diaries, says: 'If they're forgeries, they're the work of someone who's studied Mussolini with the dedication of a scholar. . . . He's also gone beyond assembling the facts to create a real human being. What kind of 'sociopath' is throwing away his or her talent when they could have written a novel to rival Tolstoy's War and Peace?'

Amazing stuff] Professor Mack Smith, conversely, says: 'I remember coming back to London thinking the diaries were Mussolini's. They seemed remarkably good, especially as they were so boring.'