Irving gets just what he wanted - his name in the headlines

Published on Thursday 23 February 2006 00:20

A WEEK of perplexing polarities. After the discredited British historian David Irving was sentenced to a three-year jail term in Austria as a penalty for denying the Holocaust, the liberal conscience of western Europe has squirmed and agonised.

Jewish historians have been implored to comment on the judgment, and most have expressed anxiety. They have defended Irving's right to reach whatever malevolent conclusion he chooses, because one crackpot is of little importance compared with the right to explore ideas. For revising accepted opinion has always been dangerous - as Galileo and Charles Darwin both discovered. But Galileo was forced to recant by the Vatican, while Darwin was merely pilloried by the Victorian establishment. The difference is crucial. Even if Torquemada and the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition are remote, Senator McCarthy, the "disappeared" dissidents of Argentina and Chile and the fatwas of Ayatollah Khomeini are not.

The unfortunate thing is, David Irving relishes all of this. I find it hard to believe that his arrest in Austria in November was the result of an unfortunate betrayal. I'd guess it was precisely what he sought.

Five years ago, I met him in London for what he said would be the last interview he would ever give to the British press. He had just lost the libel suit against the American Professor Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books - a 12-week, 2 million court wrangle which annihilated the remnants of his reputation as a historian and rendered him bankrupt.

But that was not his main concern. What obsessed him was the number of column inches devoted to him in the newspapers. Using this rather unusual yardstick, he declared that he had "won".

As he ranted on for more than an hour, only once did the mask of bellicose triumphalism slip, and that was when he answered the telephone. The person at the other end did not speak. "Just another one to see if I'm at home," he said bitterly, and went on to tell me that it was not the outraged Jew or the lone bomber he feared, but the government. He fully expected to be extradited to Germany to stand trial. He said he had information that Jack Straw had agreed to assist the German police with an extradition request.

It was all about a speech he had made in Mannheim in 1990, in which he declared that the gas chambers in Auschwitz had been built by the Poles as a tourist attraction in 1948. (And, as is so often the case with Irving, there is a grain of truth in this, as some of the Auschwitz site was reconstructed because the Nazis dynamited it.) "Anyone who challenges the official version of the Holocaust is breaking the law in Germany. The man who chaired that meeting has been in prison for seven years," Irving concluded.

The Austrian situation was identical. He had been deported from the country in 1984, and barred from re-entering. In 1989, he was charged in his absence over two speeches he gave to extreme right-wing student groups. Irving knew the penalty of entering either Austria or Germany would be immediate arrest. The fact is, this is precisely what he wanted.

HE CANNOT tolerate being ignored. The man who measured victory only in column inches has been starved of publicity for the last five years. No-one was listening any more. His shock tactics had become as predictable and wearisome as a toddler's tantrums. He had no influence on public debate or on public opinion, and he must have found that almost unbearable. So what could he do to reverse the situation? There was no money left to employ any lawyers to publicise his grievances in court.

If he wanted to engage the public, he was going to have to do something drastic. And he did. He got in his car and drove right back into the limelight - like a latter-day Salman Rushdie deciding that Tehran was the perfect place for a picnic.

And - what a surprise - the police were waiting. As soon as he was arrested, and held on remand, Irving began to write furiously. He has already completed several hundred pages of his new book.

Meanwhile, the Austrians must supply him with appropriate legal representation. So he will have lawyers in regular attendance to confirm his self-importance. He knows this book will now attract global attention when it's published. For a tortured, isolated personality in the twilight of his career, this must be gratifying indeed. Or, as he would put it himself, he's won again.