BRITAIN: Tis Pity . . .

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There will, it was made plain last week, always be an England, an England where a gentleman should always know the right thing to do—even when he is a minister of the Crown and lolling naked on a bed with a prostitute or two. Last week one of the Queen's Lords of Appeal, Lord Diplock, made a distinction between right and wrong with a whore exquisitely clear in his report on the national-security aspects of Britain's latest sex scandal.

In May, two ministers of the Conservative government—Earl Jellicoe, Tory Leader in the House of Lords, and Lord Lambton, parliamentary Under Secretary of Defense for the Royal Air Force—resigned after it was disclosed that they had been patronizing London call girls. In the report of his investigation of this matter, Lord Diplock very carefully weighed each minister's indiscretion on different—oddly different —scales. Jellicoe, it was pointed out, used only "escort agencies" advertised in the London papers, dealt with the girls under an assumed name and never "spoke to them of anything remotely related to his work" as a minister. Moreover, said Diplock, with a fine legal eye for delicate distinctions, Jellicoe took the prostitutes home to the privacy of his own bedroom. "He entertained them to a meal, and any sexual intercourse took place late in the evening and at his own flat and never elsewhere."

On Film. As for Lord Lambton, that was a more serious case. According to Diplock, Lambton indiscreetly and unwisely paid for his whoring with checks signed in his own name and went openly to a prostitute's apartment, where he was filmed "naked on a bed with Norma Levy and another girl, both also naked." Worse yet, Lambton combined pot with his popsies. Marijuana or cannabis—for those readers of the report who might never have heard of it—was described as "a soft drug which produces changes in mood and perception and gives a feeling of irresponsibility." Diplock added that there was "photograph ic evidence," involving Lambton, "of sexual practices which deviated from the normal."

Not that there is much wrong with normal sex, Diplock ruled magisterially, even for men in high places. "If all that is involved is ordinary sexual inter course with prostitutes, this is no crim inal offense." The security risk seemed relatively minor. Declared Diplock: "Such indiscretions are more likely to occur in the kind of conversation that takes place at cocktail parties or around a dinner table than in what might be said to a prostitute in bed." In Lambton's case, whatever security risk there was existed not so much in bed but behind the walls, where cameras and tape machines were recording instant history. Here was the danger that blackmail material might find its way into the hands of foreign intelligence agents.

Diplock's lesson, then, is clear to any government official who might wish to savor the sexual charms of a professional: if she (or he) asks, "Your place or mine?" the proper reply is "mine."