On the Sunday just passed I sat alongside Polly Toynbee in Manchester as one of Andrew Marr’s two newspaper reviewers on his morning programme on BBC television. Arriving at dawn, we skimmed the weekend papers for stories we might discuss. Polly chose, among others, the latest reports in the Megan Stammers saga; the schoolgirl and the teacher she had run away with, Jeremy Forrest, had been located in Bordeaux; he was in a French jail pending extradition, and Megan had just returned to her parents.
I wondered whether to say what I honestly felt. I sensed it would upset or annoy some viewers. But I’ve generally found it best to stick with one’s honest responses; when they’re clear and strong it’s likely a good many other humans — even if only a minority — will have responded in the same way. One rarely turns out to be spitting into the wind.
When, therefore, Polly, Andrew and I reached this item, I remarked that I’d have made a dreadful magistrate or judge, because surveying the messes that people make of their lives I so often find myself simply feeling sorry for them. Mr Forrest’s and Miss Stammers’s flight abroad had been so hopelessly fantastical, and the whole thing so obviously doomed, that I found pity rather than fury the strongest emotion in my breast.
Polly intervened gently and rightly to remind us that Forrest was Megan’s schoolteacher, and she was only 15, and that to disappear to France with her had been wholly inappropriate and wrong; and of course I know that and had not suggested otherwise. I simply observed that — as a matter of fact — I had rather run out of indignation: they had been so stupid, his dishonourable behaviour wrecking his career, his reputation and (perhaps) his marriage; and she bringing shame upon herself and letting herself, her school and her parents down.
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