In an article first published in 1992, Robert Harris describes David Irving's infatuation with notoriety
I first met David Irving on Cambridge railway station in December 1977. I was a student, the chairman of the university’s Fabian Society, in which capacity — in a moment of mad ecumenicism — I had invited the author of Hitler’s War to speak on ‘The Falsification of Historical Evidence’. As the day of his lecture grew closer, I came under increasing attack. I was denounced in the university paper. A demonstration was planned. I stood my ground. Irving, I said, was controversial; that did not make him a fascist.
That Saturday morning, proud of my stand for liberal values, I held out my hand to welcome him.
‘Congratulations,’ was Irving’s greeting. ‘You’ve just shaken the hand that’s shaken the hand that shook the hand of the Führer.’ Over lunch I offered him a glass of wine. ‘No, thank you,’ came the reply, ‘I don’t drink.’ He leaned forward, confidingly. ‘Adolf didn’t drink, you know.’
By the time we reached Trinity, where a large and hostile audience was waiting, my welcoming liberal palms were sweating. This man was capable of saying anything. I introduced him to a chorus of hisses. ‘I was last in Cambridge a month ago,’ began Irving, ‘talking to historians at Peterhouse.’ He paused. ‘And I thought I was right-wing... ’ The tension was broken by a shout of laughter and the meeting went well.
Whenever Irving has been in the news since then — which is often — I have always thought of that wintry Saturday. It taught me all I have ever needed to know about his technique. There is the carefully nurtured reputation for being ‘controversial’ — the eagerness to challenge established opinion which will always win him a platform, especially among the young. There is the desire to shock — the outrageous remark which suddenly makes the smile die on your face. And then there is the heavy-handed charm — the willingness to send himself up which somehow belies his reputation as a sinister Machiavelli. He may be a wicked man, but a funny wicked man. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, he is more interesting to read about than the angels.
Fifteen years have passed but I have never quite shaken him off. When I worked at the BBC, he would call with ideas for films. Did I know that Churchill took bribes from the Czech government in the 1930s? How did I feel about the fact that de Gaulle and the Free French ran a torture chamber in Mayfair in 1941?
I eventually decided that Irving himself was a better subject for investigation than his stories. When he launched his extreme right-wing political group. Focus, I made a hostile film for Newsnight, portraying him as a would-be Mosley. Irving’s response was to laugh, and print a complimentary reference to me in his horrible magazine, which led to my being pursued for several weeks by anti-Nazi groups, convinced they had discovered a fascist mole at the BBC. A couple of years later, I wrote a nasty profile in Tatler, ‘Meeting Mr Reich’. He sent me a letter of congratulation.
When I wrote my account of the Hitler diaries fiasco, Selling Hitler, he generously lent me his own diary. The portrait which subsequently emerged was one of such mendaciousness and rapacity that the publisher’s lawyers warned us of possible trouble if we printed it. We did, and Irving was ecstatic. When the book was dramatized on television last year, he was caricatured as a cross between Arturo Ui and Dick Dastardly. Again: he loved it. (I’m told he took out advertisements in the trade press for his revised biography of the Fuhrer using, the slogan, Selling Hitler this Christmas ... ?)
And here, in my experience, is the real key to Irving’s character. ‘All publicity is good publicity’ is, for him, not a comfort after a bad review but a religion, a way of life. He is addicted to notoriety. He achieves it by steadily increasing the shock-quotient of what he says, rather as drug addicts are said to start out as teenagers experimenting on the kitchen table with home brew, before progressing through cannabis and cocaine to heroin.
So Irving set the course of his life at 23 with The Destruction of Dresden, an attack on Allied bombing policy. Then came Accident, with its insinuation that Churchill might have had the Polish leader, General Sikorski, assassinated. The Destruction of Convoy PQ17 won him front-page coverage when he had to pay a record £48,000 in libel damages. But it was Hitler’s War, in 1977, and his contention that the Fuhrer knew nothing about the Holocaust, which was the real breakthrough. His subsequent assertion that Churchill was corrupt, a coward and a drunk (Churchill’s War, 1987) gave him another high.
True, his last couple of scores have been desperate: his assertion last year that the Holocaust never happened and his discovery, this year, of Eichmann’s memoirs, which suggest — well, what do you know? — that maybe, actually, it did. But that is the problem when your career has been a series of shocks: when it begins, you think you can handle it, but sooner or later people start turning away in disgust, and then you really are down there in the dirt, scrabbling around with the sad and the crazy, doing things like taking soil samples from Auschwitz to test them for traces of Zyklon-B. His assertion that there were no gas chambers is the reductio ad absurdum of Irving’s entire career.
Quite where he will go next, I do not know. Perhaps, with these Eichmann memoirs, he is preparing the ground for the ultimate shock: turning respectable. All I do know is there will be a letter in the post any day now.
‘Dear Robert,’ it will begin, ‘I saw your excellent piece in The Oldie. Now, here’s a really good story for you...
