I have something to confess. My confession is quite juicy and I'm confident that any averagely prurient reader would like to read it.
There are three criteria for a good media confession, and mine meets all of them. First, it breaks a couple of taboos. Second, it is embarrassing in many of its details. And third, it shows me in an unflattering light.
For these reasons, I am going to keep quiet. I have absolutely no intention of making any such confession here, in the pages of Prospect. I have told my shameful tale to a tiny handful of intimates, but that's it. I may be a sinner, but I am not a fool.
Such coyness may strike you as an outrageous tease. Especially since I am a professional confessor—I make a living from spilling my secrets in a national newspaper. For 12 years in the Financial Times I have written a weekly column that usually starts with some "personal" or "revealing" detail that supposedly brings a general theme to life. In the last year alone I have confessed to the following:
My teeth are falling out.
I spend a lot of time searching for Agnès B shirts on eBay when I should be working instead.
I have had dreams about certain workplace superiors, and some of the dreams were of a borderline erotic nature.
The complete list is a lot longer but I think you get the general idea. The point about these confessions is that they are all phoney. It's not that they are made up—all are true, in their tedious way. The reason I am happy to put them into the paper is that I don't care if other people know them: they are vaguely personal but don't feel private. If FT readers discover that my gums are not great, so what? Who cares?
A true confession is something quite different. It is admitting to something of which you are ashamed. Now why on earth would you want to do that in public? The answer is that unless you were weird, or stupid, or desperate, or on the breadline, you wouldn't.
Newspapers are full of supposedly confessional columns, but most contain no more genuine confessions than does mine. Many turn out to be little more than slightly perverted boasts. The Guardian recently published a bumper confessional in which it asked lots of intellectuals to name a guilty lowbrow pleasure. So Anthony Giddens confessed to enjoying wrestling on television, Elaine Showalter said she likes Trinny and Susannah, AC Grayling admitted to an interest in boxing while Roger Scruton revealed that he found Elvis "irresistible."
All these confessions simply make the person look even more marvellous, by showing him or her to be not just clever, but rounded too. Any one with no guilty pleasures of this sort is surely a prig.
If this is what passes as confession, I can happily confess that my favourite television programme is America's Next Top Model. But would I dare to go further and confess that I am so steeped in lowbrow entertainment that I hardly read serious newspapers at all? No, no—on balance, I wouldn't dare. For a serious journalist such sloppy reading habits would be something to be ashamed of. (I leave it entirely up to you if you'd like to take my conditional admission as hypothetical or as the real thing.)
Some newspaper confessions seem to go a lot further. Take the extraordinary article by Ian Hargreaves, former editor of the Independent, about his botched vasectomy (Prospect, October 1999). On first sight, that looked like a pretty good confession, though on closer reading it turned out not to pass my test. The story may have shown his doctor in a bad light, but Hargreaves's moral fibre (if not all his body parts) escaped unscathed.
For real confessions—where there is wrongdoing and shame—one needs to turn to the tabloids and reality television, where there is a never-ending stream of mothers confessing to having abandoned babies, committed incest and a whole lot of other shameful, grisly stuff.
What possesses these confessors? Some want the money. Some desire fame more than they fear shame. But there is a third and more interesting reason. This is that the media is the new church and people may feel in some peculiar way that redemption is to be found there.
This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Redemption of a sort can come because the confessing person gets the chance to tell the story so one-sidedly that they seem to have been in the right all along.
Redemption may also come because the confession is trying to raise awareness of some cause. This is what the manic depressive Stephen Fry was doing discussing on television his thieving and other dodgy behavioural traits in order to remove the stigma from his illness.
The question for this column is whether there will be enough Prospect writers for whom a few shillings, a sliver of fame or the promise of redemption will be enough to encourage them to bare their souls in the coming months.
I have put the question to my husband (who is editor of Prospect, and who is also privy to my true confession—just in case you were wondering).
I bloody well hope so, he said.
