Richard Ingrams’s Week:
I'm sorry, but all these apologies are ridiculous Gordon Brown has followed Tony Blair's example and taken to apologising for things that he had nothing to do with. In Blair's case it was the Irish potato famine; with Brown it is the suicide of the brilliant wartime code-breaker Alan Turing, a homosexual who killed himself after being convicted of gross indecency.
This could be interpreted as a cynical attempt to appeal to the so-called gay community. I prefer to see it as a sign of insanity on Brown's part, he (like Blair) regarding himself as a kind of Christ-like figure who can take upon himself the sins of the whole world.
As for Turing, it is interesting to realise that it was only quite recently that his wartime achievement has been recognised at all. In my old edition of the Dictionary of National Biography published in 1975, the entry on Turing says simply and misleadingly that "during the war he worked for the communications Department of the Foreign Office".
And while he was on the subject, Brown might also have apologised for the fact that at the war's end, which Turing did so much to bring about, this mathematical genius was rewarded with a humble OBE.
All this had nothing whatever to do with anti-gay prejudice but with the understandable desire on the part of Churchill and his warlords to play down and if possible to keep secret altogether the achievements of the code-breakers.
After all, if people were aware that thanks to Turing and co we knew in advance what Hitler was going to do before he did it, then Churchill might not seem quite such a brilliant far-sighted war leader as he would like us to believe.
Independent
