The Darwins had the big liar's hubris to believe they were untouchable.
AS JOHN and Anne Darwin settle down to their jail sentences, it's time to reflect on the utter weirdness of it all. What started as a very British story, a cosy Ealing comedy featuring a mild-mannered medical receptionist, a one-time garden-gnome ma
nufacturer and a red canoe, turned out to be far more chilling. The grieving widow with the rose at her bedside. The man with the limp who lived next door. The coffin-shaped door. The lies. The lies!
Police investigating the Darwins were not at all surprised to find a husband-and-wife team of con artists. But they were taken aback to discover that Mark and Anthony Darwin had played no role in their parents' crime. We can only speculate as to what kind of inhumanity is necessary to hug your children and feign tears at the 'death' of a husband who you know is still alive. We can only imagine what kind of self-belief or self-deception might lead a man to remain silently in the room when he hears the voices of his grieving sons on the telephone.
There's a good reason we are all fascinated by the Darwins' lies. Because we are, all of us, masters of the art of lying. Deceit, we conclude, is a question of degree. After all, lying is normal, sane and healthy. White lies are the WD40 of relationships. They oil the creaking hinges of family life. Like many of us, I'm a cheerful hypocrite with a big bowl of fruit on the kitchen table and a secret stash of Green & Black's in the larder. You think I'm fat. I preferred your old haircut to your new one. We're still friends. Little lies make the world go round.
But big lies are different. Big lies are extraordinary things when you encounter them. They shake their victims to the core. Having spent a few years as a solicitor in the field of family law, I've met a handful of big liars in my time. There were the clients who discovered that their spouses had other lives, other loves, even other families. Then there was the opposite scenario: the horrible realisation, when faced with the evidence, that the charming, tearful person sitting before you in your office was an utter fraud. Your job was to learn and move on, but the big lies often broke the people who had been lied to.
I'm never surprised at stories of over-zealous social workers or paranoid policing. Once you've had direct experience of how the most unlikely-seeming people can do the most despicable things, it's hard to shake off perpetual suspicion. But to stay sane you must, and to do so you must exercise a clever kind of doublethink. The moral outrage expressed by the judge in the Darwin case, Mr Justice Wilkie, a man whose daily job is to sit in judgment upon liars, is not the sound of a man truly surprised, but of one reminding himself and the public where the normal points of the moral compass are.
Psychologists tell us that big liars are known in the profession as 'high self-monitors'. They are people who are often ingratiating and who want to conform. They change their behaviour to meet their circumstances. The big lie usually requires two things: low self-esteem and high intelligence. It was tempting to see the Darwins as lacking the latter. But Anne Darwin's downtrodden demeanour, John Darwin's spreadsheet with its red and green arrows, and the sheer strong-mindedness required for five and a half years of conspiracy against your own flesh and blood suggest otherwise.
The big liars are out there. These days, the word 'psychopath' is most likely to be found, not on the true crime shelves of bookstores, but in organisational psychology. The smiling middle-management manipulator who screwed you out of your job; the golden chief executive who fell from grace; that respected educator who, it transpired, had faked his or her qualifications. These are examples of what is now understood as the industrial or corporate psychopath.
We small liars are consumed by guilt, and are thus often caught out by foolish mistakes or chocolate wrappers. Big liars shake off these feelings as inconvenient shackles. Anne Darwin was challenged more than once, but never faltered. The Darwins were caught, not because, as we first thought, they were incompetent in a charming and uniquely British kind of way, but because they had the big liar's hubris to believe they were untouchable.
Ultimately the judge seems to have thought there was but a hair's breadth between their levels of culpability. Her sentence of six years and three months was only three months longer than his. But in terms of sheer performance, one cannot help but be awed by Anne Darwin's spectacular deceit when she lied to her sons, the coastguard, the police and the court.
John Darwin was driven by greed, but was the destination inevitable? Heck, we've all had a moment when we'd prefer a flat in Panama City to another family Christmas. Most of us are at least mildly seduced by consumerism. Too much reading of Grazia magazine has been known to make otherwise sane women believe that shoes are something other than a means of keeping your feet dry. The Darwins' faltering, then fatal, steps into consumer debt, and the middle-aged silliness about buying a £40,000 Range Rover with a personalised number plate, are the usual depressing fallout from the explosion of individualism. But the rest is not.
As observers, we should have the utmost sympathy for the awful experience of Mark and Anthony Darwin. Their parents chose crime over bankruptcy and cash over familial love. Ordinary lying is just plain ordinary. Fraud is just another crime. The big lie, however, is a terrible, destructive and, at heart, truly inscrutable act.
The full article contains 996 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
