CRAIG BROWN: Why can’t Yoko Ono forgive the man who shot John Lennon?

Fifty-five years ago, newlyweds John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent a week in bed in the presidential suite of the Amsterdam Hilton.

A few days earlier they had sent a card with the text: ‘Come to John and Yoko’s honeymoon: a bed-in, Amsterdam Hotel’.

Every day they opened the bedroom door to hundreds of journalists and camera crews and sat up in bed to give interviews. It was particularly populated during honeymoons.

‘We have spoken to the press. We met people from the communist countries, people from the West – every country in the world,” John recalled. “We gave the press every day, every waking hour, eight hours to ask any question they wanted about our position.”

This week-long honeymoon ‘bed-in’ was part of their campaign for world peace. ‘It’s the best idea we’ve had so far.

We are doing a commercial for peace on the front pages of newspapers around the world instead of a commercial for war,” John said. “We’re trying to sell peace, as a product, and like people sell soap or soda.”

Some of their stricter visitors asked them in-depth questions about their pacifist position; some of their responses were astonishingly insensitive and selfish.

When a reporter asked her how she would have dealt with the threat of Hitler, Yoko replied, “I would have slept with him.” Within ten days I would have changed my mind.’

Not everyone was convinced. Even some of the Beatles’ biggest fans appeared skeptical.

“Underneath the apparently selfless holy folly… was a core of exhibitionist self-promotion,” wrote Ian MacDonald in his masterful book The Beatles, Revolution In The Head.

Despite John and Yoko’s bedridden efforts, the Vietnam War would continue for another six years. Undeterred, Yoko Ono remains firmly convinced that together they changed the world for the better.

In a 1988 interview with Tom Hibbert, she made the surprising boast that she and John were the only two people in the world at the time who embraced peace.

‘At first John and I were completely alone in what we said, the only ones – but now, I think, 98 percent of the world is really for peace… In the end, you see, it did have an effect. Last year, when Reagan and Gorbachev had their summit and shook hands, I felt that John and I were making an impact. In my mind I said to John: John, we did it!’

Fifty-five years later, Yoko Ono is 91 years old and the subject of a celebratory exhibition at Tate Modern.

The critics have fallen over each other in their headlong rush to celebrate her “genius.”

This is reminiscent of Alan Bennett’s comment that ‘if you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize’.

Meanwhile, her husband’s killer, Mark Chapman, is locked up in prison in New York. He has been incarcerated for the past 44 years. He is released on parole every two years; every two years Yoko Ono instructs her lawyers to oppose it.

If Chapman were released, she says, “I and John’s two sons wouldn’t feel safe for the rest of our lives; people in positions of high visibility and outspokenness, like John, would also feel unsafe.”

She adds that John Lennon’s murder “changed my entire life, devastated his sons and brought deep sadness and fear into the world.”

Earlier this month, Chapman was denied parole for the thirteenth time; it now seems inevitable that he will die in prison.

Of course, there will be those who say that what Chapman did was unforgivable, and that it is only right that he should spend the rest of his life behind bars.

This is a natural human response. Nevertheless, Yoko Ono spent her entire life publicly preaching forgiveness and urging the rest of us to follow the path of love and peace.

In Northern Ireland and South Africa, ordinary people who have suffered terrible family losses have somehow managed to forgive their enemies, all in the pursuit of peace.

As John Lennon sang on Mind Games, “Love is the answer.” Isn’t it time for Yoko Ono to practice what she has been preaching for a long time?