The Culture, Media, Sport Committee goes fishing for Eels.

Tom Crone is head legal honcho at News International where he’s worked for more than 25 years, as he proudly told the CMS Committee at an oral evidence session today. Crone is one of the country’s top media lawyers, quick on his toes, slippery as an eel and very hard to catch. He’d come along to hold the hand of Screws editor, little Colin Myler, former editor of the Catholic Pictorial in Liverpool and of the Sunday Mirror (from which he was forced to resign after derailing the trial of two Leeds United footballers).

Crone opened by telling the committee that they couldn’t talk about the most significant privacy case of the year, since Max Mosley has now followed up his successful suit for invasion of privacy by issuing a libel writ on the News of the Screws. That didn’t stop Crone referring back to it when it suited him in an attempt to justify his paper’s behaviour.

Once again, to defend their illegal filming of Mosley’s private life (and parts), he beat the tired old, slack-headed drum of Mosley’s ‘elected’ status as president of an international organisation which represents a 125 million people. He implied that this meant members of the AA and RAC had a right to know how he spent his private leisure time.

Colin Myler said that Mosley, as a public figure, had a duty to behave in a manner commensurate with his position; he was accountable for his behaviour and there were elements in Formula 1 who took exception to it.

No one on the committee pointed out that Mosley has since been re-elected as president for a fourth term, and what fallout there was centred on the publicity rather than the sexual activity.

Colin Myler ‘fundamentally disagreed’ with Mr Justice Eady’s description of Mosley’s behaviour as “unconventional”; it was much worse than that, he said  – it was immoral and depraved. But where, one wanted to ask, as self-appointed guardians of public morals, did the News of the World draw the line?

In Mosley’s case the other participants were adult, consenting and acting legally in private.

AHOY WAPPING! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Mr Myler is a member of the Catholic Church which holds that it is immoral to commit adultery or indulge in anal sex. Would he consider these activities worth reporting if committed by a ‘public’ figure – say, a prominent journalist?

He declared that any employee of the News of the World found having extra-marital sex on the premises would be dismissed. It’s lucky he wasn’t around in the Screws’ Bouverie Steet days where staff of both sexes regularly swapped experiences in the Animal Room.

Rather surprisingly –incredibly, even – he went on to tell the committee that he had only published an account of Mosley’s party and the video (for which he had agreed to pay £25,000) because it was a damned good story, although of no commercial benefit to the newspaper. And he thought it was a suitable story for a family newspaper which children could read over their breakfast cereal on a Sunday morning.

He accepted that stories like this could have catastrophic effects on the subjects, but contrary to an often quoted view, he said, the paper does not set out to destroy people’s lives. It was, he implied, the subject’s fault for dropping his trousers with insufficient discretion.

Besides, he went on with clunky logic, if the paper couldn’t publish stories like that, people wouldn’t buy it, the paper would run out of money and cease to exist. This was puzzling, given that he’d just told the committee there’d been no financial gain to the Screws in publishing the Mosley story. Perhaps he meant – after taking into account the £960,000 Mosley’s case eventually cost them.

It sounded like just more of the usual, hypocritical Wapping Shite that fills the pages of his Shag Rag every week.

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