With a characteristic flourish of hyperbole, twisted logic and demi-truth the Sun proclaims that

“Yesterday was a dark day for British freedom.”

Their sister ShagRag, the News of the World has just been ordered to pay £60,000 in damages and £200,000 in costs to Max Mosley. That was a lot more than their legal boss, Tom Crone had bargained for and everyone in Wapping is feeling jumpy.

They say: “A judge representing power and privilege laid down the law on what newspapers can write about powerful and privileged public figures.”

In fact a judge interpreting the law ruled that to promise to pay a woman £25,000 to film events in a private dwelling in which a number of consenting and willing adults were engaged in unconventional sex constituted a clear breach of privacy, and awarded accordingly.

Would Ms Rebekah Wade feel comfortable if I sent round a covert crew to film her and her current beau engaged in, say, fellatio? Probably not, but then, by her standards, she couldn’t object if I put it up on this site, so that the public could see in graphic detail what the editor of a major selling national newspaper did in private in her spare time.

But the law as interpreted by Mr Justice Eady, maintains that an individual has “a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to sexual activities (albeit unconventional) carried on between consenting adults on private property.”

It is not in any way implicit that only the powerful and privileged have this right. But naturally, newspapers like the Sun are only concerned with the sex lives of “celebrities”, many of whom could be described as powerful and privileged (whatever they mean by that), so it is only they who need to seek protection from the courts against invasion of their privacy by the Sun and the Screws.

The Sun’s contention that British Freedom has been affected one jot by yesterday’s ruling is quite untenable.

Astonishingly, other more serious (more intelligent) journalists have squealed the same, though why they should want to support their fellow red top hacks beats me – unless it’s a manifestation of the old journalistic freemasonry that binds them together.

The simple truth is that the freedom for journalists to report genuine news is as much intact as it has ever been. “Public Interest” is a clear defence for offences involving any kind of privacy invasion.

Tom Crone (is his job on the line?) desperately declared outside the court that because umpteen million people had voted for Max Mosley to remain President of the FIA (which of course isn’t true – representatives of a handful or organisations voted), they have the right to know about his sex life, and he feigned a Victorian primness over what he described as the depravity of it – like the Marquis of Queensberry wanting to horse-whip Oscar Wilde on the steps of his club for being a ‘Sodomite’.

If Max Mosley had been engaged in a whipping session with say, Osama Bin Laden’s daughter, or Pol Pot’s niece or Mr Putin’s personal dominatrix, or if the girls were underage and had been brought in by a human trafficking organisation, a public interest defence would, of course, have been justified.

In fact, the Sun should be crowing (and perhaps they are in the privacy of Fortress Wapping) because somehow they managed to persuade the judge that they didn’t make up the Nazi element of the story, (they would have been hit with punitive damages if he’d believed they did invent it), when the story had all the hallmarks of a Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck piece of prurient fiction. Thurlbeck’s an old gland at spotting a juicy spin to a story, and when his informant came to him with news of the planned session, his lightening mind quickly made the connection: Mosley=Nazi. It was clear to all of us listening to his stumbling, contradictory evidence in court that he’d set up his informant, the dominatrix known as Woman E, to extract what Nazi elements she could, and diddled her out of half the money when she didn’t deliver.

You could conclude that

“A judge representing power and privilege saved the powerful and privileged Rupert Murdoch at least a million quid.”

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