Paul Dacre’s conference on Thursday, once the Max Mosley v News of the World judgment had been handed down, must have been as rambunctious as they come. He ordered an all-out 5-page, sixteen gun broadside against the judge in the case, Mr Justice Eady and all he stood for. The judge is to be the victim of a campaign that will see him intimidated and harried until he loses the urge to make judgments that don’t match the thinking of the Nation’s greatest middle-England organ, and the thoughts of Chairman Dacre.

Star scribbler, witty, biting Quentin Letts was told to lead the attack.

Quentin, like me, is an inhabitant of the Welsh Marches, one of an eclectic gathering of working scribblers who enjoy the peaceful congeniality that prevails on the borders between Herefordshire, Shropshire and mid-Wales – a charming man, with a lovely, witty wife and sparkling kids. But Dacre had spoken, and Quentin, perhaps a little reluctantly, drew his pen from its scabbard and laid in with an extraordinary lambast against the hard-working conscientious judge who has ended up having to do what the members of our House of Commons do not have the temerity to do – to take on the combined might of the major press corporations.

First, it must be clearly seen that the screams of foul play emanating even from more stately organs like the Telegraph are simply unfounded.

The Sun slipping into indignant, pompous mode, simply howled:

Yesterday was a dark day for British freedom.

This, of course, is as hypocritical and disingenuous as ever, and utter nonsense.

The right of a journalist to pursue, by whatever means, and publish a story of genuine public interest will always be supported by precisely that justification and valid legal defence against charges of privacy invasion or any other covert methods of news-gathering.

It is true that it will be less easy to publish unimportant, intrusive stories of individuals’ private activities, whose exposure almost always causes more public harm than benefit (unless you consider satisfying the public thirst for prurience beneficial). There is no conceivable reason why this should be deemed a bad thing. It will mean that editors will have to be a little more selective in their targets, which will certainly inconvenience the tabloids who fill many inches with salacious, inaccurate, and hurtful dross about celebrities with whom they have become bored.

This includes the Mail, whose editor is damned if he’s going to let some jumped up member of the judiciary, who (rather like a lot of Mail readers) lives, according to Letts, “a life of hermetically respectability in Kent in a four-bedroomed house with a large garden and orchard … which stands apart, surrounded by fields remote from nearby houses.” Beyond these alarming indications, Quentin tells us that “Eady is not a club men. He has a loner’s streak, preferring sobriety to conviviality …and he would rather go home to tend his roses in Tenterden than gossip with colleagues.”

Golly! What a cad!

Because the judge has refrained from make moral judgements (which is not what he is employed to do) Letts goes on, “As cold a frozen haddock, [sounds more Littlejohn than Letts], he hands down his views shorn of any moral balance.”

The man is a judge, not a bishop.

Letts is quite right in telling his readers that it is Parliament who should be addressing this pressing issue of privacy invasion, but has he forgotten that only this spring as the government included a fully debated and ratified clause in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act which increased the maximum penalty for information gathering by data theft, from a fine (usually paid by a journalist’s employer) to a jail sentence of up to 2 years, his newspaper and News International lobbied so hard that the clause was neutered and transmuted to a mere order-giving power for some future home secretary (if ever there is one with the fortitude to take that on) to reintroduce.

So much for Parliamentary Democracy.

And it was the Mail who howled at the granting of rights to Local Authorities to use technical surveillance techniques to check on families thought to be lying on school applications for their children. But they support the News of the World using the same techniques to write up smutty stories to encourage people to buy their papers.

Dual Standards and Hypocrisy reign – as ever – in Grub Street.

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