It’s surprising to see the Telegraph running to the support of the News of the World. To non-journalists, this brotherhood among those who write for the nation’s newspapers is puzzling. The DT and the NoW, on the face of it, have such different motives in their investigation of individuals’ private lives.

The aim of the News of the World is to fill its pages with prurient tattle about rich and influential people, whether businessmen or movie stars.

The Telegraph’s aim purports to be to investigate and report on genuine issues of public concern. In siding with the News of the World against Thursday’s judgment in the Mosley case, they cited four other stories which wouldn’t have been brought to light if the kind of restrictions on invasion of privacy implicit in Mr Justice Eady’s judgment had been in place.

Of the four [Prescott, Mellor, Archer and Lord Browne], only the revelations about Jeffrey Archer could be deemed to be in the public interest as defined by the PPC’s Editors’ Code of Conduct, since Mr Archer’s cruising for sex was an illegal act. What is more, it did not constitute an invasion of privacy, since, with cavalier lack of discretion, he carried out negotiations with the prostitute involved in a public street.

I can see no way in which the revelations about John Prescott and his secretary, David Mellor and Antonia de Sancha, or Lord Browne and his former boyfriend were of any benefit to the public, or of material concern to them (other than prurience and possibly Schadenfreude). To some degree it can be shown to have been positively detrimental to the public good – in for instance one of our largest companies losing one of its most able chief executives.

Newspapers publish these stories because, they claim, a section of the public like reading them and buy the papers. But there is something deeply obnoxious and disingenuous about journalists on the News of the World preaching to the nation about moral standards, when they are effectively, by their continued exposure of the private misdeeds of celebrities, endorsing and encouraging precisely this kind of behaviour in younger more impressionable readers.

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