When Max Mosley sued the News of the World for invasion of privacy last July, and won, Paul Dacre’s paper launched a vicious personal attack against Mr Justice Eady, the High Court judge who made the ruling. He ordered his hacks to write pages of frothy-mouthed vindictive in which the judge’s personal life was attacked from every angle. It was disturbing to witness a full-grown man behaving like a small child who thought someone was trying to take away his favourite toy. (see my blog post: “Why are the Mail backing the Screws?” July 27th.)

The papers for which Dacre is responsible, the Mail and the Mail on Sunday rival the News of the World in their lust for the blood of wounded celebrities. The Mail on Sunday in particular, under the specious guise of Guardian of the Moral Values of Middle England, loves to get down and dirty among the private traumas of the rich and famous.

Yesterday at the Society of Editors Annual Conference in Bristol, Dacre once again put his marker down. He attacked Mr Justice Eady for applying the Human Rights Act, which was drafted by the British, adopted by Europe and incorporated into British Law 10 years ago. He expressed concern ‘that Justice Eady is ruling that, when it comes to morality, the law in Britain is effectively neutral’ – which is exactly as it should be in the view of any democratically minded thinker.

As Dacre knows only too well, and will apply when it suits his case, personal morality, which is largely subjective, is no business whatever of National Government. You should hear him, for instance, on the subject of Sharia Law.

In a display of classic Mail weaselly disingenuousness, he claims that the HRA is in some clandestine way being used to impose a privacy law, ‘allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds’ – ignoring the fact that at no stage has the defence of ‘Public Interest’ been diminished. Any story that reveals criminal activity or exposes hypocrisy is as immune as it ever was from legal privacy strictures.

Mr Dacre challenged Gordon Brown to try to create a more specific law against invasion of privacy, while admitting that the last time the government tried to tighten up on offences of this type by introducing a clause to jail journalists convicted of data theft, they were pounced on and lobbied mercilessly by News International and Associated Newspapers – the two organisations who most depend on the freedom to pry into individual privacy. He claimed that Mr Brown was ‘sympathetic to the industry’s case’.

How about, ‘sympathetic to the idea of getting an easier ride in their papers’?

We, individual citizens of the United Kingdom, urgently need greater protection of our privacy, both from prying newspapers, like Paul Dacre’s, and from prying Government, who seek to store vast quantities of data about our phone calls and emails. And, paradoxically – hypocritically, you could say – no national newspapers get more heated in their antagonism against such government prying than Mr Dacre’s.