Another confirmed phone-hacking vicitm who won’t be calling in the services of the High Court is Aussie super-body, Elle Macpherson. Why would she, when the Screws , in their tacky little Sunday mag, CRAPULOUS generously gave her a multi-page spread , with an elaborate photo-shoot and a healthy number of name checks for her range of knickers – Elle Macpherson Intimates? (There – she just got another one!)
 I dare say Ole Rumplechops (who’s right on top of this potentially disastrous embarrassment), encouraged a large ‘expenses’ cheque for her, too – almost certainly more than she’d have got from Mr Justice Eady for Invasion of Privacy (Max Mosely only got £60K by going to court, but the Screws paid c.£800k to make Gordon Taylor and his friends go away.) Max Clifford won’t come cheap, either. So the Screws may not have been nicked (yet) but it’s costing them plenty to keep out of the High Court, where they’d have to reveal all sorts of nasties. Poor Ole Rumplechops  – throwing all that money away when he’s so close to retirement.  

Pursuing the truth to the end will take strong principles and big bollocks –       
Who’s got ‘em?
Lembit Opik? Not really.
Boris Johnson? I doubt it.
Tessa Jowell? Who knows? (David Mills might.)
George Galloway? Let’s hope so.

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.

Most flagrant and gratuitous invasions of privacy are committed by tabloids who have an entirely different agenda from their distant cousins in the grown-up press, and yet in a bizarre alliance, incomprehensible to most outsiders, serious journalists continue to trumpet the rights of ShagRags to abuse this journalistic privilege.

La Frostrup goes on to say: “..only the likes of Max Mosley can afford to protect their ‘dignity’.” She should know that Conditional Fee Arrangements (CFAs), by which lawyers will act on no-win/no-fee bases, were made legal precisely to allow the non-rich to pursue otherwise prohibitively expensive libel suits.

His aim is to see law created that will prevent the loss of dignity that he has suffered, happening to other, sometimes less well-off British citizens. His own private cat is out of the bag and has bolted several times round the world since the News of the World posted their illegal video of his private S&M party on their unedifying website.

He makes the point that dignity, unlike your car or your wife’s jewellery, is uninsurable and, once stolen, can never be replaced.

However, although it will be too late to repair his own reputation, it is with great determination that he puts a strongly cogent case for making it legally mandatory for newspaper editors to inform targets of damaging stories acquired by breaches of privacy – at least one clear day before publication. This would give the victim a chance to seek a judge’s injunction, pending a full hearing into whether or not there is a public interest to justify the breach of privacy. If not, the story would never see the light of day, and private cats would stay in bags.

He makes it clear that he is well aware that parliamentary will to defy titans like News of the World Murdoch and Daily Mail Dacre is not yet well-developed. Nevertheless, he felt he should make the case as he prepares to sue the British Government for failing effectively to implement Clause 8 (the right to a private life) of the Human Rights Act by not offering a proactive defence to victims.

What is clear is that, having accepted that his own name has been damaged beyond repair by the almost universal airing of his private sexual preferences, there is not much to gain in all this for him. He is, he says, in the end convincingly, not pursuing these ends for himself. Any awards that may ultimately flow from further successful libel proceedings (in the UK, France and Italy) would be unlikely to justify the time, and the net costs to him of the whole process. But it seems if there’s one victim who can and will make a stand against ruthless tabloid invasion, then it’s Mosley, and he’s not going to shirk that responsibility.

Besides, he’s tasted victory in his first battle with the Screws, and it seems that now his blood is up, he’s rather enjoying the chase.

The point of concern is there is just one man making the law by setting a precedent sitting on his own. In a democracy that cannot be good for society. The point of having one solitary judge who is unelected and unaccountable who is setting a precedent in British law … I think a lot of people will be surprised that he sat alone in the Max Mosley case because there’s no jury in privacy cases.

She doesn’t know, apparently, that any judgements reached by Mr Justice Eady can be challenged in the Appeal Court and then the House of Lords, and she ignores the obvious truth that in 1998, Parliament after all due deliberation, passed the Human Rights Act, which grants citizens of the United kingdom “the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” And the European Convention on Human Rights, to which we are signatories, also declares, “Failure to respect an individual’s privacy can lead to distress and in certain circumstances can cause that individual real damage, mentally physically and financially. Privacy is in itself a value that needs protecting, even when the loss suffered is not readily quantifiable in terms of damage and distress.”

The Sun is not noted for its respect of individual privacy, and it deserves any chastisement it’s got coming to it.

And here’s a curious thing – if a jury in the Mosley trial had been composed of News of the World readers, a survey run by the paper itself, asking them specifically what they would have done if they’d been sitting on the case, showed that a good majority of those readers would have found for Max Mosley. So it looks like Eady’s decision reflected the public view.

The use of “Invasion”, in a way that is uncharacteristic of the Indie, gives an indication of the paper’s position as it sets out to describe how a number of American celebrities – Cameron Diaz, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, among others – who have been subjects of defamatory stories in the American press have found it more effective to sue these publications in Belfast or London, on the grounds that UK editions are available, or the information can be seen by British readers on the papers’ websites.

There are plenty of papers in the US making money by ripping into the private lives of celebrities. The relentless harassing of the troubled Britney Spears was a grisly sight, not far removed from the spectacle of Christians being munched in the Roman Colosseum. The greatest culprit, the National Enquirer makes our worst red-tops look almost sensible, but they are protected by the law in the US that considers any Public Figure a legitimate target, provided there is no malice involved, and that’s not hard to defend. So the victims are crossing the Atlantic in their search for fair treatment.

As a contribution to Great Britain’s overseas earnings, lawyers’ fees charged to foreigners pursuing compensation for libels issued by foreign publications is not enormous, but it is an unexpected and growing source of business for our legal profession.

When a new and unforeseen source of foreign earnings is identified, it is generally welcomed and talked up by the Press here. Not this time.

The UK Press, always touchy about any suggestion that it should be restrained in any way from doing exactly what it wants, have identified this trend as yet another sign that they are unfairly spancelled, compared with their counterparts in the Land of the Free.

The 1789 1st Amendment to the US Constitution firmly established the right of their Press to Freedom of Expression, and it has remained a fundamental icon of American liberty ever since, to the extent that it tends always to take precedence over the right, in US tort law, “of persons to recover damages or obtain injunctive relief for unjustifiable invasions of privacy, prompted by motives of gain, curiosity or malice.”

A similar tension exists here between Articles 8 [right to privacy] & 11 [right to freedom of expression] of the Human Rights Act, under which privacy cases tend to be fought in the UK.

Since the adoption of the HRA in 1998 several judgements have swung with the right to privacy. Naturally the press howl every time it happens. Recently, the Daily Mail launched an extraordinary attack on Mr Justice Eady after he’d found for Max Mosley against the News of the World – and they did this despite the likelihood that the great majority of Middle England Mail readers would have supported an individual’s right to privacy.

Even the Screws’ own survey of its readers, asking the question – “If a jury had sat on the Mosley trial, would it have come to the same conclusion as the judge sitting on his own?” produced a result of 65% in favour of the judgement (and the Guardian’s similar poll produced 75% in favour). In other words, it appears that the democratic will of the public is to favour the individual’s rights over those of the Press.

But the Press always howl, although they have not in any way forgone the right to publish stories about anyone, however intimate, provided that they are true and that they are “in the public interest”.

No fair-minded, balanced individual in this country would want a Press that was prevented from unearthing stories of genuine wrongdoing and damaging to the public, and it is, perhaps above all, a clear definition of “Public Interest” that should be established by statutory legislation when finally Parliament faces up to the British Press and considers statutory protection of their electorates’ privacy.

Mosley has suggested that he might use some of the proceeds of these libel actions (and it’s likely he’ll win several of them) to set up a fund so that those less rich than he could also pursue the Wapping lie-factory next time they transgress.

That’s generous and thoughtful, but it really should not be up to the private generosity of an individual who has received damages for having his reputation torn to shreds by the intrusive Screws. There should be in place a fund supported by the newspaper industry itself that will allow injured people to take the risk of suing those organs who have printed untruths about them. In cases where the individual won, it would anyway usually fall to the offending paper to pay the costs, so the fund wouldn’t be ultimately liable for a great deal.

Of course, frivolous, or potentially hopeless cases would have to be weeded out before they incurred heavy costs, but the judges could see to that.

Perhaps the PCC might consider pursuing this idea, but I doubt it.

The case could have been heard by judge and jury.

Perhaps the Screws, in defeat, feel that a jury might have come to another conclusion.

The Guardian, not a natural home for supporters of powerful motor-racing moguls conducted a poll among its readers, worded simply:

Max Mosley won his case against the News of the World today. The trial was held without a jury, so the decision rested solely with the judge, Mr Justice Eady. If there had been a jury do you think the outcome would have been the same?

The result:

Yes: 75.1%

No: 24.9%

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.