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.

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It is a curious, if familiar paradox that the most salacious of British national newspapers should also be the most judgmental. Wearing their self-righteousness like a Victorian maiden’s bonnet, they gleefully plaster their front page with all the unedifying intimate details of a subject’s sexual behaviour, in the interests of maximum titillation of their readers, while attempting to justify it as in the interest of the public.

The case between Max Mosley and the News of the World, heard last week in the High Court, has clearly demonstrated this hypocrisy. Yesterday in his closing submissions, their counsel, Mark Warby told the court how his clients had carefully counted the number of strokes/lashes Mosley had received in their covert video of the events. Their stable-mate, The Times, reported it all this morning, adding in a jocular tone that Mosley had also received “six of the best” with a martial arts cane.

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Last week the News of the World paid out a chunky sum to Jordan and Peter Andre for lying about their parenting skills. This week we learn that they have sent Cherie Blair a substantial sum for writing untruths about her relationship with Mrs Gordon Brown. And it could be that next week, they’ll be sending a jolly fat cheque to Max Mosley.

These are not the sort of additional costs a newspaper needs in difficult times like these, when advertising revenue is about to fall off the back of the truck. Will Master James, like the dominatrix he recently employed to set up Mosley, find it necessary to crack the whip? Will he chastise his staff for their wicked lying?

Whose backside will be striped with livid scars? “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck? Little Colin Myler? Or “Peeping Tom” Crone for letting them do it?

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On Thursday morning, watchers in Court 13 at the Royal Courts of Justice were buzzing at the prospect of hearing the next witness in Max Mosley v News of the Screws.

‘Woman E’ was the dominatrix who, with her husband had first approached the News of the World to tell them about an S&M orgy that was planned to happen at Max Mosley’s Chelsea basement.

Neville Thurlbeck (“Onan the Barbarian” – see blogs passim) was put in charge, and after discussing with her and his colleagues how best to exploit what they must have seen as a gift of a story, decided that, given Mosley’s parentage, a Nazi angle would be best.

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News of the World editor, Colin Myler, appeared in the High Court yesterday in the Max Mosley case. He followed a well established tradition among Screws editors of denying all knowledge of what his journalists are up to. In the same way that Andy Coulson claimed he had no idea former Royal editor, Clive Goodman was paying an (in-house) private investigator a cash bonus to tap the royal phones, Myler says he didn’t know that Neville (Onan the Barbarian) Thurlbeck was fitting up ‘Woman E’ (as she is referred to in the case) with a video camera to film Mosley’s private party. For goodness sake! How long has he known Onan Thurlbeck? He surely knew that Thurlbeck had agreed that Woman E would be receiving a large amount of money for helping to create the story – at least to embellish it enough to really destroy Mosley and his family’s feelings, thus meriting a front page splash.

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