When a friend asked me what I thought of the “celebrity threesome” story which has been making so much money for overpaid lawyers I confessed that I didn’t even know who it was supposed to be about and hadn’t tried to find out. So my pal told me. BORING!! Everyone knows about it in the US, Scotland, Sweden and China, goes the outraged cry. Yes, but do they care?
It’s obvious from erudite graphs of online traffic and explosions of indignation at the “gagged” end of Fleet Street that not everyone shares my lack of enthusiasm. Twitter has made harmless fun of the high court injunction against publishing names, since lifted by the appeal court from Wednesday at 1pm, unless the supreme court takes up the case.
Until the process is complete, trio speculation continues on social media: it includes that photo of Cameron, Ashdown and Kinnock together at a pro-EU phone bank, another of Ed Miliband at dinner with the Clooneys. My favourite remains Sooty and Sweep with a girl puppet whom I recognise even less than I would “PJS” of temporary injunction fame.
I’m still vague about the details of who did what to whom in PJS’s case and hope no gerbils were involved. But so far as I can tell the driving force behind the deployment of expensive lawyers to lift the ban seems to be circulation (of course), salacious curiosity and wanton cruelty. The much vaunted “public interest” seems nowhere in sight.
Most of us will move on (or not) to the next randy footballer or “celebrity threesome”, leaving behind only the possible wreck of a marriage and damage to innocent young lives. Privacy vfreedom of expression are high flown abstract concepts. The tangible reality of these cases is often as miserable as the average magistrates court which is more tragic than wicked. How could the accused be so stupid?
Two issues arise. One is the use of super injunctions to prevent media kiss and tell stories, also more serious issues such as Trafigura v the Guardian , cases where no mention of the existence of the injunction is routinely a stipulation of the court. That’s pretty unhealthy, even in sordid sex cases, playthings of the rich and powerful, but also often self-defeating in such a wired world as ours.
Would the press barons’ conspiracy to keep secret Edward VIII’s affair with Mrs Simpson in 1936 work today? Hard to imagine it. For some years now the media technique has been to build up the pressure until the legal dam bursts, sometimes justified, sometimes not. This case may prove the death knell for celebrity injunctions, some analysts predict.
The second issue is what the affair tells us about the attitudes of the press since the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, assorted phone hacking trials and the parallel but related trials of tabloid reporters (mostly acquitted on public interest defence grounds) and the public officials they paid to leak information (mostly convicted, I fear).
Freed from its Lib Dem shackles the government has gone cold on the promised second part of the Leveson inquiry, rightly so, I suspect, and on the royal charter-backed model of regulation it devised and legislated for in response to public indignation which has (mostly) since subsided. It hopes the press’s own regulatory mode, Ipso, will prove popular and effective, but the royal charter model remains an option while a third one, Impress, has recently been joined by the Guardian’s former reader’s editor, Chris Elliott. This newspaper has not yet signed up to any of them.
So we are all in a “phoney war” stage like 1939-40, waiting for something to happen. Meanwhile my tabloid friends and colleagues – at Westminster you work cheek by jowl with the opposition in a rabbit warren of rooms below Big Ben – are adamant that they have cleaned up their act since Leveson.
Any story that smacks of intrusion against privacy rights is fretted over and lawyered. It’s time-consuming and frustrating, they say. They cite stories which have never got into print (“the prominent MP with a 22-year-old girlfriend”) because the lawyers said no. They protest against opportunist attempts to sue them for phone hacking when the information published came from a legitimate source. Remember, the Sun didn’t do phone hacking, as its Sunday sister, the News of the World, and other rivals did. Why? Because so many readers rang it with tips for free.
I can believe most of that. But it’s hard to square the tabloids’ much vaunted (“no public interest”) restraint in John Whittingdale’s case – have you forgotten the “dominatrix” girlfriend already ? – with the concerted effort to out PJS and his/her bedfellows? My own suspicion was that there must have been at least some calculation about the MP’s then role as chairman of the media select committee, before he became the cabinet’s culture secretary in 2015.
The redoubtable Roy Greenslade, Daily Mirror editor turned professor of journalism, disagreed – he sets it out very fairly here and here – as did the Guardian’s editorial. But we all agreed that the privacy lobby, Hacked Off, had made an idiot of itself by condemning the press for not invading Whitto’s privacy.
The eagerness with which the Mail on Sunday exposed the minister’s other girlfriend, an ex-page three model, has not yet persuaded me I was wrong. The spurious justification offered was that Whitto showed off by sending her photos of a cabinet weekend at Chequers and waving “important” letters at her over breakfast while wearing a blue kimono. Whitto, not the lady.
Unsurprisingly, Simon Danczuk MP, the Rochdale child abuse crusader whose own love life later got the treatment, is puzzled too. Suspended for “sexting” with a teenager, the MP told BBC 2’s Victoria Derbyshire this week that he couldn’t fathom why his behaviour is fair game, but Whittingdale got an easy run for his affair with a sex worker.
It looked like a pretty obvious visit to the favours bank for Danczuk too, a suspicion reinforced by the zeal with which the Daily Mail is going after F1’s Max Mosley for funding the putative but puny regulator, Impress. Mosley, you may not recall, was stitched up by a NoW “ sick Nazi orgy” story which you only had to read to realise that the Nazi angle needed to plead public interest was bogus. He had the guts and money to sue and win. It was the paper’s sources who got screwed, often the case.
In the Whittingdale sex worker story, the source touting the story was apparently asking for proper money, £20,000 or £30,000, it depends which version you hear. Money is short in the newspaper business. They decided it wasn’t worth it. Yet the PJS case was. Indeed, it was only when the Sunday Sun rang Leveson-style to check their allegations with PJS that they were hit with the injunction. Righteous indignation in Fleet St.
The tabloids do some great stuff, lots of it genuinely in the public interest. I just wish they were as rigorous in examining their own behaviour as they are in making a good expose watertight. I’ve been more impressed by the Panama Papers and last week’s spotlight shone on sharp business practices adopted by the US private equity owners of Boots the chemist. Oh yes, and there’s this terrific expose. My favourite remains Sooty and Sweep in Tuesday’s edition.
These stories sometimes get picked up by Fleet Street’s heavy mob. But self-congratulation is another thing the tabloids hate about self-righteous broadsheets. So I’ll stop here.
