In all probability, there wouldn’t have been a new investigatory powers bill without Edward Snowden and his Guardian revelations that galvanised change from the Obama administration and moved the whole issue of state surveillance centre stage in Britain. There wouldn’t have been specific clauses to safeguard the rights of journalists and doctors. And we wouldn’t have known, almost incidentally (to quote the Daily Mail), that MI5 “has been hoovering up our email and phone records while operating in a shady area of an outdated law” – in short, that this whole shady area needed drastic reform.
Has Theresa May pulled it off? Campaigners from Liberty to the UK Press Gazette have certainly played a vibrant role in moving her and evasive “authority” this far. (The extent to which the police were abusing feeble statute and hacking into journalists’ phone and database records was, and remains, a scandal.) But don’t expect Fleet Street to sing from the same hymn sheet, because this whole area of reporting and analysis is a terrible muddle. Here’s Max Hastings, chuntering away in the Mail on “state snooping and why I trust our spies more than apologists for treachery”. And here’s contemporaneous Mail comment on “The duplicity of Tony Blair and his cronies”: cronies like the senior spies who signed off on the dodgy Iraq dossier.
Either spying and secrecy are part of the problem of transparency and trustworthiness, or they’re not. Either Snowden played his part and ignited the issue, or it somehow self-ignited. Either you trust the latest reassurances from on high, or you don’t.
■ Mrs Merkel seems to offer Turkey a fast track to EU membership. And the EU commission, as represented by its enlargement supremo, the Austrian Johannes Hahn? He tells a conference that “media freedom is an essential pillar for our kind of society. It makes countries stronger … It goes hand in hand … with the rule of law and economic governance”. Are you listening, Turkey, because Mr Hahn was talking about you? (And, less buoyantly, once you’re in – like Hungary – will Brussels ever bother you again?)
