Are you sitting comfortably fellow journalists? As we worry over the ethical problems about covering a war I want to tell you a story much closer to home, a story of our times, a story that shouldn't need to be told yet again.
Once upon a time - well, right now actually - there were these two young people. She is a lovely, happy-go-lucky woman, famous throughout the land. He is a personable, smart man, famous throughout what used to be called Fleet Street.
They have met only once, but fate has just brought them together again and the result has been deeply embarrassing for her and an enriching experience for him. It has also been another of those episodes which reflect poorly on the tabloid editorial agenda.
Let's begin with her story . . .
Sara Cox is a bright, bubbly, attractive woman who has emerged as one of Britain's most popular radio presenters. For 18 months she has hosted Radio 1's breakfast show, entertaining an audience of some 7m, and is therefore an object of fascination for tabloid papers and their readers.
She was well-known before that, having presented both TV and radio programmes while enjoying friendships with other high-profile personalities. She has had her moments in papers and magazines, posing for pictures and doing interviews, but she hasn't sought publicity in the style of a Tara Palmer-Tomkinson or a Victoria Hervey. Then again, she hasn't exactly been Greta Garbo either.
Cox has been pictured kissing boyfriends in public places and hanging out in nightclubs, living up to her reputation as a ladette. There was a photographic session for Loaded in which she was happy to pose sexily in scanty clothing.
Gradually, Cox showed that she was a sensible lass with enough talent to build a decent career in the entertainment business without becoming one of its victims. Her radio success has proved the point.
Her private life, long a matter of interest to the tabloids, has also settled down. After announcing earlier this year that she was to marry DJ Jon Carter, she told an interviewer: "I try to avoid showbusiness parties," explaining that she was now keen to avoid the limelight.
A couple of weeks ago Cox and Carter married and then flew off on honeymoon to what they thought was a secret destination.
Now, dear readers, it's time to meet the personable and smart young man . . .
Jason Fraser is 34, public school-educated, smartly-dressed, multi-lingual and unfailingly polite, even to me, his most persistent critic. He is a photographer who began taking pictures when he was 12 and landed his first scoop, a Miss World fur protest, when aged 15.
He didn't come to public attention until 1997 when, acting as agent for one of his paparazzi chums, he sold those famous pictures of Princess Diana kissing Dodi Al Fayed days before the couple were killed.
In the wake of their deaths the responsible press began to question the activities of the sneak photographers who haunt the world's beaches with their long lenses to take pictures of unsuspecting celebrities. Fraser, smooth as ever, decided to defend what he would call his craft.
Describing himself as "a professional photo-journalist", he wrote in the Guardian: "It is possible to take candid photographs of famous people in public and remain within the bounds of good taste, humour and decency."
He told another journalist he had a self-imposed moral code. "I like to be able to sleep at night ... I don't trespass on private property and I don't photograph on private property."
After I had pointed out to him that he was nothing more than a stalker and that many of his victims didn't like his intrusions into their privacy, he suggested that I was being naive. Did I not realise that most of the people he pictured colluded with him? Had I not noticed that there were few complaints about such pictures? Did I not know that no official complaint had ever stuck?
So Fraser went on snapping away from behind palm trees or selling the pictures of other paparazzi through his agency until March this year when, to the surprise of almost everybody in journalism, he accepted a post as executive editor at Express newspapers. It was rumoured that the owner, pornographer Richard Desmond, would pay Fraser £1m for bringing in his brand of sneaky celebrity pictures to the Daily and Sunday Express, Daily Star and OK! magazine.
Fraser's first contribution was a set of intrusive pictures of actors Emma Thompson and Greg Wise with their baby daughter on a beach in Cyprus. There was no collusion.
Fraser's photographic clients soon realised their earnings were going down because of his exclusivity deal with the Express and pressured him to give up his job. In July, after less than four months, he quit. He returned to his agency, and was soon in trouble. He sold pictures of the Harry Potter author JK Rowling with her eight-year-old daughter on a beach in Mauritius to OK!. Two weeks ago the press complaints commission (PCC) censured the magazine for intruding into the child's privacy. An official complaint had stuck.
Ok, so now we've met Sara and Jason, it's time to see how their lives intertwined . . .
Last Sunday, on the first three pages of the Sunday People, there were eight pictures of Cox on her honeymoon in the Seychelles. In seven of them she was naked. In a couple of them her husband, Carter, was also naked. It was obvious from the pictures that the newly-married couple were unaware that they were being photographed. Having paid a fortune to stay in a secluded villa on a private island they believed they were entirely alone. In the formal phrase of the editors' code of practice, they had "a reasonable expectation of privacy'.
These pictures were, by any standards, intrusive. Cox may have posed for sexy pictures years ago but she has never come close to doing nude shots. She was so outraged when her agent, Melanie Coupland, called her from London to tell her about them that she burst into tears.
Coupland immediately took legal steps to prevent the pictures from being resold and called the PCC to say Cox would be making a formal complaint.
The byline on the pictures was Eliot/Jason Fraser. Fraser had not taken the pictures. He had discovered, "through contacts", where Cox was going on honeymoon and realised one of his photographers was in the Seychelles with his fiancée.
It isn't possible to land on the island where Cox was holidaying unless one is a guest willing to spend at least five nights in a villa. Fraser, aware that pictures of Cox would be lucrative, persuaded the photographer to pay up and take a villa. That enabled him to hide in the thick undergrowth and snap pictures of Cox and Carter as they used their outdoor jacuzzi.
Once the pictures were wired back to Fraser he sold them to Sunday People editor Neil Wallis. But why did Wallis, one of the editors who serves on the PCC and who knows every word and nuance of the code of practice, dare to publish them?
Now, I'm afraid, comes the really sordid bit of the story . . .
Wallis's justification appears to have three separate strands. First, his understanding that the pictures were taken from a public beach because, as far as he understood it, all beaches in the Seychelles are public. He obviously wasn't aware that the whole island is private. Second, he was convinced that Cox and Carter had previously colluded with Fraser in what we might call "fake paparazzi" pictures. A year ago the News of the World carried pictures of the couple on a Barbados beach. According to Fraser, who was on the island specifically to picture the couple, he knocked on their hotel door, handed them a bottle of champagne, asked to do a set of pictures, they took five minutes to think about it and agreed.
According to Cox's agent, what actually transpired was that Fraser put the couple under great pressure. He said he would haunt them for the rest of their holiday unless they agreed to pose for him. They would spend their days looking over their shoulders wondering if they were being photographed.
Wouldn't it be better for them if they got the ordeal over with, posing hand in hand and paddling in the sea. They then agreed - though the pictures, it must be said, do not suggest any sign of reluctance.
Wherever the truth lies, doesn't one obvious hole in the Fraser story immediately spring to mind? If the couple had happily connived with him a year ago why wouldn't they do so again? Why didn't he tell his snapper to buy them a bottle of bubbly and pose all over again?
I know that certain very famous people have colluded with Fraser but he must not be allowed to smear those who haven't done so.
Wallis's third rationalisation, a common one among tabloid editors when confronted by complaints from celebrities, is that Cox has courted the press. She has posed for raunchy pictures, talked of her sex life and played the wild child. As another tabloid editor told me: "Sara Cox isn't JK Rowling or Anna Ford. She's a rock chick, a creature of our papers."
So, adding up the three strands, with the pictures in front of him and only a couple of hours to go to deadline, Wallis made a bad call.
It doesn't wash with me. It's surely obvious that the pictures were taken without Cox's consent and the defence about people "using" newspapers is highly suspect. Cox's recent track record suggests she wised up to that long ago and has acted sensibly since.
Wallis yesterday published an apology for having caused the couple "unhappiness and distress". "I certainly never intended to upset Sara," he says. "I gave it a lot of thought before I published and I genuinely believed they were taken from a public beach."
He also knows that other journalists disapprove of what he did. By chance, at a party last week, Wallis bumped into News International chairman Les Hinton, who also happens to be chairman of the PCC's code committee. They are good friends but it didn't restrain Hinton from haranguing Wallis, saying at one point: "You're a fucking idiot for buying those pictures."
I was reminded that Wallis himself is often to be found hiding in bushes because his hobby is birdwatching. That may raise a smile, even from Cox, but there is little to laugh about in this silly episode. Imagine if the ingenuity used by Fraser and his photographers to do this kind of work was used to show us what is happening in Afghanistan?
Then again, would our tabloid papers ever spend the resources on that kind of journalism?
