TIME TO CLOSE THAT SALOON
The press's victims need the protection of the law, not Lord Wakeham's popgun, says Earl Spencer
LORD WAKEHAM and Virginia Bot- tomley have reached the same sorry con- clusions about the press as others in their respective positions have before. They must have our sympathy for their impo- tence, but at the same time they must be condemned for perpetuating the falsehood that the newspapers in this country are the best bodies to regulate . . . the newspapers in this country. No doubt the Press Com- plaints Commission supremo and the Her- itage Minister are sincere in their wish for the newspaper industry to bring itself under control but, as Lord Waddington and David Mellor could have told them, their wishes will come to nothing. What Mr Mellor called the 'Last Chance Saloon' must have unusually outsized cellars, for there can be no other reason why it was not drunk dry years ago.
The truth is, of course, that the Govern- ment is aware that the PCC is but a minor irritant to the bully-boys of the gutter press, and that it is no regulator, neither is it an effective deterrent to unacceptable practices. While the Spanish courts send a reporter and a private detective to prison for tapping the telephone lines of one of their prince's alleged girlfriends, the British public wallows in the Duchess of York's private telephone calls, sold by a woman she mistakenly believed to be there to help her, but who was clearly only interested in helping herself from the tabloid trough.
Lord Wakeham calls on 'the industry' to improve itself. As is common PCC pol- icy, even when presented with ammuni- tion to attack the worst excesses of British journalism in the form of the hoax video pictures reproduced by the Sun, he ends his popgun attack with an apology that smacks of the spinelessness of a school- master who has caught the school bully peddling drugs, but praises him for stop- ping glue-sniffing. To quote from his epis- tle to the Times, 'I have always been the first to praise the industry, which has made tremendous strides in the last few years in raising standards. I know they will rise to the new challenge.'
Lord Wakeham's PCC is simply inade- quate. His recent plea underlines this point, which has been evident ever since the PcC replaced the risible Press Coun- cil. David Calcutt, whose Privacy Com- mittee published its report over six years ago, never intended the PCC to take on the parlous state of the newspaper indus- try single-handed. Calcutt recommended a three-pronged attack, of which the PCC was to be just one part. The most blatant forms of physical intrusion — door-step- ping, bugging, the use of long-range cam- eras — were to have been outlawed at once. A tort of infringement of privacy was not to be introduced immediately, but was to come into effect if the tabloid practices persisted. In 1993, when review- ing the performance of the PCC, Calcutt stressed that it was not the Privacy Com- mittee's view that a statutory tort of infringement of privacy was impractica- ble, but that it was not then appropriate — the press were to be given one last chance to prove that self-regulation could work.
Three years on, Lord Wakeham has underlined that the time for fudging has ended. The Government must acknowl- edge the need to protect the right of the individual against hugely powerful destructive forces. It must concede that it has already undertaken to protect its citi- zens from such abuses, but has feebly stood by, frozen by moral cowardice and self-interest.
And so the challenge for most of Britain's tabloids remains the same: to ensure that British subjects remain unpro- tected by any law of privacy. The brutalis- ing of their favourite gallery of stock characters must continue for the delecta- tion of a readership who cannot possibly understand what it is like to have one's private life held up to millions, distorted, sensationalised, and minced into bite- sized mouthfuls of mendacity. Anyone who has gone through it will tell you of the symptoms, which are usually the com- panions of severe shock and bereave- ment: the inability to think straight, the tears, the insomnia, the sense of isola- tion. Fortunately, being 'turned over by the tabloids' is an experience few will ever suffer, but the stress factor is up there with death, divorce, and moving house. Indeed, the latter seems truly triv- ial in comparison.
Lord Wakeham also complains that those abused by the press do not go to his Commission for redress. Why should they? There is no logical reason why anyone should, for what is the outcome of a complaint? Maybe, after lodging it, and after having been sniped at repeatedly by the defending newspaper as it tries to seek justification through 'the public interest' loophole, or some other devious exploitation of the sound principle that the press should have its freedoms, the paper will be found against. What then? Rarely an apology; more likely a small, dull, wordy and weightless adjudication, quoted verbatim, which will be read by almost nobody — unlike the offending article or photograph, which will have had a banner headline and the usual con- coction of the sub-editor's and the pic- ture editor's art to draw as many people's attention to it as possible.
The newspaper concerned will have lost a tiny amount of credibility, but the proprietor will not, except in the gravest examples, have suffered at all: his profits will have remained unimpaired. The cha- rade of occasionally having to bow to the PCC is as nothing when compared to the threat of a privacy law which would ham- string the highly profitable business of butchering people's souls.
Perhaps you are beginning to wonder whether I am overstating the effect of having one's private life pored over by strangers. Well, if that is the case, why have we not been treated to snippets about Murdoch, Rothermere, Stevens and Black? Granted, Daily Mail staff occasion- ally get called upon to write sycophantic pap about scions of the Rothermere fami- ly getting married, or whatever — but what about serious insights into the pri- vate worlds of these massively powerful figures, whose foibles, in that they might affect the way in which news is presented to hundreds of millions of people, could be justified as being 'in the public inter- est'? Of course, there is rarely a mention. The proprietors ensure that their own lives remain private, not only in the organs they control, but also by agree- ment — spoken or unspoken, it is not rel- evant — in the ones they compete with. They understand, more than anyone, the sacredness of retaining some part of your life as private.
The irony of the debate about the pri- vacy law is that there should already be one. The Government is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 8 (1) provides that 'every- one has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his corre- spondence'. Article 13 requires there to be an effective remedy for violations of an individual's rights under the Convention. The Government, therefore, has failed in its duties as a signatory, thus leaving all Britons shorn of a basic human right.
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