New Dimensions in Privacy Law

"Well you can ask that, but lets put it this way: Everybody says the press shouldn’t report on that sort of thing. This is why everybody reads the Times and the Telegraph, because we’re all high-minded individuals. [Laughs.] The serious papers don’t have the highest circulations. Which ones do? The ones that publish the stuff that people want to read! Like it or lump it, they want to read about it. There are a lot of celebrities who’ve made their living by achieving status as a celebrity. That’s how they’ve done it; that’s how they’ve made a lot of money. You might think that’s a good or a bad thing. It might do! It depends. You see, a lot of it hinges on the Max Mosley case and there are a number of practical difficulties with that. Suppose you had, take a completely hypothetical example, a minister for families and it turns out that he’d been going to brothels or something. Does that affect the way he does his job? Can he argue that the way he conducts his private life doesn’t impinge on the way he does his job? Should he be given an injunction to stop the newspaper from publishing that? Is it public interest? Now according to the European Court of Human Rights is that the highest level of free speech is speech about politics and politicians. When you mix the politics, politicians and the man’s personal life then it’s going to start coming back down the line. The problem is that courts in this country seem to be saying that personal life will outlive the media’s right to free speech. Andrew Caldecott [QC] made a very good point at a conference I attended. He said: the problem with the European Court of Human Rights in the Princess Caroline case is that they either ignored or discarded a lots of the arguments put forward by the German government. In many ways, Princess Caroline is something of a role model for people just as footballers are role models or even people who go on reality TV shows are role models. What he was saying was that people don’t only want to read worthy newspapers about politics and politicians, they want to read about the other people that come into their lives. We’ve got all these ways of communicating, of sending information – think about it the Internet today. The news of Michael Jackson’s death went round the world faster over the internet than through any other medium. Given the amount of all this information sloshing about, you can’t just say it should be protected as private."