Privacy and the Media

"You can’t say, as the European Courts says – at least I don’t think you can or should – that people, despite having actively encouraged the degree of publicity they receive, should then ask for protection whenever they decide that they want it. It’s usually when something unpleasant about them is written that they want protection. You look at what this government is doing, and what the European Union wants to do! Every phone call is being logged. Every email you send is being logged; they know whom you’re sending it to, they know when you’re sending it and where you’re sending it from. All your mobile calls are logged, all your landline calls, all your internet calls are being logged. The government wants a huge great identity database with all sorts of DNA, photographs, fingerprints all this kind of stuff. They’re already doing it to us. I live in a small town in Surrey and I can’t walk about town without being filmed by at least two cameras. I go into my local pub and there are CCTV cameras. I go into the local shops and I can see my bald head shining on the CCTV camera. We are being spied on all the time and nobody’s noticed it. There’s only one problem. If I was, for example, Sienna Miller, I don’t think it would be unreasonable to suggest that in some ways Ms. Miller has asked for a degree of the publicity she’s received. I’m not quite sure that she can complain that there’s been an invasion of her privacy. Well, there are a number of well-known celebrities who are not in the paparazzi pages all the time. If someone like Jordan wants to go to a nightclub and have far too much to drink, that’s her business. If she wants to throw up on somebody’s front that’s her business as well. It’s not the sort of thing I want to write about, but it’s not to say that people aren’t interested in reading about what people like Jordan get up to or what people like Sienna Miller get up to. If you think about people doing these things in the public eye, going around courting publicity which so many of them actively do, you have to remember – as Mr. Justice Munby warned a couple in a case not long ago – “publicity and public identification is a two edged sword”. It might backfire. I don’t think anybody ever learns this. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The problem is that if you have a free press, there comes with it a certain discomfort. If you look at the overall quality of the British press, I think it’s actually very high. Yes, there are people who get it wrong, but how many stories do you read everyday in where you think, “they have no right to publish that”? How many stories do people read, really, where they think, ‘they shouldn’t have published that?” I think it was Voltaire who said: “I might not agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.” The trouble is that we want a free press but only ‘our kind’ of free press and you can’t have that. You can only let the press get on with it and hope that they have a certain amount of integrity, self-respect and so on and so forth and that they are prepared to give that to other people. And once in a while you will get people getting it wrong"