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When Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran in 1980, Henry Kissinger looked at the two ghoulish combatants and said: "It's a pity they can't both lose."
I feel the same about the battle in the High Court between Max Mosley and the News of the World before Mr Justice Eady.
On the one hand, we have Mosley barking out orders in German to women dressed as prisoners. His QC, James Price, claimed: "Most people probably think S& M behaviour - spanking, bondage, whipping role-play like doctors and nurses, sheikhs and harems and guard and prisoners - is harmless."
Most people? Maybe anything goes in Price's Grays Inn chambers but I suspect that "most people" are still naïve enough to find the idea of Mosley paying £35,000 to set up a dominatrix in a "torture chamber" faintly shocking.
But then against Mosley is the News of the World, which displays the morals of a blackmailer and deploys the tools of a secret policeman. Can anyone apart from its lawyers pretend that it was serving the public interest when it set up honey traps, bugs and hidden cameras in a Chelsea flat? Mosley's sexual tastes may make for salacious reading but they have nothing to do with his ability to run motor racing.
Yet it would be hugely against the public interest if he won his case. British judges have already made our libel courts a national embarrassment. As the American human rights group Freedom House puts it, Britain has taken the lead in using "strict lopsided libel laws to punish and muzzle journalists, authors and publishers". At a great cost to free speech, "influential moneyed interests" are silencing legitimate investigations into the financing of terrorism and political corruption.
I see it happening almost weekly. For instance, you may remember the story about Vitol, an oil company which paid kickbacks to Saddam's henchman during the UN's oil-for-food scandal. It quickly died, not because the accusations didn't have substance - Vitol admitted its guilt in a grand larceny case before the New York courts in November - but because newspapers have been deluged with legal warnings. The law in Britain is so expensive and so weighted against the press that the media backed off.
If this judgment now extends to privacy law, I can soon see it becoming-impossible for a newspaper to report that a minister who is demanding public- sector pay restraint is claiming a small fortune in expenses, or that a politician who denounces single mothers is keeping a mistress on the side.
We need to be removing restrictions on freedom of speech in Britain, not adding to them.
The prurient hypocrisy of the News of the World is the price we have to pay for a free country.
Reader views (2)
I predict a win for Mosley followed by a successful reduction of damages on appeal by the News of the World.
Everybody wins.
- Jason Stone, Stratford, Newham, 10/07/2008 13:22
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Is there any truth in the perception that while the Tories were in power they were constantly hounded by the press over 'Sleaze allegations' yet once Labour got in power they suddenly lost the use of the word?
- Jeremiah, London, 09/07/2008 11:44
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