It is rather disconcerting that, sitting down to write this post, I have to think quite hard about what I can and can’t say. It does seem that free speech is rather trammeled when people can’t talk directly about this case. Those who have bothered to spend a little time googling (try Australian, US and Canadian outlets or a well-known political blog), will know what I am talking about. Those who haven’t, won’t. It’s all a bit strange.
That said, it seems to me that the Supreme Court have taken a sensible decision in the case of PJS.
In brief, The Sun on Sunday wanted the injunction on the allegations of an extra-marital affair to be lifted mainly because a large number of people already know the identity of those involved, due to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s ingenious inter-webby device.
The Supreme Court disagreed saying that if they lifted the injunction there would be additional “intensive coverage”. That, I think, is very true.
Four out of the five judges said that just because the couple are well known, there is no “right to invade privacy”. I agree.
There is absolutely no case to argue that these allegations need to be disclosed in the public interest. The people involved are not politicians or upholders of public morals. The allegations concern private lives.
The Sun has gone ballistic this morning (below) calling the judges “analogue…old duffers”.
I think that is wrong. Strangely enough, “old duffers” are often quite wise, and the Supreme Court has certainly thought long and hard about this case.
Just because the public would, no doubt, be very interested in the alleged shenanigans of PJS, it does not make such revelations in the public interest. And let’s be frank, if the injunction had been lifted, we would never have heard the last of the story – it would have been plastered all over the press and covered on the broadcast media 24*7 for weeks.
I would add, as an aside, that I am concerned that only rich people can put these sorts of injunctions in place. Hopefully, perhaps there will be a “trickle down” effect of this judgment, leading to less invasion of the privacy of those who cannot afford such expensive justice.
I am also concerned that tabloid newspaper publishers are getting rather mean-spirited, even truculent over this issue. One particular newspaper seems to be in high irony mode. I am very concerned that their “holier than thou” attitude could, in the future, be damaging to the children involved in this case and is simply unnecessary.
Comments on this post will be pre-moderated. Please do not make comments which will lead to the identification of the people involved in the allegations which are subject to the injunction.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
Follow @LibDemVoice on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
No Hiding Place (1963): The joys of live television drama
Elon Musk becomes even more unpopular with Brits
How to lose weight and keep it lost.
January
Weekly Road Report - West End Ward #dundeewestend
Will Reeves be forced to break her own fiscal rules?
Simon R
Cassie
Peter Davies
20 Comments
It may be there is limited “public interest” in this story, but we have never had a press restricted so that only stories in the public interest are allowed to be published.
In any case, it seems pretty clear that this story is already bigger than it would otherwise be and will no doubt become even more of a deal in the future. I’d have hoped celebrities would have learnt by now.
My wife was told the names, over the telephone, by an Australian friend…
My wife’s one word reply of, “So?” rather stymied any further discussion of the subject…
I’m not always going to take the side against the press, so I think publishing gossip is fine, but it depends how such gossip is achieved. If people have private videos leaked after a break-up, revenge porn, then people shouldn’t be allowed to publish those.
It’s not just about love life either. Bank and financial details, military secrets, there’s lots of important information that we can’t just publish because someone else has.
Liberals strongly campaign against privacy invasion when it is the government doing the invasion, too much in my opinion, but there’s not enough complaints when it is the press doing the invading. There’s hardly anything and anyone who tries to risks getting painted as an enemy of press freedom.
The Sun today has a list of stories “we wouldn’t have been able to publish.” There were all X is married to Y and sleeping with Z. There is no public interest in any of them.
Public interest has always been a consideration when information is in breach of confidence or in breach of privacy.
The argument drew a specific distinction between what is in the public interest and what the public might find interesting. A rather crucial difference.
I’m going to slightly disagree with Paul here. I’m a bit “a plague on both your houses” when it comes to PJS and the Sun.
I wrote an article about the two SNP MPs the other day, slating the press for publishing lurid details of things that are basically none of our business. What I didn’t say is that the press should be banned from publishing such nonsense and, only if you are very rich, can you avoid such scrutiny. My opinion of both PJS and YMA has gone down as a result of this. Not because of PJS’s activities, because, frankly, I don’t give a damn, but because they are spending a fortune on this case just because they can. Every time there’s another development in this case, and we’re nowhere near through all the legal arguments, it will be reported and everybody, even though they can’t say it out loud, knows exactly who is being talked about.
Now, as far as the Sun is concerned, and all other tabloid rags, I wish that we had a culture where we didn’t have such a fascination with this sort of story. I wish we had a “there but for the grace of God go I” kind of approach to downfalls from grace as a society. I wish we didn’t have to have a massive slice of schadenfreude with our Sunday breakfast. Most of all, I wish we actually understood how utterly vile some of the papers are in their pursuit of people.
I’ve seen one young friend hounded by a journalist from a tabloid and who found pictures from her personal Facebook account in a story. There was no public interest in the story. She couldn’t afford even a bargain basement injunction and she had to endure some really distressing stuff – and she had actually done nothing wrong.
There’s quite a sinister article in Fail today. It’s supposedly celebrating the happy lives of a married couple, but there are some rather nasty undercurrents. There’s an insinuation that because that couple seek out publicity on some occasions that they are fair game the rest of the time. If I invite you round to my house for dinner on Monday, that doesn’t mean that you can just turn up on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday as well. Celebs and the media work together for the benefit of both a lot of the time. That does not morally justify much of the intrusion into their private lives.
In this particular case, though, I am inclined to agree with Joshua Rozenberg who wrote in the Guardian thus:
Judges need to be very cautious about granting injunctions to prevent publication of what is widely known, Toulson said. Otherwise, the court may “lose public respect for the law by giving the appearance of being out of touch with reality”.
I consider this a very dangerous decision. It is one more nail in the coffin of free speech and the right to publish. It should not in my opinion be a question of whether or not a court deems publication to be in the public interest, but whether or not there is an overwhelming reason to suppress publication, such as national security, or the disclosure of genuinely confidential information and/or protected data.
This is a case of judges extending their own powers through judicial activism in a way which is harmful to the public generally, but beneficial to the narrow segment of the public that happens to be rich and powerful.
Lord Denning, though an establishment man to a fault, did at least believe in the freedom of the press. He had a 100% record of refusing applications for interlocutory injunctions against newspapers. The present judiciary is much less bold, it seems.
Incidentally, I am not impressed by attempts by famous people to use their children as human shields. A recently deceased Tory politician played that one, did he not? Is the Supreme Court telling us that people who do not have children should not be afforded the same consideration?
A man was jailed in Leeds not too long ago for making a rude comment on Twitter. Yet the newspapers were allowed to publish what that comment was. If the comment was so terrible that the person making it deserved to go to prison, why was the press permitted to put the moral safety of the public at risk by repeating it? Similarly, it is widely known who the litigant in this case is, but we are not allowed to know about it in our own country. Echoes of the Abdication? When the law seeks to tell us what we can and cannot say, write, hear or read, it is always an ass (and an ass with a dirty tail).
In my opinion, the Supreme Court decision has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting individuals (least of all children), but everything to do with advancing the control agenda.
Thanks for your comments. They are persuading me to reconsider this…
I was quite surprised when I found out that blog wasn’t UK based and I’d made completely the wrong guess about the identities. I only felt the need to find out the identities because they were trying to stop me. Then I completely lost interest because it is nothing if not a sordid, tedious and predictable story. Big deal. Not. My knowledge has had zero impact on those children’s lives. The law in this case is an ass – it didn’t and doesn’t protect the couple or their kids.
I did read in ( i think the London Evening Standard) that the Peter Stringfellow had stated that the PJS in the injunction was not him 🙂
There would be a public interest if publication produced bye-election/s or ministerial changes.
Chris Huhne was on the Daily Politics this week saying that when David Laws had to leave the Treasury Chris was offered the opportunity to replace him and be a member of the Quad.
He declined because the most important policy was not the economy (!!! he is an economist) but climate change.
The department has a mix of “missionaries” and people who have been concerned with dealing with large energy companies and keeping the lights on. It would likely continue while Cameron is PM, but would be abolished promptly if Osborne succeeded him
As you would expect Jonathan Calder extremely good on this: http://liberalengland.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/famous-men-behaving-badly.html
Is it legal for Stringfellow to rule himself out and thereby narrow the field? If we all did that then it must be whoever is left. At that point could the injunction be lifted? I’ll take a chance. It wasn’t me either.
Firstly, remember that the injuction applies only in England and Wales, and not Scotland. So presumably it would be perfectly legal for, say, Caron to publish PJS’s name on her blog – written and published in Scotland, while hosted on a US server – but not to publish the same article on this site.
Secondly, if you’re really interested, it takes no more than 10 minutes to find out not only the identity of PJS but also the identity of the other celebrity case which came back into the news last week.
The problem with these injuctions are, as Caron said, the fact that wealthy celebrities (and PJS’ partner is one of the wealthiest) can use these injunctions to protect their “image” whilst ordinary folk can’t. It’s very similar to the Spycatcher case in the 1980s, which was a waste of Government money because, by pursuing the case, it highlighted what Peter Wright had written to a much greater extent than had they allowed the book to be published (it is probably one of the dullest books I’ve read.)
I am going to agree with Paul (in his article) and disagree with Caron on this. Let us be in no doubt, the only reason that the Sun are pursuing this is because tittle-tattle about celebrities sells newspapers. If this country had a proper Press Regulator that the Press were compelled to sign up with, rather than self-regulation through IPSO, it would never have reached the courts. Have we all forgotten so quickly why ‘Hacked off’ was set up in the first place. A regulator levying fines on newspapers big enough to make their eyes water will soon make them think twice about running these sort of stories. The Sun’s revenues in 2014 were £489 million; for them fines need to be £10 million a time and upwards to make a difference.
Responsible journalists will not be hit by this because they will be able to make a genuine public interest case to the regulator; it is the ‘gutter press’ in this country that needs cleaning up.
Responsible journalists will not be hit by this because they will be able to make a genuine public interest case to the regulator
And who do you trust to be the regulator, and have the final say over what the rest of us are allowed to know?
There’s a huge difference between journalism employing illegal techniques such as phone hacking to obtain stories and regulating journalists to prevent them publishing legally obtained material that might embarrass a celebrity or politician. Even with illegally obtained material there is sometimes a public interest angle that is incompatible with regulation. Not only who do you trust to be regulator but where is the consensus on where the line is drawn?
Hacking Milly Dowler’s phone. Extreme, illegal, Chuck away the key. What about Max Clifford’s phone? Still illegal but somehow not so bad. What about the paparazzi following Princess Diana into that Tunnel? What about the Telegraph obtaining and publishing stolen material about MP’s expenses? And then allegations of impropriety? And if it is Major and Currie, the former simultaneously promoting moral values? What about being rude about the Prime Minister?
There are laws that protect against defamation, laws that deal with stolen materials, laws that deal with breaking and entering, hacking, dangerous driving. If a journalist has stepped over a line, the law can already be invoked and defendants sued or prosecuted. We do not want, need, deserve a regulator to enforce and fine newspapers for crossing a line it is impossible to define. The police and courts can deal with criminality and whether there is a legitimate defence.
Points taken. But if we don’t have a regulator deciding when the line is crossed – what happens?
Who decides whether it is right to publish a story about a normal citizen, with no money to “go legal”, but whose story seems enough to sell papers? It is the newspaper editor who decides, based on what will sell papers, in an extremely competitive market.
Is that right? And does it lead to lots of Christopher Jeffries who are not as able as the real Christopher Jeffries to take the papers to the courts?
“if we don’t have a regulator deciding when the line is crossed – what happens?”
Where criminality is concerned the police and CPS and judges and juries provide a remedy free to the victim. You can of course increase fines, make directors criminally liable and subject to incarceration, and alter sentencing guidelines to provide teeth.
For civil cases no win no fee is available for compensation claims and you could add provision for punitive damages in aggravated circumstances. This would not allow for injunctions but then I would stop all injunctions since, as in this case, they do not guarantee privacy. You could introduce privacy laws that bring in criminal remedies and compensation post-publication as a deterrent and again judges and juries decide if a crime has been committed or damage incurred demanding recompense. Not a government/media appointed individual.
I know I am not the only person on the planet who does not know or care who these people are. Please give it a rest.