Labour or Tory politician, football star or banker, they are all indeed the same. They strive to keep their own or their family’s misdeeds out of the public eye. We read of Caroline Spelman’s dramatic call for ‘privacy’ when she failed to gain a permanent injunction to help protect her hulking son from the publicity surrounding his steroid abuse after a rugby injury. We all remember the long-running saga of the well-known ‘family man’ footballer Ryan Giggs, and how his legal team spent loads of his cash trying to keep his name out of the headlines, when all along he was not only shagging some whore, he was also screwing his sister-in-law, and had been doing this for years. We now read of the Labour councillor who tried for over a year to suppress the facts that she was arrested for being drunk whilst in charge of her 2 year-old daughter, and who sought an injunction on the grounds that the publicity would damage her daughter. The final name on this particular list is that of Fred Goodwin, and now that everyone is aware of his crimes after his injunction was quashed, no further mention need be made.
The point I am making is that, after Dave Cameron, in one of his more spectacular misjudgements, set up a judicial enquiry after the mobile phone hacking row broke, and of course the truly illiberal Lord Leveson answered the call with the first legal chain around the neck of the Press in Great Britain. We are already seeing the glee with which all politicians, and all the suddenly publicity-shy ‘celebrities’ who were upset after their own misdeeds, such as Hugh Grant’s adventures in oral sex with some whore in America, were laid bare for the public’s gaze, fasten upon the fact that they will be protected from press scrutiny by legal force.
All the stories, all the reporters and policemen charged, all the phones whose digital memories were unlawfully accessed; all these items were processed under laws presently in place; in other words, no complainant has been forced to wait for action upon a new press muzzle, but that is the outcome of the Leveson Inquiry.
Fire, Pillage & Plague 