Paul Dacre’s laughable attack on Eady J

I almost almost choked on my credit crunch this morning (Sainsbury’s “Basics” breakfast wheat biscuits) as I listened to quotes from Paul Dacre’s lecture to the Society of Editors Conference, in which he attacks Eady J personally for his “arrogance and amorality”. You can read the full lecture here, but here’s the opening of the Daily Mail editor’s attack:

inexorably, and insidiously, the British Press is having a privacy law imposed on it, which – apart from allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds – is, I would argue, undermining the ability of mass-circulation newspapers to sell newspapers in an ever more difficult market.

This law is not coming from Parliament – no, that would smack of democracy – but from the arrogant and amoral judgements – words I use very deliberately – of one man.

I am referring, of course, to Justice David Eady who has, again and again, under the privacy clause of the Human Rights Act, found against newspapers and their age-old freedom to expose the moral shortcomings of those in high places.

Dacre goes on to criticise specifically Eady J’s judgment in the Max Mosley case, which I’ve written and spoken about at some length before, and which in Dacre’s view involved “unimaginable sexual depravity”:

Now most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Justice Eady. To him such behaviour was merely “unconventional”. Nor in his mind was there anything wrong in a man of such wealth using his money to exploit women in this way.

He argues that Eady J has unprecedented power and is personally biased,

But surely the greatest scandal is that while London boasts scores of eminent judges, one man is given a virtual monopoly of all cases against the media enabling him to bring in a privacy law by the back door…. The freedom of the press, I would argue, is far too important to be left to the somewhat desiccated values of a single judge who clearly has an animus against the popular press and the right of people to freedom of expression.

and that the law has been changed sneakily and without Parliamentary approval,

If Gordon Brown wanted to force a privacy law, he would have to set out a bill, arguing his case in both Houses of Parliament, withstand public scrutiny and win a series of votes. Now, thanks to the wretched Human Rights Act, one Judge with a subjective and highly relativist moral sense can do the same with a stroke of his pen.

I’m not going to mince words: this outburst is laughably excessive, self-serving and misleading. It is not just nonsense, but binged-up intoxicated happy-hour nonsense in the way it lashes out angrily at someone just doing his job.

I could go on and on about what’s wrong with Dacre’s views. Fortunately, you can instead listen to a debate on Today in which Lord Falconer made all the key points and I thought argued his opponent into a quivering pulp. I agree with absolutely every word he said. But let me make a couple of points myself.

First, Dacre’s view of morality seems to me to smell at best of the 1950s, if not the Victorian era, an aspect of this that should not be lost sight of. I can well understand people disapproving of Mosley’s sex life, but to call it unimaginable depravity? Heavens. He also calls adultery a “proper cause for public condemnation” – another cry from the past, surely.

Second: Eady J at no point in his judgment says that there’s “nothing wrong” with what Mosley did. The judgment is – as it should be – about legality, not morality. Dacre’s charges of amorality and relativism are simply wrong.

Thirdly, it’s just false to suggest that the development of the law here is down to one man. The House of Lords has also contributed to developments in this area – and Eady J’s judgments are subject to appeal, like any other judge’s. The truth is that it’s difficult to fault his judgments in law (whether you agree with him that Mosley’s party wasn’t in fact a “Nazi orgy” is another matter), and that may be why Dacre and his friends prefer to scythe the man down from behind, all studs showing, rather than kicking off in the Court of Appeal.

Fourth, Dacre fails (how odd!) to mention how friendly the Mosley judgment is to the press – Eady J floated the idea that newspapers should be able to rely on a defence of “responsible journalism”, something the higher courts may pick up on if newspapers dare appeal and risk something worse than the nurse Dacre is throwing his toys at. The reason Eady J did not base his judgment on responsible journalism is that, far than being the arrogant figure of Dacre’s imagination, he was conscious he could rely on no authoritative precedent for it. What’s more, Eady J rejected the idea that exemplary damages should be available against newspapers in privacy cases – a ruling that’s been criticised, by me anyway, as unduly favourable to newspapers.

Fifth, he fails to mention that the Mosely judgment leaves plenty of room for newspapers to expose wrongdoing where they have public interest justification for doing so. What it actually limits is exposure of private behaviour where there is no good reason for the exposure. It’s the freedom to do that that Dacre is mourning.

Finally, as for the idea that all this has happened by stealth – give me strength! Dacre only thinks a law of privacy is “being” introduced by the back door because he is ten years behind the curve, as they say. Everyone who was paying attention at the time knew that the Human Rights Act 1998 – 1998 – gave effect to the right to respect for private life, and the press certainly knew it, because they fought for and obtained concessions from the government during the bill’s passage. Never was there a clearer case of Parliament having legislated in full knowledge of what it was doing.

In reality, Dacre is the one who’s out of touch, over-mighty and pursuing his own personal moral agenda. The sound of his voice seems to me to be the gloriously nostalgic whine of someone who was once above the law and is now pained by the revelation that it is above him.