Roy Greenslade: Ex-DPP is right to back hacking, as long as it’s in public interest

Is it wrong to hack someone’s phone? Is it wrong to pay a police officer for information? Is it wrong to seek a person’s private medical details?

In this post-Leveson Inquiry era, the answer to those questions appears obvious. Surely, it should be yes every time.

All Britain’s reporters now know where they stand. They could end up in court if they intercept a person’s mobile-phone voicemail messages or slip £100 to a compliant police sergeant.

Hang on though. Listen instead to former Director of Public Prosecutions(DPP) Sir Keir Starmer QC. He says journalists who hack phones or pay public officials should have legal protection to do so.

He argued on Monday at a London Press Club debate on press freedom that journalists should be able to advance a public-interest defence for engaging in what has been routinely termed journalism’s “dark arts”.

In other words, if a reporter is seeking to reveal something that can be demonstrated to be of sufficient public interest and which can only be proved by, say, hacking, he or she should enjoy protection from prosecution.

At present, only one law, the Data Protection Act, includes a public-interest proviso. Now Starmer believes there should be a special law to enable journalists to argue their case on the merits of the story they are chasing.

If such a law was already on the statute book, it would not have got the News of the World hackers off the hook because the overwhelming majority of their celebrity tittle-tattle stories would have failed a public-interest test.

By contrast, many of those journalists prosecuted for paying public officials could have advanced public-interest reasons for having done so, if only they had been allowed to make such a case.

I accept that defining the public interest is itself tricky.

That is not, however, an insuperable problem. It could, and should, form part of a journalistic defence. Juries can see the qualitative difference between exposing an actor’s dalliance and a politician’s graft.

So no editor or reporter could possibly oppose Starmer’s initiative. It is long overdue and should be welcomed, not only by journalists but also by their readers.

But what cannot be overlooked is Starmer’s role. The newly elected Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras was DPP from 2008 to 2013, a period when many of the trials involving journalists were launched.

It is fair to say that, in 2012, he did introduce guidelines for prosecutors to take account of the public interest when assessing cases involving the media.