A win for celebrity hypocrisy

The press has lost a significant battle against tougher privacy laws - and the main beneficiaries will be the rich, famous and powerful. But are the newspapers destined to lose the war too?

There are some positive signs from this worrying verdict. Mr Justice Morland, who today branded Naomi Campbell a liar, agreed that the Mirror was entitled to report that she was a drug addict, despite her public denials. He merely took issue with the extra "sensitive personal data" the paper also revealed.

He was right to point out that she was a celebrity who has regularly lied to the media about taking illegal drugs - "unlike other models" - as she once self-servingly put it. It is surely a legitimate function of a free press to expose such hypocrisy and deceit in high places, whether in Parliament or on the catwalk.

But the final verdict is still troubling. This is a businesswoman who has not been averse to a little tabloid intrusion when it suited her commercial interests: she has spent her professional career trading private matters in return for the free promotion of a ghost-written novel, scent, jeans, cafes or whatever else the multi-millionairess happens to be hawking at the time.

Those who make this sort of expedient pact with the red-tops - "a bargain with fame" as the Mirror's QC put it - must expect, at some stage, to be devoured by them. Celebrities who have exploited the media for their own purposes ought not to expect the same privacy protection as the vast majority of folk who do not court publicity and who live private lives.

But it now seems they will be able to. For the press is in grave danger of being shackled by new privacy laws. Streatham's most famous female is only the latest in a growing lists of celebrities who have resorted to the courts to counter what they regard as unwarranted press intrusion.

Anna Ford, the BBC newsreader, who was pictured in the Mail in a bikini on a public beach in Majorca; actress Amanda Holden, whose topless holiday pictures graced the pages of another tabloid; Mr and Mrs Michael Douglas, who sought to ban publication of unauthorised pictures of their wedding; even an unnamed footballer caught bonking a lap-dancer and nursery nurse, neither of whom was his wife - all have appealed to the courts to protect their privacy from newspaper intrusion.

Some won, some lost, others await their day in court. But there is one common cause behind all this lucrative new work for m'learned friends: the Human Rights Act of 1998, which incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights into English law and whose article eight states that everybody has the "right to respect for his private and family life, his home and correspondence".

This is balanced by article 10, which guarantees the "right to free expression" but the media would be mistaken to place too much faith in that. An unacknowledged and unholy alliance of politicians and judges is in the process of using the Human Rights Act to put in place a set of privacy laws for which the country has never voted but which will seriously impair the ability of the British press to call powerful people to account.

It has been made clear to me by several senior figures in the political establishment that when the Government incorporated the European Convention into English law it did so in the full expectation that judges would develop a set of common law precedents which, when taken together, would in effect give Britain, for the first time, a fully-fledged law of privacy.

As leading QC and Tory MP Edward Garnier explained to me on BBC2's Despatch Box, politicians are scared of confronting and angering the press with a privacy law which would have to be debated and scrutinised in Parliament before it ended up on the statute book. The newspapers would whip up a frenzy against it and the polls suggest the public might well side with the papers against the politicians.

By introducing human rights legislation and waiting on the courts to do their bit, the Government gets all the constricting benefits of a privacy law without the pain and possible unpopularity of legislating for one. No wonder ministers are insufferably smug when you raise the matter with them.

The Tory party - which knows what it is like to be savaged by a rampant press - is happy to go along with this ruse: it wants privacy-by-stealth as well. But why is our supposedly independent judiciary going along with it? Because, in my experience, most British judges are pretty hostile to press freedom. They do not share the same high regard for it as their American counterparts, reared on the invigorating first (free speech) amendment to the US constitution.

When I was being hauled through the courts in the late Eighties for daring to serialise Peter Wright's Spycatcher in The Sunday Times (the book was already on sale in America), the judges sided with Government efforts to gag us at every opportunity. One even suggested I should have handed over the book to the Government. We won in the end only because, as one judge reluctantly concluded, "the cat is out of the bag".

Today's judges are privately making no secret of their desire to use the Human Rights Act to create case law to provide greater privacy protection. This inclination is already being felt. "When it comes to privacy matters," a leading media lawyer told me, "there is a very strong presumption among judges in favour of imposing gagging orders on the media." Editors who could wallpaper their offices with such injunctions will testify to that.

We are on the brink of a sinister threat to press freedom, implemented without proper debate by unelected, unaccountable judges with the collusion of spineless politicians who do not have the guts to defend what they believe. It will no doubt curb some tabloid excesses but it will castrate much legitimate investigative journalism in the process.

Those who doubt that should look across the Channel to a French press which privacy laws have turned into a poodle of the political establishment, incapable of lifting the lid on multi-million pound political scandals which are only now belatedly coming to light (thanks to investigating magistrates not journalists). It is the way we are now in danger of going: tomorrow's Keith Vazes will be able to sleep soundly.