Beware the ideologues

The hypocrisy illuminated by the desire to control the press by the Western Governments of America, Australia Canada and the UK is breathtaking in its mendacity.
In fact I would go so far as to call this desire deeply evil. Consider this report from the UK:

Open season on the press
casts a chill on freedom
When the journalistic world protested almost as one after the publication of the Leveson proposals to regulate the Press, others dismissed these objections on the grounds of: ‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they?’

Fears that the Press was suffering from a ‘chilling effect’ even before the Leveson proposals were enacted, that these proposals would prevent journalists from doing their job and that they would stifle the free flow of information, were scorned as overblown special pleading.

Reporting that was truly in the public interest, we were assured, would be protected — of course.

Whistleblowers would be protected — of course. Freedom of the Press, openness and justice would be protected — of course.

Well, now look at what’s happened.

On Friday, it was revealed that the entertainer Rolf Harris had been arrested on suspicion of sexual offences.

No one at present knows whether such suspicion is well-founded. But the circumstances of this revelation should cause intense disquiet.

For Mr Harris was first questioned by police last November and arrested and bailed at the end of last month. Yet although it was an open secret on the internet, no newspapers or broadcasters identified him until last week.

This was partly because his lawyers, Harbottle & Lewis, used a passage in the Leveson report — which suggested that the public should be prevented from knowing the names of arrest suspects in all but ‘exceptional’ circumstances — to intimidate the media into silence.

The firm threatened newspapers with ‘serious consequences’ if they published Mr Harris’s name. One was warned it could be hit with an expensive damages bill even if its report was entirely accurate.

What a frightening state of affairs, where newspapers are being bullied into self- censorship on the grounds that it is considered unacceptable to tell the truth!

Worse still, such intimidation attacks one of the bulwarks of a free society — the principle of open justice whereby the identity of someone who is arrested is not concealed from the public.

Yet now, emboldened by Leveson, no less than the Association of Chief Police Officers — backed up by senior judges, lawyers and the Information Commissioner — has suggested that in general the police should be prevented from confirming to journalists the names of those who have been arrested.

As has been observed, it is but a small step between keeping secret the names of people who are arrested and arresting them in secret.

And Messrs Harbottle and Lewis used this proposal, too, as grounds for putting the thumbscrews on the Press to keep Rolf Harris unidentified — until the Sun finally blew the whole rotten process open.

This climate of intimidation is spreading fast. A local newspaper, the Cumberland And Westmorland Herald, reported that Cumbria’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Richard Rhodes, had charged the taxpayer £700 for journeys to two dinners in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

The commissioner, who had not revealed these expenses, paid the money back after this was exposed and issued a partial apology. But he also reported the three whistleblowers to the police — who promptly arrested them on suspicion of misconduct in a public office and perverting the course of justice.

The only reason this commissioner’s questionable expenses had came to light was the newspaper story using the whistleblowers’ information.

For him to report them to the police and — much worse still — for the police then to arrest them represents a chilling assault on the freedom of the Press to report apparent wrongdoing. And before Leveson, this would have been unthinkable.

But his inquiry seems to have served as a kind of starting pistol for an open season on the Press, declared by a coalition of everyone with a score to settle against it — including rogues, cheats, the sexually debauched and others desperate to avenge their being called to account for their indefensible behaviour.

We should not forget the veiled threat made to the Telegraph by an adviser to Culture Secretary Maria Miller, in response to journalists preparing a story about the minister’s expenses claims, that in the light of her role in drawing up the new Press rules, such a story could be ‘ill-timed’.

Then there’s the case of the New Milton Advertiser, which described local Tory councillor Goff Beck as ‘controversial’ and revealed he had been accused of making bigoted remarks to an openly gay colleague. It also said he had been reprimanded for bullying a female councillor.

The paper was then phoned and visited by Sergeant Paul Beale of the Hampshire constabulary, who complained that Mr Beck’s ‘credibility as a person of good standing was being undermined’.

Excuse me? Since when did a police officer put pressure on a newspaper on the grounds that someone didn’t like what it had said about them?

The answer is: since the Leveson Inquiry . . . the shocking consequence of which is that journalists are all too likely to find the police fingering their collars merely for reporting what is going on.

It is no exaggeration to say that this intimidation of the Press and the development of political policing are more akin to what we would expect from a totalitarian state.

All this while the moral authority of the Leveson Inquiry itself is crumbling by the day. From the start, there was a disturbing closeness between the inquiry team and Hacked Off, the lobby group trying to fetter the Press.

That smell of collusion then extended to the Labour Party. For who should have been found closeted in the office of Ed Miliband, on the night when he was stitching up the Royal Charter on Press regulation with Nick Clegg and Tory minister Oliver Letwin, but Hacked Off.

Last week, an audience at a Glasgow literary festival rounded on the organisation’s founder, Brian Cathcart, for once again refusing to reveal the identity of his backers.

The hypocrisy from a lobby group that vilifies the Press for lack of transparency about its own dealings, but refuses to say who is pulling its own strings, is simply breathtaking in its shamelessness.

Now, however, the question of collusion is turning positively farcical. At the weekend, it was revealed that Carine Patry Hoskins, Lord Justice Leveson’s supposedly utterly impartial junior counsel, and David Sherborne, counsel for many of the high-profile complainants to the inquiry, were, ahem, an item.

They insist their affair did not begin until after November 2012, when the inquiry’s report was published. Yet they had holidayed together on the Greek island of Santorini in August 2012, days after the inquiry closed.

According to them, during the holiday they discussed the ‘possibility of a future relationship’. But not, apparently, to exchange even a word about the inquiry in which both were so heavily involved.

Talk about wriggling on the head of a pin! Not so much Leveson as the Loverson Inquiry, then.

Quite apart from the serious questions of possible conflict of interest to which this gives rise, the irony, of course, is exquisite.

Here is a tribunal that denounced the Press for, among other things, exposing sexual misdemeanours we were told could not possibly be in the public interest, itself now potentially compromised by a relationship between the lawyers on supposedly opposite sides — revealed by none other than the reviled Press.

Someone could make a black comedy out of all this. But we can guess what would happen if they did.

On the grounds that Lord Justice Leveson’s ‘credibility as a person of good standing was being undermined’, doubtless the police, backed up by Messrs Harbottle and Lewis and assorted luvvies, libertines and other loathers of liberty, would raid the theatre and shut it down.