Privacy and Prurience

The UK media clan are busy picking apart the issues around so-called “Super-injunctions” and privacy – particularly the lack of a UK Privacy law. Much of this has centred on the revelation by my former colleague Andrew Marr that he had taken out an injunction some years ago to prevent news of an affair being published.

This was initially greeted as a bold move likely to support the case for ending the courts growing tendency to issue all encompassing injunctions – but of course within a day or two the tide turned. Led by Private Eye’s Editor, Ian Hislop, Andrew is now accused of being a hypocrite for working as a journalist and seeking an injunction. Increasingly it is suggested he should no longer have his political interview show at the weekends as he’s compromised in asking politicians about their private lives. (A view well encapsulated by Charlie Beckett of Polis).

Surely, there is wrongheadedness here. There is a difference between public and personal lives and between matters of public importance as opposed to public prurience. Of course affairs are newsworthy – they sell newspapers because the public enjoy reading about them. But that doesn’t mean they are important except to the individuals and families involved. Some super-injunctions may be preventing the press from reporting matters of genuine public importance – but they are also used as almost the only means of fending off invasive and damaging purience into personal matters of no public interest. The issue here is the lack of a sensible Privacy Law which allows that distinction to be properly made.

Hugh Tomlinson QC recently blogged at The Guardian about the way ahead for a Privacy Law. To my layman’s eyes it seems the current criteria around a “reasonable expectation of privacy” is too broad and too subjective to be of much help. In the meantime, progress is caught in a tangle with European legislation and the Human Rights Act.

However, I don’t agree that just because Andrew Marr sought to protect his family and others from harmful and intrusive publicity about an affair it means he is disqualified from asking poltiicans or others about matters of genuine public importance. The two are not the same, even if the law, or media chatter, is unable to differentiate sufficiently between them.