Justice Eady effectively ruled that it’s perfectly acceptable for the multi-millionaire head of a multi-billion sport that is followed by countless young people to pay five women £2,500 to take part in acts of unimaginable sexual depravity with him. The judge found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a ‘sick Nazi orgy’ as the News of the World contested, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform. Mosley was issuing commands in German while one prostitute pretended to pick lice from his hair, a second fellated him and a third caned his backside until blood was drawn. 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’...In the Mosley case, the judge is ruling that there is no public interest in revealing a public figure’s involvement in acts of depravity. What the judge loftily calls the ‘new rights-based jurisprudence’ of the Human Rights Act seems to be ruling out any such thing as public standards of morality and decency, and the right of newspapers to report on digressions from those standards. Today the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, has sprung to Eady’s defence. The Times reports him saying: The judge did say if it had involved anything to do with Nazi behaviour or anything wholly inappropriate in relation to the Holocaust, he would have not said it was something that was legitimately private. But the human rights convention does say we’ve got a legitimate entitlement to privacy. It gives way to the public interest, but if there is no public interest then you should keep it private. Lord Falconer’s reasoning is as inconsistent as it is revealing. He is apparently not saying that Mosley is not a public figure and therefore his sexual proclivities are no business of anyone else’s. He is saying that if Mosley’s orgies had been Nazi themed, he would not have been entitled to keep that private; but since they weren’t, he was. So it would seem there is no public interest in knowing that Mosley was depraved -- only if he had been fantasising about Nazism. In other words, exactly as Dacre observed, to Lord Falconer depravity in a public figure is not a matter of public interest. That is an amoral position. So the role of newspapers in bringing to light the moral failings of public figures is being fettered by an amoral ideology promulgated by unaccountable judges and the unholy writ of the Human Rights Act: Britain's secular religion.
Britain's Secular Religion
At risk of sounding like a toady, the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre was absolutely right to tear into Mr Justice Eady, the judge who appears to be creating a privacy law by the back door. In a major speech last night Dacre said that Eady’s ruling in favour of Formula One boss Max Mosley, who won a privacy case against the News of the World earlier this year after the paper had reported he had indulged in Nazi-themed orgies, had repeatedly used the Human Rights Act to restrict the right of newspapers to expose the shortcomings of public figures. On this occasion, Mosley won his case because Eady ruled that there was no evidence that the orgies in question had had a Nazi theme. Dacre observed:
Tuesday, 11 November 2008
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