What would you do. if your home was suddenly besieged by a mob of complete strangers with cameras and tape recorders and notebooks, who were trampling up to your front door, shouting at you through the letterbox, trying to get in through the windows and the backdoor, offering you loads of money just to talk to them or be photographed by them?
Well the first thing you ought to do is find out whether you were a notorious sex criminal or having an affair with a member of the royal family or had won the national lottery. Because those raucous strangers would be newspaper reporters desperate for an exclusive story from you. And to get it they are perfectly willing to do something called Invading Your Privacy.
Which has caused a lot of fuss lately—so much that Tory MPs who have been caught out in some extramarital adventures or financial jiggery-pokery have defended themselves by saying that the evidence against them was accumulated only by the media intruding on their private business. That is why so many of them are suddenly so strongly in favour of a law to protect their privacy. Of course their panic is understandable when we remember how many reputations have recently suffered by exposure of the facts which privacy was supposed to hide—the "cash for questions" MPs. junior ministers like Tim Yeo, Lord Caithness and Michael Mates and—most prized, most exposed, of all—David Mellor.
Hospital and royalty
But none of this is new. One member of the Calcutt Committee, set up in 1989 to look into the media and privacy and related matters, commented that "Many of the most appalling cases that were sent to us . . . came from way back in the 1930s and even earlier than that. . ." In June 1988. as Russell Harty was dying in hospital, reporters working on the well-tried principle that there’s nothing money won’t do, bribed a window cleaner to take pictures of him. They posed as doctors, in white coats, and tried to persuade a nurse to hand over Harty’s medical records. In January 1990, when the TV actor Gorden Kaye was in intensive care, seriously injured and not expected to live, two reporters got to his bedside, took photographs of him and tried to interview him.
In all this it would be unnatural if the privacy of the greatest media stars of them all were left unviolated. Prince Charles in August 1990 was photographed by a long-range camera seemingly canoodling with a woman. This apparent triumph of the papparazzi's art turned out to be a massive embarrassment because Charles was comforting the woman, in the presence of her husband, when they told him their child had cancer. The People lost its abhorrent editor—Wendy Henry— when it published a picture of Prince William urinating in a park with the headline (a typical Wendy Henry one) "The Royal Wee". When the Press Complaints Commission, set up on the recommendation of the Calcutt Committee. opened for business in January 1991 one of its first calls was from Sandringham—a complaint about press harassment from the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Double standards
This was in fact an example of hypocrisy such as the sleazier tabloids would be proud of. One thing which has been clear about the current turmoil in the lives of the royals—their affairs, their crumbling marriages, their nervous disorders—is the eagerness of some of them to use the media to publicise their side of the story. Apart from specific episodes like Charles’s selective television soul-baring in interview with Jonathan Dimbleby there has been a steady leak of carefully constructed information to favoured journalists. People who manipulate the media in this way can’t be taken seriously when they also complain about it invading their privacy.
Neither can those MPs. who scream about the unfair violation of their personal privacy when the press spotlights one of their sleazier activities. To begin with, as upholders of capitalism's morality about the sanctity of property they shouldn’t do the things which lay them open to such exposure. And when they are exposed they should remember that it’s all in the day’s work to a social system where what is profitable is good and what is unprofitable is bad. Newspapers make profits by being bold and those which produce the scoop-stories about scandalous politicians, or hypocritical royals or whatever, are likely to sell more.
Humiliation
The politicians tell us that this system is the most effective way of running human affairs. In fact they say there really is no other way. Of course there is the matter of what capitalism and its profit motive does to us—its prisons, weapons, pollution, the indignities which people like journalists will endure in order to obey the law about the production of goods for sale. Under that law the working class—who clamorously vote for those politicians—suffer massive humiliation and abuse, so that they don’t ever have what might properly be called any privacy to be intruded upon.
Ivan
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