‘Injunctions are a necessary evil’ Privacy, free speech and a feral press.’ Public debate at the London School of Economics – Felicity Capon

One of the most salient issues to have emerged in the press in recent weeks, that of injunctions, was recently fought out at the London School of Economics. The panel, chaired by Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship, consisted of two expert media lawyers, who represent the opposing clients in the CTB v News Group Newspapers case: In the blue corner was David Price QC, a legal expert on defamation and privacy matters and who represents Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas, and in the red corner, Hugh Tomlinson QC, who represents Ryan Giggs. Tomlinson was joined by the former president of Formula One, Max Mosley, who won a privacy case three years ago against the News of the World and is currently trying to change the law so that prior notification becomes a legal requirement, and Price was joined by Guardian and Mail on Sunday columnist Suzanne Moore, who famously resigned from the New Statesman after Alistair Campbell was invited as guest editor (which to my mind rather quickly put into question her credibility as a proponent of freedom of expression, stifling as Campbell’s editorship might have been).

Thanks to Sean MacEntee for image

Whilst it was clear that neither of the proponents of the two powerful and contradictory principles, freedom of speech and right to privacy, would throw in the towel without a good fight, what did emerge was a discussion on the power struggle between the judiciary, the legislature and the media, and when the debate went ring-side, a disturbing disregard for the judgment and freedom of those who read tabloids.

Mosley began by broadly stating that privacy is a fundamental right, and if this is accepted, it follows that injunctions are a necessity. England's privacy regime, Mosley claimed, is ‘a negation of the rule of law’, as without prior notification there is no proper remedy for a breach of privacy. For Tomlinson the issue was one of justification, and he claimed that none exists for exposing the salacious shenanigans of figures such as Giggs and Mosley. Tomlinson argued that the boundaries of public interest are fairly clear cut, for example, exposing crime, or financial wrong, yet the sexual misconduct of people’s private lives is no business other than their own. Even the extra-curricular activities of Fred Goodwin, which many would think of as being rightly subject to public scrutiny considering the large amounts of taxpayer’s money he was in charge of, appeared a grey area for Tomlinson and Mosley. Mosley candidly retorted that what Goodwin was doing was ‘no different from playing a round of golf’, which, whilst attracting gratifying guffaws from the audience, seemed bizarre; Mosley unwittingly appeared to advocate that more information about Goodwin’s affairs was required in order to satisfy the public interest justification; ‘Goodwin could have been going on for an hour or two a week with no influence whatsoever on the decisions he was making, or it could have been something going on morning, noon and night in the boardroom.’