Judges still making a mockery of the law

THE Supreme Court yesterday displayed an astonishing, and indeed deeply depressing, inability to understand the sweeping changes being brought about by the internet. The judges instead swung their authority behind the ridiculous and unsustainable ban on publishing the name of a married celebrity who arranged a threesome with another couple.

A few seconds online are sufficient to discover the identity of this celebrity, which has been published around the world, and also in Scotland. Only in England and Wales are newspapers prevented from running the story.

As the Mail last month pointed out, the law is an ass to uphold an injunction which has proved so porous as to become virtually meaningless.

The court yesterday responded to this ‘ portrayal of the law as an ass’ by declaring: ‘If that is the price of applying the law it is one which must be paid’.

Such purblind judicial obstinacy is threatening to bring the rule of law into disrepute.

The judges believe they are engaged in a sophisticated balancing act, in which they somehow manage to reconcile contradictory commitments in the Human Rights Act to uphold privacy and freedom of speech.

But in practice, this turns out to mean that celebrities who spend millions on their PR, can now spend further millions slapping an injunction on any newspaper which threatens to expose the sordid reality of their lives.

Such hypocrisy stinks. And to add insult to injury, the defendants then claim they are trying to protect their children, whose welfare they might have considered before doing whatever it is they are now so desperate to cover up.

Baroness Hale, one of the four judges who so vigorously took the side of the celebrity in this case, is a long-standing critic of the institution of marriage, an enthusiast for privacy laws and a feminist who has said domestic violence should include shouting.

Only one judge, Lord Toulson, had the courage and realism to dissent from the judgment by saying: ‘The court must live in the world as it is and not as it would like it to be. The story is not going to go away, injunction or no injunction’.

The sooner his colleagues start agreeing with him, the sooner they will stop making a mockery of the law.