A shroud of secrecy

LET there be no doubt, the BBC’s reporting of the police raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s home was crass, sensationalist, and indefensible. By hiring a helicopter to film officers rifling through his possessions in search of non-existent evidence of child abuse, the Corporation acted, as the singer said outside court last week, like ‘judge, jury and executioner’.

And the BBC – or in truth us licence fee payers – has paid a terrible price, handing over £1.5million in damages and costs.

But while Sir Cliff deserved his victorious day in court, and the BBC its abject humiliation, Mr Justice Mann’s ruling drove a coach and horses through the public’s right to know.

By insisting that the names of those arrested or suspected of committing a crime should only be published in ‘exceptional circumstances’, it could allow the police, the rich and powerful, and the crooked to avoid public scrutiny.

Yes, people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But that cannot mean the police arresting innocent people in the middle of the night or ransacking their homes under a shroud of secrecy.

So while condemning the actions of the BBC (and how crass it was to put this disreputable piece of journalism in for an award), the Mail believes the Corporation has no alternative but to go to the Court of Appeal to try to overturn a ruling that has profoundly worrying implications for all forms of media. SHARES in Chinese shopping app Pinduoduo soared 35 per cent when they debuted in New York this week, giving the company a value of £26billion – or around twice Britain’s annual foreign aid budget. Meanwhile, our public services are starved of cash and the tax burden is at a 50-year high. So why in the name of sanity are we still sending nearly £50million of aid money to China, and £320million to Nigeria, a country with its own space programme?