Privacy/undercover techniques/

Peter Wilby
Monday January 29, 2007
The Guardian

Yes, Clive Goodman went too far. The News of the World reporter had no particular aim in mind when he intercepted the voicemail of royal aides on 487 occasions and paid a private investigator more than £100,000 in a year to make further intercepts. He wasn't trying to stand up a specific story. He was on a fishing expedition in the hope that something interesting would turn up. He came up with such gems as the news that Prince William went to the doctor about a knee injury and called his girlfriend Babykins.

So we can all agree that what the judge quaintly termed his "low conduct" justifies his briefly cluttering up our overcrowded jails. We can also agree that Andy Coulson, the News of the World editor, should at least have asked questions about why Goodman's expenses had reached six figures and he was therefore right to resign. But suppose Goodman had stumbled across evidence that Prince William was discussing with a New Labour figure how to keep out Gordon Brown or was in regular contact with leaders of the UK Independence Party. Suppose he had overheard Prince Harry using racist language. Would we take the same view of his behaviour? Goodman's crime, it has been said, was to be found out. It was also, we might add, that he failed to unearth a decent story.

Issues about privacy and the press are more complicated than the high-minded moralising of recent days suggests. A high proportion of the juiciest stories - the ones you want to read rather than the rewritten press releases - have been obtained by journalists cutting corners and sailing close to ethical if not legal boundaries. For example, David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations specialist, has admitted he listened to company executives' phone messages while looking into corrupt arms deals. The suspects in the Stephen Lawrence murder case had their homes bugged to find evidence they were racist. The Sunday Times used impersonation and secret tape-recordings to kick off the cash-for-honours story. According to a report from the information commissioner last year, almost all papers, including the poshest ones, have used private detectives to dig out confidential data.

It may be objected that my examples all have a public interest defence, which the law allows. Yet the royal family is a unique public institution: it has no function other than to entertain us with details of its members' private lives. Prince Charles, in a case against the Mail on Sunday, has already won the courts' support for the view that extracts from his private journals, even if they are circulated among his friends, cannot be published. Prince William, by threatening the Press Complaints Commission as well as the courts, has frightened photographers away from his girlfriend, Kate Middleton. Now the complaints about phone intercepts have delivered the biggest scalps yet.

The public doesn't have a compelling need to know that William has a bad knee or Middleton has taken a trip to the supermarket. But equally, I don't see why it shouldn't know. I would have more sympathy with the royals if their spokespeople didn't lie so persistently. The crisis in Goodman's career, which led him to such excesses, was partly the result of his failure to stand up a tip that Charles and Camilla were about to get engaged. He accepted a Clarence House denial - four days before the story was officially confirmed.

Even I have experience of the royals' sharp practice. Believe it or not, the Independent on Sunday, where I used to work, got a scoop on the Princess Royal's second marriage. Though the source was impeccable, we checked it just before deadline with the royal press office. It rushed the news out instantly, claiming it had always intended to make an announcement that day, thus depriving us of our scoop. More important, it managed, thanks to predictably deferential TV and press coverage, to bury the point of our story: that the desire to keep the marriage plans secret until the last minute - to reduce controversy over the first senior royal divorcee to remarry - had led the royals to breach the normal public notification procedures.

Almost anybody in public life now has PR advisers burnishing their image, and filtering out potentially negative stories. Readers have grown familiar with the lengths to which politicians will go. But they may not realise the influence PRs now have over almost everything that appears in newspapers, particularly on sports and business pages. Celebrities allow magazines into their homes and reveal other intimate details if sufficient money is involved. Agents, footballers and club managers feed contrived transfer stories to the press to ramp up prices and dish competitors, and full-time sports reporters know the supply of titbits would dry up if they tried to investigate bungs. Hollywood stars, before granting interviews, routinely demand the right to approve copy and pictures, and they often get it. One of many reasons why I regret Coulson's departure - don't forget he risked odium for printing pictures of "our boys" abusing Iraqi youths - is that he dared to defy Max Clifford, the biggest name in PR. Clifford withdrew cooperation from the paper after it had written disobligingly about one of his clients, an Atomic Kitten.

I do not say there should be no laws on privacy. Clearly, there should, and they have to apply to journalists as much as to anyone else; otherwise, we would have the state deciding who's a bona fide journalist and who's not. But we need to be aware that loss of privacy isn't the only danger facing our society. An equal danger is that we shall live in a world where everything we know, everything we hear and everything we see is doctored by the public relations industry.