The Spectator

Letters | 23 July 2011

<em>Spectator</em> readers respond to recent articles

issue 23 July 2011

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Selective indignation

Sir: People are — quite correctly — very offended by the phone-hacking antics of the News of the World journalists and editors. But did any of these (now) horrendously affronted guardians of the rights of individual privacy give the slightest damn when similarly disgusting reporters were so gleefully reporting the (hacked) private conversations of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles?

No sensible person condones the actions of the News of the World, or of its editors and journalists. But I, for one, do not find their actions nearly as sickening as the revoltingly selective indignation with which we are now being so continuously bombarded.

Colin Brown
Natal, South Africa


In praise of loyalty

Sir: When Jack Profumo resigned his seat in March 1963, having admitted lying to Parliament, Iain Macleod, then leader of the Commons, amid public and press hysteria quite as overblown as is manifest today, said: ‘Jack Profumo was a friend of mine, is a friend of mine and will continue to be a friend of mine.

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