Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Lord Justice Leveson and the baby killers

I have worried about Hugh Grant’s understanding of power ever since he started bringing up baby. I first saw him reach for the innocent child at one of the party conferences, where he was on stage arguing for statutory control of the press. He had his stock reply ready when someone asked whether he wasn’t being naïve about the likelihood of politicians or politicised bureaucrats seizing the opportunity to censor.

‘The phrase that is always used is ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bath water’. I have always said I don’t think it is that difficult to tell what is bath water and what is a baby. To most people it is pretty obvious.’

‘Is it really, comrade?’ I thought to myself. It seems to me that it depends where the red lines are drawn and who is doing the drawing. It depends on knowing how a story will work out and what its consequences will be, which no one can know in advance. As I listened to his blithe assurance that the punishment of free speech was an easy task that reasonable men and women could perform without qualms, Saul Bellow’s wonderful sentence from the Adventures of Augie March ran through my mind.

‘Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.’

Everybody knows it, that is, except Grant, the Hacked Off campaign, 99 per cent of the media studies academics in England and the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties This morning’s Telegraph raises a further objection. What about the people who want to throw out babies? What about the people who want to drown them in the bathwater and hurl them out of the window to stop them screaming the house down?

The Telegraph had discovered that Maria Miller had taken more than £90,000 from the taxpayer to spend on a house in Wimbledon, where her parents lived with her family.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in