Our suicidal newspapers are throwing press freedom away

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[/audioplayer]With the possible, although far from certain, exception of the men and women who hire me, it is fair to say that Britain’s editors have a death wish. They suppress their own freedom. They hold out their wrists and beg the state to handcuff them. They are so lost in ideological frenzy that they cannot see that free journalism is the first casualty of their culture wars.

The Daily Mail acclaimed David Cameron’s threat to repeal the Human Rights Act and pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights as ‘triumphant’. Within days, we learned how the ‘triumphant’ state treats the Mail on Sunday when it thinks no one is looking. Without a warrant from a judge, Kent police officers trawled records of thousands of calls to its news desk. In other words, they hacked its phones. The police hate the comparison, but it still holds. Just as celebrities could accuse tabloid journalists of threatening their right to privacy under the Human Rights Act, so journalists can now accuse the police of threatening their right to free expression, which the judges in Strasbourg have ruled includes protection for a journalist’s sources.

The police targeted the Mail on Sunday because it was on the fringes of the Chris Huhne affair. You will remember that a roadside camera caught him speeding. Huhne persuaded his wife, Vicky Pryce, to pretend she was driving so that he could escape a ban, thus involving them in a (rather small) conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Huhne would have got away with it, had he not enraged his wife with the surest method known to man: running off with another woman.