Rishi Sunak has touched down at the Nato summit, but there’s only one question journalists want to ask him about: the allegations that a BBC presenter paid a young person for explicit photos. The claims are ‘shocking and concerning’, the Prime Minister said, adding that he has been assured the BBC’s investigation will be ‘rigorous and swift’. Yet amidst the ongoing and frantic speculation – and endless chatter on social media – the silence from officialdom, the police and the news media as to who the man at the centre of the story actually is has been deafening.
A veritable feeding frenzy continues online, not to mention on foreign websites speculating on who the unlucky man might be. The result has been predictably toxic. As in a Hercule Poirot whodunnit, everyone is falling under suspicion. BBC bigwig after BBC bigwig has been forced to issue an embarrassed statement saying that, whoever it was, it wasn’t him. The BBC’s director-general Tim Davie has said he ‘wholly condemns the unsubstantiated rumours being made on the internet about some of our presenting talent’. But in this information vacuum, is it any wonder that people are speculating?
An unsustainable silence continues in the media – and the feeding frenzy continues online
We don’t know for sure why the Sun, which first reported the claims, has kept quiet on the identity of the ‘household’ name presenter. Vague fears of libel and privacy laws have doubtless combined with a feeling of omertà among the great and the good, and, for some, a perception that it was only fair to protect the good name of a household figure unless and until he appeared in court.
Yet the real cause of this silence, I suspect, probably has something to do with the increasingly draconian restrictions emanating from human rights laws on what we, the public, are allowed to read.
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, protecting private and family life, gave the UK government some worries when it signed the Convention in 1950: in retrospect the government was absolutely correct. In the last thirty years or so, the interpretation of Article 8 has become bloated beyond recognition, so that today a person must be allowed legally to suppress information about himself on the basis of no more than what Strasbourg judges see as a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’. This can cover such things as revelations of casual affairs and embarrassing public photographs, something that has made the tabloid press less interesting of late.
Eighteen months ago, our own Supreme Court, aligning with Strasbourg thinking, held that an American businessman had a right to prevent any mention being made of the fact that he was under investigation in relation to claims his company had been involved in corruption. It also confirmed that, in principle, a person had a right to use the law to keep under wraps the fact of any criminal investigation against him short of charges being brought.
This is worrying. Human rights, we must always remember, are by nature anomalous and exceptional: they are so important as to justify giving an end-run around the democratic process. Sometimes this is all very well: think extreme cases, such as forced sterilisation, torture or deliberate state murder. What is not right, even though judges in Strasbourg and London now do it however, is to apply this kind of reasoning to lesser matters, such as protecting the amour propre of businessmen (and media personalities) who would rather the public was kept in the dark about any investigations being made about them. Balancing such demands for secrecy against the freedom of the press and free speech generally is fundamentally a matter of social policy, which should be decided upon by electors and their representatives.
Whatever human rights law may say, insisting on obscuring certain information is simply misguided. For one thing, it rests on a crabbed view of the function of the media. In any open society, people are naturally and rightly curious about their fellow citizens, the institutions of the society they live in and those involved with those institutions. But the idea that the press should exist to satisfy this curiosity is anathema to some judges. On the contrary: trouble must be avoided, curiosity deprecated, and only the public interest as determined by them can justify spilling embarrassing beans. Or, to translate, they hold the rather prim attitude that we the public should on principle only get the information the great and the good think is good for us.
If we had been allowed to know from the beginning who the man is in the Sun‘s story, most of this chaotic fallout could have been avoided. News is forgotten fast: without the obsessive secrecy, public attention would have moved on to another story. But, as it is, an unsustainable silence continues in the media – and the feeding frenzy continues online. Meanwhile, innocent people are being traduced. Supporters of keeping the names of those accused of impropriety secret must pause and reflect: is this current situation in anyone’s interest?
