Mona Lisa smile – please!

Have you ever wanted to take a photograph in a gallery – and found that you couldn’t?

While many museums and galleries do ban any photography, others don’t. Still others allow some – Tate Modern, for instance, will allow visitors to snap the permanent exhibits, but not the special exhibitions.

But the announcement that, in future, the National Gallery in London is to allow photography has inspired indignation from some visitors, and allowed the Telegraph to provoke a small measure of ire, as well as agreement, in an opinion piece on the decision.

In one sense, it’s quite amusing that publicising a quiet decision – made in part because it’s increasingly difficult for staff to know whether a visitor is using an electronic device to photograph an exhibit or look for information about it – might actually increase the likelihood of people now taking pictures in the gallery by raising awareness of it.

The issue, however, is not really about photographing exhibits, but in many ways, about what galleries are for and how we look at art and what we expect or want from art.

There’s nothing wrong per se with photography in a gallery. Allowing photography doesn’t suddenly mean that every painting is going to be obscured by people taking snaps of it – with or without the added ‘selfie’ element.

Some might ask why you’d photograph anything in a gallery.  

I do so on occasion – almost always for later reference. Many galleries don’t have general catalogues or postcards of every single work. And that’s particularly true of smaller galleries outside major cities.

Sometimes I might make notes – on my phone or even (say it quietly) in a little, old-fashioned notebook. With a pen.

But sometimes, when it’s less likely that you’ll be able to find a reproduction online, a might take a snap.

As an interesting contrast, in Paris, photography is banned in the Orangerie and the Orsay, but not in the Pompidou.

On a personal level, it was helpful in July, in the latter, to be able to take a few photos – and I didn’t get in the way of anybody else and nobody got in my way.

I don’t think it made any difference not to be able to in the Orsay, but in the Orangerie, where there’s a specific effort to create a peaceful, almost meditative space around Monet’s vast Nymphéas canvases, it would have been totally out of place.

There is an element of snobbery involved in at least some of the complaints. Nobody, I suspect, grouches about a visitor sitting quietly in a gallery and sketching a work.

That, of course, has a sort of discipline about it – it was one aspect of a traditional art education, so has a certain ‘legitimacy’.

The big problem in major galleries, though, is not photography, but overcrowding. And I mean when it’s 10 deep near a famous work.

Scrum at The Night Watch

Then, as I’ve said before, I do start feeling irritated by the ‘selfie with Rembrandt’ syndrome, as it occurred when we were visiting the Rijksmuseum last year and you had no chance of really seeing The Night Watch and a bloody struggle to get near any Vermeer.

I actually had to get rather rude myself and push through a crowd, pulling The Other Half behind, so that he could actually get to see The Milkmaid, which he loves.

Equally, when visiting the Courtauld in London last year, I was revelling in being alone in the gallery of gothic and medieval works, when the door opened and a group of tourists flooded in and I was pushed out of the way so that people could start snapping the exhibits.

I fled upstairs, only to be interrupted by them again as their guide nearly sprinted them around the place, barely allowing enough time to cast more than a cursory glance at anything – oh, apart from taking pictures of each other in front of Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve, making crass gestures at the picture.

This is not a question of expecting people to genuflect toward works of art, but of basic good manners and a little bit of respect for the others you’re sharing a gallery space with.

In the Courtauld, I eventually sat it out in the Cézanne room. There are worse things in life.

But it begged a question that why people visit galleries – particularly in those sort of groups – and what art is for.

Is art simply another commodity – an attraction to boost tourism, for instance? Or does it have a value beyond that? In our price-of-everything-value-of-nothing world, I suggest that there is clash between these two.

If, as Picasso said, “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”, then that implies the need for some sort of contemplation. In the Orangerie, with those Monets, it could hardly be truer.

I get the sense that, with the likes of that Courtauld group – and others I’ve seen being dragged around cities on tours, led by bored individuals carrying a brolly or a plastic flower aloft to identify themselves – this is tick-box tourism and has nothing to do with really seeing or experiencing what they’re looking at.

At the heart of this, ultimately, is the gross over-commercialisation of our society, with its attitude of instant gratification and the dumbing down that goes with that.

These are problems that spread across all sorts of realms of life, not just art, but one small illustration of it is the use of ‘selfie’ to describe a self-portrait by someone like Rembrandt, effectively removing any appreciation of the skill involved or even what self-portraiture is really about.

Not that this should be any surprise. After all, concentration camps are on tourists trails these days, while visitors stand grinning as they’re photographed next to the statue of Anne Frank outside the Westerkerk in Amsterdam.

And all this works in combination with the technical/digital revolution, leading to a world in which people visit cultural icons – not to look at them and wonder at what made them such, but, in effect, to digitally play a version of I spy, before moving rapidly to the next one.

There is another problem with that. Let’s shrug our shoulders and say that, well, if someone wants to race around a gallery and merely glance at stuff, then that’s up to them and they are free to do so.

Which is entirely true, of course.

But at what point does the sort of behaviour and crowd chaos outlined above become unacceptable where it impinges on the experience of other visitors?

You can ask the same question another way: why should someone have the right to play their music so loudly that all their neighbours have no choice but to hear it too?

Those are the problems: not photographing the exhibits in galleries.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, it's a load of fun

On the way to Africa – Elders Price and Cunningham. Pic: Joan Marcus

For all who are familiar with South Park, the creation of Colarado's own Trey Parker and Matt Stone, you won't need telling that the humour is of 'an adult' nature.

Or out another way, lots of rude words and an absolute rejection of anything even close to political correctness.

To be honest, it too me years to 'get' South Park. I'd cringe at anything that affected my own sensibilities. But then - finally - it dawned that everything is fair game for a reason, and that that in itself is wonderfully liberating and cathartic.

Parker and Stone are scrupulously fair in their use of their cartoon world to rip the almighty piss out of anything and everything. There are no sacred cows.

So when it was announced, early this year, that their Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, was coming to London, tickets were booked.

And yesterday - perfectly timed, as it happens, after yet another week of metadata and tagging and SEO and other such wearying geekiness - we made the short journey into the heart of the West End to see it.

First, a little note about the Prince of Wales Theatre. I last visited in about 1988, with my parents and sister, to see 'Allo 'Allo!, which was a hoot. But the building has been seriously renovated since and restored to wonderful, Art Deco glory.

Now, on to the show itself.

The story starts with a group of spotless, gleaming young Mormon men waiting to receive their missionary assignments. Well, spotless and with gleaming teeth and so on apart from one, Elder Cunningham, who is short, chubby, with curly hair and spectacles, is friendless, has parents who are ashamed of him and turns out to be an inveterate liar/fantasist.

When he's paired with Elder Price for a two-year stint converting the locals in Uganda, we're in for fun and games.

The pair join a group of other missionaries in a little village, where they find that 'Africa' isn't really like The Lion King. To start with, Aids is rampant, with some people trying distinctly unpleasant 'cures', and a murderous local warlord wanting to 'circumcise' every women in the area, blaming the female sex drive for Aids.

Suffice it to say that Parker and Stone do the remarkable - and make us care about the characters without ever taking the foot off the gas that drives their ridiculing of Mormonism in particular and religion and superstition more generally, together with Western/American attitudes toward and misconceptions about Africa.

The duo have targeted Mormons before - perhaps most particularly in the South Park episode, All About Mormons, which includes details of the Joseph Smith story, interspersed with a jolly musical ditty - 'dum dum dum dum dum' etc. Although what's actually being sung is not so much 'dum' and rather obviously 'dumb'.

Here, there are plenty of little interludes telling the story of how ancient Hebrews travel to the US, war a bit between themselves, and then leave behind golden tablets that an angel, centuries later, tells Joseph Smith to dig up (keeping the actual tablets to himself, of course).

And if there's no 'dumb dumb' ditty this time around, we're still left in no doubt that that is what the writers think.

Indeed, the show becomes a rather clever look at how a religion can develop. And it's giving little away to say that great fun can be had spotting and listening out for the pop culture references, from hobbits to Star Trek, which themselves make a dual point.

The music is a mixture of pretty conventional Broadway and a more rock-based approach, and it works well.

It's all bubbly and moves along at a cracking pace.

There are a few interesting references to spot too: the most obvious are those to The Lion King, which are for satirical purpose.

But a scene where the villagers present their version of the story of Smith for visiting Latter Day Saints hierarchy, is clearly a nod to the telling of Uncle Tom in The King and I (another culture-clash musical), right down to the use of a strip of cloth to represent a river.

And a line suddenly popped up - "what's so scary about that" - that struck me instantly as familiar. It took me until a few hours later to remember "what's so fearsome about that" from I Have Confidence, from The Sound of Music. Here too, it makes sense as a reference, since religion has held back both Maria's development and that of Elders Cunningham and Price. And all need confidence to get through their rite of passage.

Which all illustrates how, in many ways, The Book of Mormon is actually an incredibly conventional show - in spite of its very pointed assaults on a fair few subjects that some might find offensive.

Mind, as The Other Half reminded me, even in South Park itself, the boys often end an episode observing that they've 'learnt something today'. Parker and Stone's approach may seem to be a finger in the face of convention and tradition, but it isn't without a basic belief in humanity and what we might think of as 'civilised', tolerant attitudes.

Robert Lopez worked with Parker and Stone on the book, score and lyrics - and they're good.

It's primarily an ensemble piece - and the ensemble is flawless. But Gavin Creel as Elder Price and Jared Gertner as Elder Cunningham, are both excellent. I did find myself wondering if the casting adverts specified white makes of a certain type, with Osmond teeth, apart from for Cunningham.

Special mentions also to Giles Terera as the head man in the village, and Chris Jarman as the warlord.

Perhaps it's not for the easily-offended - a man across the aisle from me cracked but a single smile during the entire performance and didn't applaud at the end: The Other Half speculated that he was possibly a religious leader come to look, possibly in search of offence.

The Daily Telegraph and that paragon of upstanding morality, the Daily Mail, both disliked it. Which should tell you something. The Mail, in a particularly outraged rant shortly after it opened, revealed that it spectacularly missed the point of some of the jokes. Or perhaps that simply made for more sensationalist copy.

For the record, if you're not familiar with South Park, there is no mainstream religion that they have not ridiculed – and that includes Islam (in episodes both before 9/11 and after the cartoons debacle). So claims that Mormons are a 'soft target' and they wouldn't go for other ones are fatally flawed.

Mormons themselves seem to be taking it in smiling stride. The Church of the Latter Day Saints has three full-page adverts in the programme, and has also taken out ads on London buses.

A damned good evening's entertainment. If you get the chance - get along to see it.

It's not the Daily Mail in disguise – honestly

Here's a question: can the only way to lure women to read a newspaper be to liberally sprinkle it with celebrity tittle tattle and bitchy dispatches about someone else's private life/body/clothes?

I ask for a reason, inspired (although it seems to do that word a rank injustice) by a piece in today's Daily Telegraph.

In it, a female journalist - and again, this is taxing the language somewhat - addressed the the vexed question of whether Ms Kate Winslet, star of the silver screen, was really doing a favour to her two children in marrying for a third time, being also pregnant by the new man in her life.

I'm really not sure what Kate has done to draw this attention - other than being a famous and successful film star - or perhaps it's simply because she is a Kate. After all, only a few short weeks ago, the same publication produced another piece, written by a different hackette, and filed under UK news.

The 'news' in that case, was that another Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, was rather letting the side down in the maternity wear stakes. She had apparently been buying off-the-peg pregnancy wear. The nerve of it.

There is something a tad ironic about the dear old Torygraph carrying an article that says that marriage might not be the best option for a particular individual who, whatever their 'success' rate in that field, certainly seems rather committed to it as an ideal.

Although, of course, marriage shouldn't be allowed for gay people.

But allow yourself a flight of fancy for a moment and muse whether it would have entertained the same thoughts of Henry VIII.

Which subject itself raises a quite interesting point.

Earlier this year, author Hilary Mantel was pretty much crucified by most of the press for a lecture that she gave (and the subsequent essay that was published) for the London Review of Books. In it, Mantel argued that the bodies of royal women become public property, because their core role becomes to produce an heir to the throne.

That she appealed, very calmly, for the Duchess to be left alone in her pregnancy came to nought, as what she'd said was twisted from being a very polite condemnation of much of the media coverage (and the public obsession with the issue) into a personal attack on Kate herself.

Yet within days, there was more coverage of the royal pregnancy. I recall one online article - if we can dignify it with such a term - that was simply an excuse to publish a number of pictures of the Duchess, taken at a function, from a variety of angles, to illustrate her "baby bump".

But while you reach for the sick bags, ponder this: one of the things that Mantell pointed out was that even in the reign of Henry VIII, while there may have been no newspapers, there was still no shortage of public speculation about his wives and their abilities (or otherwise) to produce a male heir.

So the issue is not new and cannot be laid entirely at the door of the newspapers.

What these latest examples illustrate, however, is that even quality newspapers are going down a particular route.

A little background here. I was first introduced to the Telegraph when I started doing sports coverage for the Morning Star. One of the senior hands informed me that it had the best sports coverage around and that I should read it.

He was right - and I did. And since these were the days when you had no option but to buy areal paper newspaper, I also read other content.

You didn't have to agree with the editorial line - but editorial and reporting were clearly and properly defined, and the quality of both was high. The Other Half also recalls that the Telegraph had exemplary coverage of intentional news, so this isn't just my viewing things through rosy specs.

Which makes it particularly sad to see a fine newspaper's descent down the road it is currently taking.

Only the other week it was revealed that the Telegraph, in conjunction with the BBC, of all media organisations, had done some serious, public-interest work on revealing lobbying issues among MPs.

But an increasing amount of the mainstream media seems to be relying on these occasional public-service journalism to justify an increasing amount of tripe - and their continued opposition to any form of independent regulation.

And there is the additional issue of such coverage so often being an encouragement by women, to other women, to judge and despise yet more women.

What does the Telegraph want and what does it think it will achieve?

The sort of articles that I have mentioned would be more obviously at home in the Daily Mail - and indeed, the Telegraph has gained a recent nickname of the Maily Telegraph in recognition of precisely this approach.

The Mail  has been remarkably successful in winning female readers - and winning them to right-wing politics. That's a fact. So does the Telegraph really believe that this is a way to boost circulation/hits among women?

It's probably fair to say that the majority of those who purchase gossip magazines are women, so presumably there's a growth market out there or at least considered to be. And the success of the Mail should never be underestimated as a model. for other publications

Of course women do not, per se, simply want to read tat, but the Telegraph is far from alone in this, and there is a real and increasing problem with even our so-called quality press feeling a need to dumb down.

And of course it's not merely a female thing. Judging by many, many posters on the Telegraph forums, most of whom appear to be male, the ultimate problem is an increasing, cross-gender inability to think beyond kneejerkery.

And that is bad for the public discourse as a whole and, therefore, for every single one of us who cares about that public discourse and about the political life of the country that it inevitably informs.

For that reason, it is irrelevant if one personally avoids such copy. Because the impact is obviously so much wider.

Unfortunately, I cannot see an end in sight to the dumbing down. Except to say: think about what you read - particularly online - and don't give financial succour to those who are probably quite happy for that dumbing-down, that increasing bread and circuses, to continue.

There is a question of wether in discussing such articles we actually fall into the trap of doing exactly what the accountants want - particularly given the relationship between online hits and advertising revenue - but it's just as dangerous, it seems to me, to pretend that ignoring this dross will make it go away.

We need to hold up the media to some sort of standards. Anything else simply lets the bastards get away with it.

The Leveson delusion

You could be forgiven for imagining that the end of the world as we know it is nigh.

One look at some of the UK’s newspapers could lead readers to believe that we are on the cusp of a dictatorship – heading into Stalinist/Hitlerian* terrain.

After all, in the wake of that dreadful Lord Leveson’s inquiry, the Prime Minister has said that the proposed new system of regulation would do some pretty hideous things.

It would mean:

• upfront apologies from the press to victims;

• fines of 1% of turnover for publishers, up to £1m;

• a self-regulatory body with independent appointments and funding;

• a robust standards code;

• a free arbitration service for victims;

• a speedy complaints system.

Oh me, oh my – who on Earth could find such things acceptable?

So it’s clear why the likes of the Telegraph, News International and the Daily Mail are all in a state of high dudgeon, and talking about seeking legal advice to see if they would really have to sign up to the proposals.

Personally, I like the idea of standards. Although that would obviously upset a publication that, in January this year, paid for paparazzi photos of an eight-year-old child leaving a gym class with her mother, model Heidi Klum, and suggested that Ms Klum was not the only “leggy beauty” in the family.

Yes: you did read that correctly. The Mail compared an eight-year-old child with her adult mother in terms that were about sexual attractiveness.

Not, of course, that this is some sort of first for the Mail.

Readers may be interested to know that I have tweeted the latter link at the paper itself a few of times. There’s never any response. Can’t imagine why.

Anyway, setting aside the hysterics of the press itself, amongst the members of the Twitterati who are up in arms about all this nasty censorship, there exist a number of delusions.

So it seems that the time is right to examine these.

Delusion 1

We already have the laws to deal with press excesses.

No. We don’t. We have laws to deal with hacking and so forth, yes.

But we have no privacy law. We have no law to stop the Mail’s creepy peado-lite obsession with children.

We have no law to ensure that lies are corrected properly and on a scale that is the same as how the lie was originally printed.

Delusion 2

Regulation is the end of life as we know it!

Even a passing acquaintance with some recent stories, from horsemeat in ‘beef’ products to the banks causing the financial crisis, would suggest that regulation, properly enforced, might have helped to avoid these problems – in other words, be a force for good.

Similarly, with major pharmaceutical companies routinely withholding trial data on drugs (see Ben Goldacre), strong regulation, properly enforced, is required to stop this, for the sake of everyone concerned and, most of all, for patients.

The majority of people do not believe that regulation is a bad thing – or that any of the industries referenced above would not be better with meaningful regulation, properly enforced.

Indeed, according to various polls, the public at large seem, in general, to be in favour of meaningful regulation of the media.

Which of course explains why the press had to go way over the top in its hyperbolic ravings, invoking Churchill and God knows what else, in order to get past the rational stuff and whip up knee-jerking hysteria.

Delusion 3

Why does a private company like Hacked Off get to have “an audience” with politicians discussing this?

Actually, this is less a delusion and more either simple stupidity or deliberate disingenuousness. Take your pick.

The reality is that the vast majority of media organisations are private companies. How many ‘audiences’ has Rupert Murdoch had with prime ministers, from Margaret Thatcher on?

Delusion 4

We have a free press!

For most people, the notion of a ‘free press’ is bound up with ideas of that press working in favour and on behalf of the majority. They don’t tend to believe that the idea simply means being free to publish anything.

We have no such thing in the UK.

The majority of our media is owned by private individuals/companies, who use their publications and other media outlets to push their own agendas.

Thus it should come as no surprise that the Daily Mail loves to rabble rouse on matters to do with tax. After all, it’s owner, Viscount Rothermere, is himself a foreign domicile tax exile. As are the Telegraph-owning Barclay brothers.

But how much the bulk of the British mainstream media believes in the idea of working in favour of the majority can be found in its apparently easy readiness to promote the government’s demonisation of anyone who is on benefits – the majority of whom are in work.

It has shown itself happy not to stand up for ‘the people’, but to demonise the poor, the disabled and the vulnerable.

The majority has been happy to turn a blind eye to Iain Duncan Smith’s lies – and also to those of David ‘the NHS is safe with me’ Cameron.

The media can be a force for good.

But let’s not be a bunch of romantic fools about this: at present in the UK, it is, for the most part, simply the agendas of private individuals and companies that are being promoted by our ‘free’ press.

And just like many another industry, proper regulation, properly enforced, can make it better.

What will be interesting is to see how this same media reacts to Cameron’s u-turn on regulation.

But then again, it’s difficult to imagine that the Conservative Party (or at least the Parliamentary part of it) has many illusions about retaining joint power or gaining full power at the next general election.

There are reasons that it has been so cavalier about its lies and its taking of a bulldozer to the entire social contract in the UK.

* Select as desired.

Anyone fancy having a 'free press'?

Paul McMullan – a living, walking advert for regulation

Well, it didn’t take long. The weekend after the Leveson Inquiry reported, we had the fun and games of seeing Liberty director and Leveson advisor Shami Chakrabarti having to pen a rapid response to the confusion‚ in some of the press, over her stance on the report.

Now, setting aside the questions about who exactly elected Chakrabarti – and the organisation she heads – to the position that it appears to hold, one can’t help but wonder if the likes of the Mail on Sunday and the Independent (which lovely couple share a home these days) really couldn’t understand the nuances of her original response or were motivated by something else to actively misunderstand it.

But then again, lots of other people seem similarly incapable of understanding the issues surrounding Leveson.

For instance, there is lots of talk about threats to a ‘free press’. But what exactly does that mean?

Well, at it’s most simple, what people usually mean is something that can act in the general public interest by explaining things properly and uncovering corruption and lies etc, and holding politicians and so forth to account.

And it cannot be difficult for many to agree is a good idea.

But that is not, in general, what we have in the UK today.

Instead, what we have is a press that is, generally, owned by individuals for the sake of profit and their own agendas.

Now, for the sake of clarity: I have nothing whatsoever against profit – indeed, as a freelancer, I like it. Goodness – couldn’t I make a bit more myself?!

In terms of the press, though, there is the potential for conflict between the drive for profit and the general public interest ˆ not least where news isn’t considered sexy‚ enough to get readers and advertising.

Over the years, it’s meant, for instance, that some missing children are considered more worthy of space than others – usually because pictures of pretty, white girls make better front pages.

In other words, profit has been one of the drivers of the general dumbing-down of the UK press over the last 20-30 years, whereby we’ve arrived at a point where news‚ is dominated by who tweeted what, who slept with whom, and which celebrity fell out of what nightclub at 3am.

Now it may well be that that is what the great British public wants from its press – but let’s not pretend that, if that is the case, it’s what the concept of a ‘free press’ is really about.

Then there’s that agendas bit. Now again, let’s not be naïve.

All newspaper proprietors will have their own political views, and will want to disseminate them. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But in the last decades, we’ve seen a serious crumbling of the once sacred wall that divided reporting and editorialisation as the British press has slumped toward a sort of Fox News approach, the kind of thing that Rupert Murdoch espouses as his answer to supposed elitism.

Even a once fine newspaper such as the Telegraph does it these days. In the past, you’d buy it for its quality of news coverage, even if you didn’t always agree with the editorial line, but the two were clearly defined.

And if conflating reporting and editorial isn’t bad enough, papers further dumb down matters by employing the likes of Jeremy Clarkson or Julie Bindel as columnists.

Okay – Clarkson can at least be funny, but he’s no more a philosopher, say, than Richard Littlejohn. Oh.

And Bindel’s continued contributions to the Guardian simply serve to allow hand-wringing liberals a bit of ‘acceptable’ bigotry.

Look across the Channel and it’s a different world. When the French were having their burqa debate, for instance, the public discussion was not drawn along strictly tribal political lines.

For instance, one of the commentators was a left-wing female philosopher who was in favour of a ban, but articulated her reasons in a nuanced way. Philosophically, in other words.

Similarly, if there is a strike in France, papers might not agree with that action, but there will be a pattern of all press – from across the political spectrum – actually analysing the reasons for industrial action, and discussing it in a way that at least examines the issues.

And French newspapers are refreshingly free of those 3am nightclub stories.

They are not, however, run by the state or as organs of the state – they are private companies. Which rather suggests that you don’t need to print a diet of salacious gossip or infantilised opinion in order to make money.

But fair enough: if you’re going to turn news into knee-jerkery and titilating entertainment because it sells, that’s your decision. Just don’t try to pretend that it’s about ‘free press’. It’s not.

Indeed, it was the late Sir Robin Day who once noted: “Only two newspapers tell the truth. The Financial Times, which tells the truth for the business community, and the Morning Star, which tells the truth for the workers”.

There is, of course, plenty of other hypocrisy in all this. Imagine if you will, editor Paul Dacre at the Mail suggesting that it would be a good idea for trade unions to regulate themselves. No?

But, as the late Frank Carson would have said: “There’s more”.

Many of those now shrilling the loudest about the idea of any form of meaningful (independent) regulation are, in effect, defending the intrusion into people’s private lives on the grounds of profit.

Because profit was the only motive for the stories about Max Mosely, for instance. The News of the World tried to confect a public interest argument – and failed.

The idea that, when someone is in the public eye, they are automatically demanding to be followed and photographed everywhere etc is a nonsense.

Some might – some do – but it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be a better world by ignoring such attention-seekers and not pandering to their demand for attention, let alone then deciding that anyone else remotely in the public eye (well, in the entertainment world, at any rate) is fair game.

And let’s note what should be obvious: making a film or writing a book is not one and the same as demanding to be followed and reported everywhere, any more than writing a column or editing a paper is also a demand for an end to one’s privacy.

So when some in the media wail about ‘a free press’, what they’re actually meaning is a press that is free to invade people’s privacy for no reason other that profit by publishing salacious stories.

What is odd about this is that it seems unlikely that the same people would also ever applaud or have applauded countries where the state invaded people’s privacy to the extent of persecuting them for what they wrote or said or read, whether for reasons of religious or political ideology.

Few would support such totalitarianism, but if not, why fall for a line that a ‘free press’ needs to invade people’s privacy for salacious entertainment that does not have the support of a genuine public interest argument?

That is one of the things highlighted by Leveson, together with other similarly irresponsible behaviour, in the name of sensation that, as Leveson himself said, has caused “havoc” in people’s lives.

One of the most tragic cases raised again at Leveson was that of murdered Glasgow schoolgirl Diane Watson, about whom a series of lies were published in two Scottish newspapers, plus Marie Claire magazine. Her brother later killed himself and was found clutching the articles about his sister.

The murder happened in 1991. One of the two papers, the Herald, only managed an apology in 2011, after Diane’s parents had appeared at the Leveson Inquiry. It was itself under different ownership by then.

The journalist who concocted stories about their daughter, claiming she was a bully and had, in effect, contributed to her own murder, claimed to have been shocked to have been personally mentioned at Leveson.

Perhaps if he had not taken a decision to invent stories to support his own agenda, that surprise wouldn’t have occurred.

There was the case of Mosely’s son, who suffered from depression and died of a drug overdose within a year of the News of the World story, which might or might not have pushed him over the edge.

Mosely himself has described how, when going to his son’s flat to deal with his remaining belongings, the place was subject of a press scrum. One wonders what public interest was served by that?

And then there’s the story of how News of the World hack Paul McMullan drove the mentally ill and drug-addicted daughter of the late Denholm Elliot to suicide by luring her into prostituting herself so he could take nude photographs of her for the paper and, in his own words, impress his new boss, Piers Morgan.

This is the same McMullan who has also claimed that the only people who want privacy are paedophiles – which quite splendid piece of utter fuckwittedness has the ring of Orwell’s 1984 about it.

And all this is without mentioning the links between elements of the press and the police in the case of the murder of Daniel Morgan.

It is without mentioning the complicity of swathes of the British press in the 20-plus year cover up of what happened at Hillsborough.

And so on.

None of these were accidents. They illustrate a culture that exists – a culture that is being defended by an assortment of individuals and groups.

It takes some contortions to pretend that any of this is remotely justifiable – or that the state of the British press is, in general, something to be proud of and something to defend.

Independent regulation works fine in places such as Finland and Denmark – the former is consistently number 1 in the International Press Freedom Index, even with (gasp) statutory underpinnings.

In the UK, independent regulation doesn’t seem to upset anybody when applied to, say, advertising.

It seems that the real problems people have with the thought of independent regulation are nothing to do with any concept of a ‘free press’, and everything to do with either reducing the ability to profit from the private lives of others – and a sort of fundamentalist small statism that has to pretend that none of the above problems and contradictions exist or need dealing with, in order to continue with it’s view that even an independent regulator would be state intervention and the end of life as we know it.

A free press? Yes – that would be most welcome.