Paul Dacre: Confused, contradictory and hypocritical

Dacre delivered a long speech to the Society of Editors conference the transcript of which can be found here: RePress

It's a long and rambling speech with, it must be said, some good points but this section on the Max Mosley case is just too funny to miss. Remember, this is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Mail talking here:

Recently, of course, the very same Justice Eady effectively ruled that it’s perfectly acceptable for the multi-millionaire head of a mult-billion sport that is followed by countless young people to pay five women £2,500 to take part in acts of unimaginable sexual depravity with him.

The judge found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a “sick Nazi orgy” as the News of the World contested, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform Mosley was issuing commands in German while one prostitute pretended to pick lice from his hair, a second fellated him and a third caned his backside until blood was drawn.

Now most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Justice Eady. To him such behaviour was merely “unconventional”. Nor in his mind was there anything wrong in a man of such wealth using his money to exploit women in this way.

Would he feel the same way, I wonder, if one of those women had been his wife or daughter? But what is most worrying about Justice Eady’s decisions is that he is ruling that - when it comes to morality - the law in Britain is now effectively neutral, which is why I accuse him, in his judgments, of being “amoral”.

In the sporting celebrity case, he rejected the idea that adultery was a proper cause for public condemnation. Instead, he declared that because family breakdown was now commonplace, there was a strong argument for “not holding forth about adultery” or, in other words, attaching no greater inherent worth to marriage than to any other lifestyle choice. Thus no moral delineation was to be made between marriage and those who would destroy it, between victim and victimiser, between right and wrong.

In the Mosley case, the judge is ruling that there is no public interest in revealing a public figure’s involvement in acts of depravity. What the judge loftily calls the “new rights-based jurisprudence” of the Human Rights Act seems to be ruling out any such thing as public standards of morality and decency, and the right of newspapers to report on digressions from those standards.

Update 11/11/08: Toynbee tackles Dacre as does Neil Lyndon