stephen smith

🚨WATCH! Andrew Neil has just delivered one of the strongest, most necessary interventions of the week on this absurd “mystery celebrity” high court injunction. He is completely right, and anyone in a position of power should be paying attention. He is clear-eyed about the ruling itself: “I’m delighted he’s ruled that way. I’m not so delighted he’s kicked it into the long grass and we still can’t name this person.” Then he gets to the heart of it: “It really is ridiculous to stop legitimate newspapers and broadcasters who’ve done a legitimate investigation into somebody’s behaviour which seems unsavoury to put it mildly, not to be able to publish because that person says he’s gonna kill himself. You might as well shut down the British media if that’s the case.” This is exactly the point. We indulge this sort of nonsense far too often in Britain. A celebrity with the means to hire expensive lawyers should not be able to muzzle legitimate reporting of serious allegations simply by invoking mental health or the threat of self-harm. Money must not be allowed to buy silence, and threats of this kind must not become a reliable tool for suppressing scrutiny. @afneil is equally sharp on the contrast with America. Speaking from the US, he notes that a case like this would never have seen the inside of a courtroom. The First Amendment would have stopped it dead. As he puts it, we need to stop allowing our media to be “cribbed and confined and intimidated by people who are trying to hide their own wrongdoing by muzzling the media”. The whole situation is made even more ridiculous by the fact that everyone already knows who it is. The name has circulated freely in Scotland because the ruling does not apply there. Yet the English media remain gagged from publishing their own investigation and the allegations themselves. It is a farce. We need to get much tougher on this. The more the courts entertain these applications, the more people will keep using them to bury inconvenient truths. Let the press do their jobs.