Some Guy Behind The Editor's Desk

Sordel learnt a valuable lesson from the example of Jonathan Aitken.

For those too young (or perhaps too old) too remember him, Aitken was one of what seemed at the time a great many Conservative politicians forced to resign by various scandals last century. This one is rather more interesting to us today than some of the others because it involved the Saudis, but what people tend to remember is not the scandal itself but the speech that Aitken made when embarking upon a catastrophic libel action that landed him in prison for perjury:

If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it, I am ready for the fight. The fight against falsehood and those who peddle it.

And the lesson that Sordel learnt from this episode is that the clearest evidence available to us that someone is a scoundrel is the grandiloquence with which they appeal to high principle.

At which one turns to Michael Gove.

Gove - whom under normal circumstances one would have dismissed as a pompous nitwit perhaps shortly before he opened his mouth but certainly shortly thereafter - has managed to hold much of the country thrall beneath his mesmeric, piscine glassiness during his tenure as Secretary of State for Education. He is rather like an unsettling child who, having been liberated from the need to blink by genetic abnormality, settles all arguments with a staring competition.

"Good fellow, Gove" we mutter nervously, leaving him in the classroom at break to eat flies and cogitate on future improvements to the English Baccalaureate.

His appearance before the Leveson Inquiry yesterday revealed, however, the man's Inner Aitken as he proceeded to lecture Lord Leveson about the Freedom of the Press and admonish him pre-emptively for seeking to curtail it in any way.

Gove (like Aitken as it happens) is a former journalist who finds himself on the Westminster side of a revolving door. Presumably having been rendered giddy by passing through it, Gove seemed to have forgotten himself completely, regarding his testimony as an opportunity to bloviate insufferably in a manner that is fairly characterised by Esther Addley in The Guardian.

Clearly his dizziness was infectious as well, since it was clear from the tone of voice employed by both Robert Jay and his judicial master that their eyes were rolling almost as persistently as Gove's vainglorious oratory. Go watch the full performance if you can find the time.

Clearly such a man is not to be contained in my Promethean nutshell: like the Press itself he strides free of such bounds bearing the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play.

Still: it might be appropriate for him to remember that those editors of whom he speaks in tones befitting deities did all put their trousers on one leg at a time. The Press is all very well in abstract, but in particular some of them might prove to be the sort of odious tick who would presume to lecture a judge on his public duties for the sake of striking a public pose.

In such cases it is surely justified to extend the right to freedom of speech only grudgingly and with scant reason for celebration.

Hang 'Em (Even in Conservation Areas)

Good news everybody! You have a fundamental human right to a satellite dish. When it comes to human rights, the BSkyB is not the limit, but it is certainly the icing on the cake.

To say that human rights are a misunderstood area of thought would be an understatement, mainly because legal rights and natural rights have been blurred to the point at which they are difficult to disentangle. If you infringe someone's legal right to a satellite dish, you have committed a crime; if you infringe someone's natural right to life, you have committed a ... sin?

Opponents of capital punishment like to hedge their argument around with practical considerations, but claims that it is ineffective or inefficient cannot explain the fervency with which they argue their position. Lots of things are ineffective and inefficient; the problem with capital punishment is that it is morally repugnant, even to many people who are not religious.

The natural right to life is, however, very weakly defended in several areas of public life. There is no legal right to life for soldiers in a war, but the natural right to life is inalienable, so why do we go along so meekly when our country wages elective wars on, for example, the soldiers of Libya?

If you won't cry for those, how about civilian women and children killed in Afghanistan by NATO bombing? (Perhaps you shrug at all death in war?)

How about the extra-judicial murder of Danny McCann, Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell on Gibraltar? How about the fatal shooting by police this month of Mark Duggan, an incident exploited by those rioting in North London?

If they were too "guilty" for you, how about the extra-judicial murder of Jean Charles de Menezes?

Every single day people all around the world (and sometimes in the United Kingdom) are being killed without the due process of trial or appeal. If you are genuinely appalled by the state killing people in your name, capital punishment should be the least of your worries.

We aren't just on a slippery slope ... we are already right at the bottom of one.

So, what right do campaigners believe themselves to be protecting? A high ethical standard that our society seems largely to have abandoned? Or a legal right to life that is one short step in triviality from the legal right to watch it all on Sky?