Stephen Glover: Hating the ‘Mail’ is one thing, hailing Mr Justice Eady another

The Guardian and the Daily Mail hate, and are fascinated by, each other. Scarcely a week passes without a missile erupting out of one camp, aimed at the other. In any other walk of life, Norwegian peace negotiators would have been brought in, and innumerable UN Security Council resolutions passed.

So it was hardly surprising that, after Paul Dacre’s attack on Mr Justice Eady last week, The Guardian should have poured a couple of buckets of cold soup over the head of the editor of the Daily Mail. Actually, the paper ran a leader that was almost sympathetic in a very superior way, which suggests to me that its editor, Alan Rusbridger, did not want to become personally involved in hostilities.

Instead, he encouraged Polly Toynbee to slip her collar. She wrote a characteristically spirited piece, not so much in favour of Mr Justice Eady and a privacy law, as against Mr Dacre and the Mail. More daringly, perhaps, Max Mosley was allowed to pop out of whatever S&M dungeon he was occupying to mount an enthusiastic defence of Mr Justice Eady, who recently found in his favour against the News of the World.

There was also a swarm of letters, almost all pro-Eady or anti-Dacre. This is the liberal default position. I can quite understand why all decent people should hate the Daily Mail (let me again mention that I write a column for that paper), but it is more difficult to understand why they should celebrate Mr Justice Eady as a beacon of liberty.

I suppose that they don’t like tabloids invading people’s privacy. What these enlightened souls do not grasp is that Eady has sometimes acted as a force for suppression. Three months ago, the United Nations committee on human rights (which all good liberals naturally support) criticised British libel laws in general as being restrictive and illiberal, citing a judgment by Mr Justice Eady.

In 2005, he ruled against Dr Rachel Ehrenfeld, an American expert on terrorism, who had alleged in a book that a Saudi billionaire called Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz had supported terrorism and contributed millions of dollars to al-Qa’ida. What was notable about this case is that Dr Ehrenfeld had not published her book in Britain, though 23 books had been ordered over the internet from America. Dr Ehrenfeld was told to pay £10,000 to Sheikh Mahfouz, and the same to each of his two sons, and was saddled with a bill including costs of over £100,000.

This was not the first time that Mr Justice Eady had ruled in favour of wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen. In 2003, he found against The Wall Street Journal, which had claimed that a Saudi company was being monitored by Saudi banking regulators at the behest of US law-enforcement agencies. On that occasion, his judgment was ultimately overturned by the House of Lords.

It is childish for people to have lined up in this argument according to what they think of the Daily Mail. Mr Justice Eady is not an enlightened judge with a full-hearted belief in a free press. His belief in a privacy law dates back to at least 1990 when he served on the Calcutt committee and argued in favour of such a law. The Human Rights Act has given him the wherewithal to develop a privacy law off his own bat without Parliament having voted in favour of one.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of individual cases, Mr Dacre is right to argue that one judge with a particular take on newspapers should not be allowed to develop a privacy law single-handedly that may inhibit the workings of a free press.

Surely time for a truce in the stupid battle of the London freesheets

Anyone doubting that newspapers are also having a hard time right now need only read about DMGT (Daily Mail and General Trust), one of the most powerful newspaper groups, making people redundant, and Trinity Mirror’s advertising revenues declining by 20 per cent since June.

In this context, the afternoon freesheet war between Rupert Murdoch’s The London Paper and DMGT’s London Lite looks even more ridiculous. Both are losing millions of pounds. Neither makes any useful contribution to journalism. And in the case of DMGT, London Lite is helping to throttle its own London Evening Standard, which is a proper newspaper.

The sensible course, as I suggested over a year ago, would be to merge the two freesheets, with Murdoch and DMGT each taking 50 per cent. You would then have one almost profitable, potentially acceptable freesheet, as opposed to two bad unprofitable ones.

Rupert Murdoch’s News International has reportedly just rebuffed an approach by DMGT, though I don’t know what was actually proposed. Can even the mighty Murdoch continue to blow millions of pounds on such a stupid cause?

Carter-Ruck vs Anthony Julius – clash of the legal titans

How wonderful that we still have lawyers who champion the right of free speech. In that pantheon, no one ranks higher than Carter-Ruck.

The firm (whose website recently boasted that it had won damages “in excess of £700,000 for a number of Muslim clients” over the preceding 12 months) has been engaged by an Iraqi-born billionaire, Nadhmi Auchi. Mr Auchi was convicted in a French court in 2003 for fraud, though he contests the judgment and is appealing against it.

Between 2 February and 16 November 2003, The Guardian and The Observer published six articles about Mr Auchi, none of which was complimentary. The author of two of them was Martin Bright. Another was written by Nick Cohen.

Mr Bright is now the political editor of the New Statesman, in which guise he writes a blog. This included a link to the six articles about Mr Auchi. Carter-Ruck complained to The Guardian, which feebly disavowed the pieces it and its sister newspaper The Observer had published, and removed them from its website, admitting “significant inaccuracies” without specifying what they were. Mr Auchi via Carter-Ruck is now seeking an apology from the New Statesman.

However, a fightback may be brewing. Mr Bright and the other journalists involved are not happy to see their articles dismissed as “inaccurate”. Anthony Julius of Mishcon de Reya is offering his services gratis to the cause. While the impoverished New Statesman may be inclined to put up the white flag, the much more powerful Guardian is being urged to stand by articles which it and The Observer published five years ago, and which were only recently disowned.

This may be quite a battle, and it is possible that Carter-Ruck has bitten off more than it can chew. I wonder if the case will end up in Mr Justice Eady’s court.