Stephen Glover on The Press

Mr Justice Eady is beginning to worry me. Is he a friend of a free Press? There are good reasons to believe that he isn't.

He presided in the recent case involving the Mail on Sunday and Lord Browne, who was forced to resign as chairman of BP. The judge took exception to a lie told by Lord Browne regarding how he met his homosexual lover, Jeff Chevalier, and much of the story came tumbling out. Mr Justice Eady could scarcely have been angrier about Lord Browne's falsehood.

What seems to have been widely overlooked, however, is that the Mail on Sunday's original story is still covered by an injunction that has not been lifted by the judge. It has, however, been published in outline both by the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Telegraph. Mr Chevalier alleged that BP, which is Britain's biggest company, had threatened to move its headquarters abroad, with potentially seismic consequences for some of its employees.

This is the story the Mail on Sunday had originally wished to run in detail until it was injuncted by Lord Browne's lawyers. Mr Justice Eady's reasoning for granting the injunction was that Lord Browne asserted the story was untrue, and this denial was corroborated by senior BP employees. The judge believed the chairman of BP, though he subsequently lied to him.

Of course, I have no way of knowing whether or not the story was correct, but it is surely not for any judge to prohibit the publication of a story of this nature on the grounds that it may not be true. No individual was maligned or traduced. It was the word of a source who the newspaper believed against the word of BP. Why shouldn't the Mail on Sunday be allowed to publish, and be damned if its story turned out to be false? We cannot have judges weighing up the veracity of political or business stories before they are published.

Mr Justice Eady has crept on to my radar too often for comfort. In 2005 he ruled that certain passages of a book by the author Niema Ash about her former friend, the Canadian singer Loreena McKennitt, be removed. The suggestion was not that anything in the book was untrue, but that Loreena McKennit's privacy had been infringed and the duty of confidence owed to her by her former friend had been violated, though no confidentiality agreement had been signed.

This striking judgment, which has been upheld by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords, could have profound consequences for journalists and authors. Public figures may be able to censor what is written about them not on the grounds that it is false but because it infringes their privacy - in particular, their right to have their private life respected as described in Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into English law in 1998.

The same human rights legislation was interpreted by Mr Justice Eady even more startlingly last December. A prominent figure in the sports world who had had an affair with another man's wife was granted an order by the judge preventing the betrayed husband from naming him in the media. In other words, a man who had been done a wrong could not speak about it to the Press. There was subsequently a settlement between the two parties, though publication is still prohibited.

Mr Justice Eady's feelings about a free Press may be judged by his attitude to what is called the Reynolds libel defence. The gist of this is that newspapers which act responsibly, and are reporting on stories of public importance, need not fear libel actions. In the case between the MP George Galloway and the Daily Telegraph (which resulted in damages and costs being awarded against the newspaper) some observers believed that Mr Justice Eady placed new limits on the Reynolds libel defence.

In another libel case, Mr Justice Eady awarded damages to a Saudi billionaire businessman called Mohammed Jameel against the Wall Street Journal Europe, which had alleged that the Saudi Arabian authorities were monitoring the bank accounts of prominent Saudis for evidence of supporting terrorism. Five Law Lords overturned this judgment last October. Lord Hoffman accused Mr Justice Eady of being "hostile to the spirit of Reynolds". In judge-speak this was a severe dressing-down.

In recent years Mr Justice Eady has presided over some of the most crucial cases involving the Press. While there are no doubt instances when he may have been sympathetic to newspapers - his defenders cite the recent case involving Lord Browne - it is hard to deny that there has been a trend in the other direction, and in particular that he has interpreted the European Convention on Human Rights in a restrictive way. In effect he is developing a privacy law.

Newspapers, so fearless in their criticisms of politicians, are sometimes feeble in responding to over-mighty judges. Let me simply say that I regard Mr Justice Eady as a threat to a free Press, and that this won't be the last time I write about him.

Tragic story of Madeleine shows media madness

Forty years ago quality newspapers and the BBC would have largely ignored a story such as the one involving the missing four-year-old Madeleine McCann. If I had been writing a Press column then, I hope I would have chided the serious media for their heartlessness in underplaying a deeply affecting story.

We seem to have gone too far in the opposite direction. It's an important story, which should be properly covered by the so-called qualities. But if China had declared war on Japan, or Russian troops marched into Estonia, the media could hardly have taken such developments more seriously.

The Daily Telegraph, whose newsroom is now largely run by ex-Daily Mail hacks, has gone particularly loopy, with barely a day passing without a piece about Madeleine on the front. One might understand the newspapers' obsession if there were any real news, but there isn't. A suspect here, another one there, and that's about it. Hundreds of thousands of words have been spewed out telling us almost nothing.

Even worse has been the behaviour of broadcasters. Sky News, often indispensable in normal circumstances, has taken leave of its senses. Twice last week BBC1's 10 o'clock News was introduced by Huw Edwards in Portugal. What kind of madness is this? The only mercy has been that the Today programme's Jim Naughtie - normally the most peripatetic of presenters - did not head off to the Algarve.

I repeat: this is a dreadful story that should be covered in detail. Madeleine's parents evidently believe the more the coverage, the greater the chances of the abductor being found, and maybe they are right. But we are surely a half-witted nation with a half-witted media to treat the tragic disappearance of one girl as our forefathers might have responded to a declaration of war.