Abstract
When I heard the former attorney general Dominic Grieve explaining on Radio 4 why Peter Hain had been wrong to use parliamentary privilege to name Sir Philip Green as the mystery man in The Daily Telegraph's non-disclosure agreement (NDA) story, I thought “spot on”. Even such an unattractive rascal as Phil Yer Boots (my words, Grieve's sentiment) is entitled to the protection of due process of law, he said. Lord Hain had no business to interfere.
Assorted lawyers and retired judges of great distinction piled in behind the saintly Grieve, who is never going to be a hit on The Graham Norton Show but demonstrated fastidious courage when AG. He stood up to Dave over his half-baked plans to mug European human rights law and prosecuted tabloids for flagrant contempt of court during the Joanna Yeates murder investigation in Bristol. It was long overdue.
Grieve is not everyone's cup of Earl Grey, I realise, and his anti-Brexit militancy won't make him Spectator Backbencher of the Year either. But we like people – I mean, I do – who speak their mind and can string a coherent sentence together. So much better than Boris's patronising and demotic gibberish, which gets more desperate by the month as he ups the dosage.
So far, so predictable. Lawyers back the sanctity of the law. Newspapers back their special “Ryan Giggs” brand of press freedom, even those who have been baiting Hain, the anti-apartheid campaigner turned Labour cabinet minister, for decades. The public – that is to say, the newspapers – have a right to know without awaiting the outcome of ongoing legal wrangling which prominent businessman has been buying the silence of those who complained about his bullying ways. Too many politicians (not you, Dominic) back whatever their prejudice is in the case.
The Times was quick to claim Lord Hain had himself used an NDA in settling an action arising from his extraordinary Old Bailey trial and acquittal in 1975. The allegation that he had robbed his local Barclays Bank in Putney was a set-up by South Africa's secret police, BOSS, he still believes. His NDA was quite different, Hain insists, as people do.
Private Eye joined in the hypocrisy game to remind its readers that the Telegraph-owning Barclay twins (too many Barclays – Ed) have aggressively used courts to defend their own strange notion of privacy. The paper - Lord Gnome suggested - went after “Sir” Phil only after the twins fell out with their former partner over his asset-stripping purchase of BHS, from the spoils of which they were excluded.
Hypocrisy is an easy charge to spray around: we are all guilty, even the hyper-virtuous Facebook lobbyist Sir Nick Clegg. But when this row blew up, I happened to be reading Catherine Bailey's gripping yarn Black Diamonds. It tells the tale of the Fitzwilliam family, whose vast wealth and enormous home at Wentworth, near Rotherham, rested – literally – on the legendary Barnsley coal seam. The FitzBillies, as they were known to their miners, were good, paternalistic employers who organised cricket matches for their men during the General Strike of 1926 and polo lessons for the pit boys and their pit ponies.
But Bailey reminds us that the treatment of most miners by their corporate owners over decades was shocking and that the law and senior judges were part of their armoury. The Taff Vale judgment of 1901 broke a coal strike by laying the union open to crippling damages and 1926 was no better: rich men using the law to cut their workers’ wages and increase their hours.
More likely to have been on Hain's mind is his own past. Not the 1975 Barclays bank job. I remember that day because Hain rang me, a young reporter and contact, to put his side of the story: “I've been framed.” But The Guardian wouldn't touch it out of respect for due process. Hain had been charged, outrageously improbable though it seemed to me, and the bare facts got three paragraphs. Would such an obvious plot go unchallenged now? I hope not.
More likely Hain acted after thinking of his own upbringing in South Africa, where the law was constructed around the monstrous injustice that was apartheid. He made his first political speech at 15 because his activist parents were banned from attending the funeral of an ANC friend. That sort of experience must sensitise a teenager to the scope for legal abuse of due process in which one side has so much more power than the other.
I realise that something like this happens somewhere every day, so it's a dilemma with which we're all familiar. The law is there to protect us from injustice. Reporting restrictions are sometimes right. Even Donald Trump, a serial abuser of legal and constitutional niceties, is entitled to a presumption of innocence as Robert Mueller keeps digging. So is Harvey Weinstein.
But the law in its majesty also inflicts casual injustices. On BBC TV the other week, an accused murderer's barrister was reported to have told the court his client was innocent because the victim's husband was the real killer. The husband was named. That sounded a bit rough to me – but reporting it seems to have been legal, all the same.
That's the law for you. Sometimes majestic, often an ass. Justice is a better guide.