I would sooner be thinking about the view from Le Club, the fabulous hotel at Cavalière where David Cameron's father spent the last holiday of his life and where it is possible to take aperitifs without breaking the bank, or the Var night sky as seen from my house. Or even the glorious train journey along the coast to Nice and Menton. But maybe I should just get this off my chest first ...
Time to forget DSK, if only for now (I've written, here and elsewhere, as much I'll ever really want to say but suspect duty will dictate otherwise).
Ian Evans wondered whether I would be commenting on the Ryan Giggs case. First reaction: I have written nothing on him so far and that is already more than I'll ever want to say.
But since Ian asks, the internal conflict I have is between the right to free expression and the right to reasonable privacy. No public interest, other than the prurient interest of members of the public, is served by knowing anything about the way Giggs conducts his private life.
If he had set himself up as a paragon of virtue and seemed to look for some benefit from it, I suppose there would be a case for publication of material that exposed him as a hypocrite.
I have seen it suggested that because he is seen as a role model for children, and has generally been thought to be squeaky clean, intrusion into his private life is justified if it shows he may be other than the ideal role model, not squeaky clean at all. But who accorded him that status, that description? Did he actively seek it, exploit it, profit from it? Or was it just a media-manufactured image? If the latter, it seems grossly unfair to suspect him of anything that warrants exposure.
The honest answer, Ian, is that with my lack of interest in the love lives of footballers, and my present distance from the UK, I am not especially well qualified to say more than I have.
There are occasions when public figures do things that are so at odds with what they proclaim to be doing, or with what they wish to force others to do, that disclosure performs some service.
John Major would dispute this, but the private behaviour of members of his Government, not to mention his own, did appear (when it was known about, which was not then true in his case) to contradict the moralistic tone he and ministers chose to take. If single mothers were fair game for general attack, his ministers had little reason to complain for being given equivalent, albeit personalised treatment.
But all of this is complicated by the speed of communication. A superinjunction against the press, even when part of this or that judge's personal crusade on privacy (as has seemed the case in recent times), is utterly pointless if there is no way of stopping the suppressed information attaining global currency via Twitter and the like.
It doesn't make us any more entitled to know more about people's lives than they wish us to know, unless the circumstances (some as argued above) deem otherwise. But I am not sure, in the absence of controls on electronic messaging, how you are going to do away with the public appetite for celebrity gossip on which the dissemination of that knowledge feeds.
None of which, incidentally, should be taken as support for the characteristically boorish and bullying response of Sir Alex Ferguson, a great football manager but sorely lacking a sense of proportion, to a press conference question to which, if the question appalled, the correct response was "no comment", not a mindless vendetta against the reporter concerned. What can we expect next from SAF's notion of sensible public relations? A call to some masked lads to get round to Old Trafford fast and teach the impertinent hacks a lesson?
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