Next time you watch Notting Hill, enjoy the ironies of the scene where Hugh Grant masquerades as a reporter from Horse and Hound to gain access to Julia Roberts's Hollywood star.
Grant, like Steve Coogan and other Hacked Off celebrities, is trying to shackle the mass-circulation press at the same time as enjoy the benefits it brings him. I doubt he has ever signed a contract for a movie which didn't require him to undergo a tedious pre-release publicity tour of precisely the sort lampooned in Notting Hill. He wants to have it both ways. He wants the lucrative and glamorous film work while wanting rid of the attentions of the mass-circulation press which helps plug the produce and fill the multiplexes.
Moreover, both Coogan and Grant have taken the Murdoch (and therefore the News International) shilling. There is a limit to the number of hours in the day, but a very brief excursion to the University of Google reveals that Grant worked on Nine Months, a Twentieth Century Fox film, and much more recently Coogan has appeared in Fox's Night at the Museum films. Grant says he regrets it now. Easy to say once you've pocketed the money.
There is something deeply unattractive about this, but none of it would matter if these self-regarding people had not succeeded in persuading the leaders of all three major parties into doing their bidding on the press regulation front.
Clegg, Cameron and Miliband must be living in cloud cuckoo land. The case for the new regulator rests on the proposition that the new regulator will succeed where the combination of the PCC and the criminal law previously failed. But if the prospect of going to prison did not deter the phone hackers, nothing will. Actually the hackers behaved as they did because it never occurred to them in a million years that people like them might end up in jail.
You can see something of their incredulity - what? us? - in the outraged reaction of Rebekah Brooks to the notion that she might face criminal charges. There is a pleasing symmetry with Chris Huhne's attempt to get his prosecution struck out - how dare they prosecute a cabinet minister! Don't they know who I am? These prosecutions will do ten times the good the new regulator will.
If the hacking saga reveals anything, it is that the press will always ignore any regulator when it suits them, and that the most serious failings lie with the police, who were disinclined to investigate journalists for reasons which might well not be above suspicion. As so often in public life, applying existing laws effectively, rather than dreaming up new ones, might be the way forward.
And the new regulator might do some harm. Having a Royal Charter is better than primary legislation; but requiring a two thirds majority in parliament doesn't mean parliament can't interfere. Recall that leaders of all three parties have connived to put us in this position - there's nothing to stop future parliamentarians tinkering about with it; in fact I hope the new body will be tinkered with if it doesn't work - but by then the question of regulation will be firmly in the domain of politicians. Once there it will be impossible to remove.
And what of the papers that say they won't join in? The Spectator has refused, and I would be quite surprised if Private Eye didn't follow suit. It appears they will face exemplary damages if they lose libel actions. That means facing closure. Can anyone truly say, faced with exemplary damages which it will fall to the machinery of the state to enforce, that politicians haven't got their grubby fingers in this issue?
This is a fine example of Simpson's Law, which states that anything celebrities campaign for will almost certainly be A Bad Idea. Horse and Hound probably won't suffer, but just about everybody else will.
