Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Max Mosley, Steve Coogan, Zac Goldsmith MP and Hugh Grant—Oral evidence (QQ 697–
753)
people like the Dowlers and Christopher Jeffries, etc, would have had no access to justice.
That is absolutely key. I am sorry; I have forgotten where I started.
Q726 Lord Thomas of Gresford: Privacy is not the prerogative of people in
positions of power or wealthy people.
Hugh Grant: Exactly.
Q727 Lord Thomas of Gresford: Privacy applies to the families of victims and
the families of criminals, and to people who could not possibly have recourse to the courts
at the moment. What we are seeking to do is find a way whereby there is a remedy for
everybody regardless of income and position in society.
Hugh Grant: I think the ultimate backstop is the common law as we presently have
it but with CFAs preserved, as they have been up to now. Before that, my personal
preference is to get rid of the PCC and have a new regulator, which has, right at the back of
it, a statutory backstop. Without that, it is meaningless.
Lord Thomas of Gresford: A CFA is not of much use in obtaining an immediate
injunction.
Q728 Chairman: Lord Thomas, I think we are rather straying from our own area.
As has been observed, CFAs are being debated elsewhere in this place.
Hugh Grant: If I may say just one last word on CFAs, it is significant that the
campaign to do them damage comes from the same sources as the campaign to do common
law and privacy damage, which is the tabloid press. All these arguments in my opinion
should be viewed in terms of where they come from. They come from a commercial point
of view; they come from, “Let’s protect our business model”, not from principle.
Max Mosley: To go back to the fundamentals of this, we need a body to which
anyone can go, without cost; a body that can deal with privacy as a matter of urgency. It
would not be beyond the wit of man to do that. I think that all these other things—the
current CFAs and after-the-event insurance—are side issues. A completely new and
different body is needed that can deal with it.
Q729 Lord Black of Brentwood: I should like to push you further on public
interest, because it is central to the issue. I probably know what your answer will be before
I put the question, but I will ask it, if I may, because we have asked it of other witnesses.
Zac Goldsmith said that a free press was vital to a free society. We all believe in that, but
for a press to be free, it needs to be commercially successful. Newspaper businesses will
not run as charities. In order to be commercially successful, it needs to write about things
that people want to read. A point made by the then Master of the Rolls in one of the very
early human rights cases, involving Garry Flitcroft, was that courts needed to take account of
the fact that people wanted to read things in newspapers in which they were interested. Do
you think that when anyone is making a judgment about the public interest, whether it be
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