Toby Young Toby Young

I was all for press freedom. Then I heard from Gary Lineker…

Now that Hacked Off has this lot, who could oppose it?

[ANDREW COWIE/AFP/Getty Images] 
issue 22 March 2014

It looks as though Hacked Off has finally won its three-year battle for tighter regulation of the press. Why do I say this? Because on Tuesday it published a list of 200 people who agree with them in various national newspapers. These weren’t just the usual suspects — Hugh Grant, Rowan Williams, Richard Curtis. And this isn’t the same list of panjandrums Hacked Off has published in this week’s Spectator. No, these were, in Hacked Off’s words, ‘the leading figures in literature, arts, science, academia, human rights and the law’. Not some leading figures, mind you, but the leading figures.

So who are these luminaries? One of them is Zoe Margolis, described as an ‘author’. Presumably, she’s one of the ‘leading figures in literature’, so I looked her up on Amazon. It turns out that her latest book is called Girl With a One Track Mind: Exposed: Further Revelations of a Sex Blogger.

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