Penned in

Cynical old hacks like me have been amused by the chorus of establishment applause for the Mail on Sunday’s great Kim Darroch scoop. Our elected masters were outraged, rightly, by threats from the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu to criminalise editors who publish leaked memos. Politicians left, right and centre condemned an assault on press freedom. Alan Rusbridger, saintly ex-editor of the Guardian, demanded to know what they taught budding bobbies in police college these days. ‘I would like to suggest a new and compulsory course,’ he said. ‘Let’s call it “The Basics Of Free Speech”. Lesson number one. The police do not tell newspaper editors what to write.’

Others piled in: Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt both defended newspapers’ right to publish. So did Labour’s John McDonnell and Emily Thornberry, claiming to be disgusted even though they support a second Leveson inquiry more draconian than the first. Everyone, it seems, is saying that the press must be free to publish information so long as it does not breach existing laws.