A few weeks ago, the Sunday Times had an amusing story by the estimable Tim Shipman about Nicholas Soames MP having lost weight – thanks (it was rumoured) to a new gastric band. All very jolly, but it seems to have sent Soames into a fury. He’s no fan of press freedom (he was one of the MPs who was urging Cameron to adopt state regulation) and complained to IPSO, the new regulator, about an invasion of his privacy. Weirdly, it upheld his complaint (in a ruling that repeated the very information he wanted repressed). Worse, the offending article appears to have been purged from the Sunday Times website.
This is a worrying development, whose significance goes far beyond Soames’ dieting tips. The main function of a press regulator is to protect the public, not to protect politicians from appearing in gossip columns.
And why might Fatty Soames be sensitive about newspaper gossip? This
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