"If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it," Jonathan Aitken intoned in Churchillian style as he embarked upon his libel action against the Guardian in 1994. He might well have added to his list of weaponry, "and the stout halberd of the British libel laws, which guard the guilty, protect the powerful, and limit the public's right to know." As he daily prays for forgiveness (and no doubt for mercy) in Brompton Oratory, he might also reflect: had he been an Irish minister, his career and his life would not now be in ruins.
Libel laws
No Irish news outlet would have even made the revelation about Aitken's hotel bill in Paris being paid for by a Saudi businessman, firstly because we expect our politicians to behave like that anyway, and secondly because Irish libel laws would have hindered disclosure. The occasional scandal which has hidden behind our ludicrous laws libel laws - such as corruption and fraud in the beef industry - has usually leaked out thanks to British-based media. The government of the day, perhaps hoping to embarrass a previous administration, or reluctant to be seen as engaged in a cover-up, has then commanded a court of enquiry into existence. For we opt for tribunals instead of investigative journalism, preferring to reveal the truth through squads of lawyers on £1,200 a day apiece over a hundred days, rather than through a couple of journeyman journalists.
There is a bitter irony in all of this, for it was the owner of the Ritz Hotel, Mohamed Al Fayed, who tipped off the Guardian about who paid the bill of a then cabinet minister. Why did Al Fayed do that? Because he was getting revenge on the Tory government for not giving him a British passport.
Can you imagine anyone of Mohamed Al Fayed's eminence in Irish commercial life being denied an Irish passport for a millisecond, never mind over the years that Al Fayed was refused a British passport? Indeed, we know that all sorts of improbable people have been given Irish passports for no other reason than, oh, for example, they invested in Albert Reynolds's family firm. What many have done with those passports, we cannot say - except that mostly they have not used them to travel from Ireland, for they never moved here in the first place. Their passports, like Panamanian flags, are ones of convenience.
Passports
No such accusation could be made against Mohamed Al Fayed, whose home is in England; yet he was not given the precious document which he yearned for so desperately. Stupid man. He could have got an Irish passport without even suggesting he was going to move here. Oh to be sure, maybe it might have helped his cause in the good old days of passports for sale if he had opened an apple-and-oranges pram outside Lansdowne Road on match days, just to show that he was investing in the Irish economy; and maybe also made a contribution or two to a political party; and then, Lord bless my soul, just like CIA agents, he could have been swanning around the world waving the precious harped passport - for which good men died - at foreign immigration controls.
But of course he didn't, and thus began the wretched Aitken's downfall, for which we should be grateful. The alternative, an Aitken victory in the libel action, might have cost the Guardian millions. That would certainly have had a feeder effect on Irish juries, which already make ludicrously and ruinously large awards to libel plaintiffs - exacerbated by ruinously and ludicrously large legal fees on both sides.
The most spectacular recent example of this was the Proinsias de Rossa-Eamon Dunphy libel action (on the rights and wrongs of which I make no judgment, not least because I'm not a complete and utter cretin, and I don't want to spend any more time in court than I absolutely have to). But that trial stands as a landmark warning to newspapers about what they may say about politicians.
De Rossa case
What is certainly undeniable was that Proinsias De Rossa in the 1970s was a member of a party which was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and which either tolerated or did not detect the injustices and brutalities of that regime. Despite that flawed political record, and despite his earlier membership of the IRA, Proinsias de Rossa - whose imperfections, I accept, were well-meaning, and certainly not corrupt - won a libel action which cost the Sunday Independent over a million pounds.
Journalistic errors should not be so punished; for in the train of such excessive punishment comes caution, timidity and self-censorship, the querulous trinity behind which the genuinely corrupt practices of the powerful find sanctuary. Such practices have this week taken a hard knock in London. We should raise a toast to the Guardian - but keep back some champagne against the day when the same good fight may be fought, and won, in an Irish court.