Mary Riddell

MPs are studying the gagging order obtained by Fred Goodwin to see if any details about the private life of the former RBS boss are in the public interest. That focus, combined with Andrew Marr’s decision to let his order lapse, brings the current system into further disrepute.

Gagging orders are, in all but the gravest cases, an iniquity. Privacy should not be put up for sale, and nor should justice. The law must be open to all, not simply those who can afford to pay many thousands of pounds in hush money.  No one knows yet whether Sir Fred’s private life was related in any way to a failing of corporate governance  at RBS, but taxpayers deserve to know whether or not revealing proscribed facts would be in the public interest.

What is becoming ever clearer is that some judges have over-stepped the mark. Injunctions contra mundum are, in reality, evidence… Read More

Mr Justice Eady

Mr Justice Eady has surpassed himself. In granting a restraining order contra mundum to an actor who allegedly paid a prostitute, the gagging judge has dealt a heavy blow against human rights.

David Cameron’s expressions of unease about this ruling are wholly justified. The latest and most blatant concession to those who can afford to buy their privacy through the courts makes a mockery of the law, before which all citizens should be equal. But the PM’s disquiet is unlikely to be motivated purely by his doubtless high regard for justice or by dislike of the anti-women tenor of this and similar judgments.

Mr Cameron appears also to be using judicial excesses to strike a blow at the Human Rights Act, which  is currently none too secure. A commission looking at whether it might be replaced… Read More

Don't mess with the WI (Photo: Alamy)

Politicians treat the Women’s Institute with care. Ever since Tony Blair was slow hand-clapped by the WI, ministers have feared to step into the erstwhile land of Jam and Jerusalem. The modern Institute, a cutting-edge campaigning body, might be treated even more warily by faint-hearted secretaries of state.

Last night Ken Clarke and Andrew Lansley, two of the most battle- scarred government front-benchers, met the WI at a Westminster reception. Neither the Justice Secretary nor his counterpart at the Department of Health is any stranger to a rough reception. Mr Clarke’s wish to reduce the prison population has provoked squawks of outrage from the Right, while Mr Lansley’s NHS reforms have confirmed the old adage that you can please none of the people all of the… Read More

Ed Miliband responds to the Budget (Photo: PA)

George Osborne’s second Budget tells the story of the failure of the first. That sentence sums up the thrust of Ed Miliband’s response.

Voters still blame Labour for the mess the economy is in, and today is Mr Miliband’s best chance to change the story by establishing that the Coalition now has a history of failure.

Once, Mr Osborne asked to be judged on growth. Today he was, when the Office of Budget Responsibility downgraded the forecast to 1.7. With unemployment at a 17-year high and inflation predicted to stay between 4 and 5 per cent this year, Mr Miliband can claim, with some authority, that “it’s hurting but it isn’t working”.

Voters, however, will be the judge of that. Labour’s gamble is that the 1p petrol cut and the small tax gains for low… Read More

A reconnaissance plane circles above the eastern Libyan town of Ajdabiya (Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

No more fear, no more hesitation. The moment of truth has come. That address by Colonel Gaddafi to the people of Benghazi finally prevailed on the UN security council. A body bedevilled by fear and hesitation faced its own moment of truth last night and voted for military action against Gaddafi’s troops.

The resolution could, in the circumstances, not have been stronger. Whereas the magic words “all necessary means” were missing from the Resolution 1441 that Tony Blair tried, and failed, to interpret as a legal mandate for war, this authorisation sanctioned “all necessary measures”, barring ground invasion,  to protect the people of Libya.

Doubters said that, if the UN ever acted, it would be… Read More

Lord Wood has just made emerged from the shadows to give a speech on the crisis of the Left. Until now Ed Miliband’s consigliere has operated behind the scenes. His name may be unfamiliar. But Wood, an Oxford academic introduced as the “key brains” underpinning the Labour leadership and strategy, is the driving force behind Miliband.

So his analysis, delivered at a round table event to launch a Fabian pamphlet, Europe’s Left in the Crisis, is the most accurate reflection going of where Labour is heading. Wood concedes, as I write in my column today, that the European left is in dire straits. Why, he asked first, is the Right doing so well? His answer: That governments in power, as Labour was, in economic crises, reap the whirlwind. And that pessimistic voters find Right-wing calls for belt-tightening more persuasive.

Though Labour did the right thing in bailing out the banks, it… Read More

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is to investigate Colonel Gaddafi and his henchmen. Do not expect Libya’s rogue elite necessarily to find themselves in the dock any time soon.

Indeed, the colonel may draw some comfort from the experience of General Bashir, whose brutal reign over Sudan has not been disturbed or shortened by the ICC warrant hanging over his head. Part of the failure to bring tyrants to justice may lie at the court’s door.

Some of the staunchest upholders of human rights are of the view that Bashir, who presided over slaughter in Darfur, is better left in charge. Their reasons are that fractured Sudan cannot bear any more instability and that the court itself has failed to command respect and trust among the African Union, whose leaders think (with some justification) that the ICC has focused almost exclusively on their continent’s monsters.

Although that pattern has changed with… Read More

Adam Rickwood, the youngest person to die behind bars in Britain (Photo: PA)

Spare a thought for Adam Rickwood, the youngest child ever to die in penal custody in Britain. Adam was 14 when he hanged himself in his cell at Hassockfield Secure Training Centre in Co Durham. Yesterday an inquest jury found that he had been unlawfully restrained in a way that contributed to his suicide.

The nose distraction technique, a short, painful blow dealt to Adam was the last indignity of a life beset by troubles. He was a vulnerable and disturbed boy with a history of self harm, suicidal thinking and feelings of hopelessness. The second inquest since he died six years ago heard a grim litany of the institutional errors that led to hi… Read More

When is a control order not a control order? The new regime announced by the Home Secretary is a rebranded and resprayed variant of the old decree allowing uncharged terror suspects to be held under virtual house arrest.

Yes, there are concessions. Suspects will have greater access to internet and mobile phones under what we are supposed to call Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures. Anyone for TIPM? In practice, these are  control orders lite. Some of the concessions are real, some baffling. How does an overnight residence requirement differ, for example, from the old-style curfew?

There is also a price to pay for any progress. The new orders, rather than having to be renewed annually, will be forever enshrined in law. A great chance has been missed today. As David Davis has said, control orders fuel the discontent that can lead to terror acts. As others have noted, seven suspects absconded under… Read More

A Royal Marine fires a wire guided missile at an Iraqi position on the Al Faw peninsula, Southern Iraq, in 2003 (Photo: PA)

The sheer gall of Tony Blair never ceases to startle. And he gets away with it. Once, the revelations emerging from the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war would have been dynamite. The  attorney general’s advice that the invasion would not, without a second UN resolution, be legal; the Foreign Secretary’s worries about the whole enterprise – these are yesterday’s sensations, neutralised by time and by inertia.

And yet there is still something awesome about Mr Blair’s intractability. On he marched, in thrall to the US president and unhindered by hi… Read More