Long before Twitter, we were lapping up the indiscretions of the rich and famous through the popular press
Tim Luckhurst
Kiss-and-tell stories sold by young women to popular newspapers became staples of the red-top press after Rupert Murdoch bought and reinvigorated the Sun in 1969. But lest Murdoch be accused of dumbing down newspapers, this particular genre of scandal was as much the product of sexual revolution as editorial policy.
The British public has bought newspapers to read about the private lives of celebrities since Lord Northcliffe launched the Daily Mail, his "penny newspaper for a halfpenny", in 1896. As its circulation soared, Northcliffe explained its appeal. "You could search the Victorian papers in vain [but] you could not find in them anything that would help you understand the personalities of public men."
The Mail filled the gap with acres of newsprint about the lives of the famous and the powerful. Sensationalism and human-interest reporting had arrived and rivals imitated it immediately. Deference to power kept Edward VIII's affair with Wallis Simpson out of the papers, but they were keen to pay for scandal. And Britain's elite was duly disgusted.
In 1938 the thinktank Political and Economic Planning – later influential in the foundation of the NHS – complained about a "dangerous tendency" in British newspapers. They were allowing entertainment to supersede news. Eleven years later, the first royal commission on the press wailed that the affairs of film stars were presented "as though they possessed the same intrinsic importance as events affecting the peace of a continent".
The arrival of competition from commercial television intensified newspapers' hunger for scandal. Expensive buy-ups of film star memoirs boosted circulations and the more revealing the better. Serialisation of Errol Flynn's autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, won the People 200,000 additional readers. Loquacious ex-wives offered a 1950s equivalent of today's reality television stars. Only war or a hanging, such as the execution of Ruth Ellis in July 1955, sold better.
The New Statesman was appalled. In 1963 it carried a futile appeal for newspapers to "abandon the cheque-book journalism of confession stories by criminals, prominent divorcees and others who have won notoriety".
Victorian liberals who campaigned for a free press and educated people to read it believed that newspapers should prepare Britons to participate in democracy. The new voters repudiated this patronising view. They were not content to read accounts of parliamentary debates and analyses of British diplomatic endeavour. They wanted fun too. Crime and scandal provided it. It provided moral purpose as well, via a demotic version of JS Mill's "sanction of public opinion".
We are all familiar with this concept. Marriage ceremonies offer an example. Weddings are public occasions whether they take place in register offices or according to the Book of Common Prayer. They are conducted beneath the community's glare as an affirmation of the relationship and as a warning to anyone who might wish to damage it. They include an invitation to members of the public to reveal reasons why they cannot proceed.These intimate declarations of commitment between individuals benefit from public celebration and approval. We believe recognition strengthens and legitimises them. And, to the dismay of many progressives, a widely shared version of popular morality adopts a similar view of journalism that exposes private wrongdoing by public figures.
Our raucous, unlovable popular press has never accepted there is a clear distinction between the public interest and what the public is interested in. It grew to power by asserting that public figures deserve less privacy than the rest of us. Its readers responded with profitable enthusiasm. Now, in their use of social networks to undermine injunctions, British readers have moved towards a more emphatic rejection of privacy law.
In the 115 years since the birth of professional, popular journalism ordinary readers have chosen to use their favourite titles to censure and regulate the conduct of people who have grown rich on their wages.
Hostility to privacy injunctions is not, as Lord Prescott fondly imagines, a conspiracy by newspapers to preserve profits. The sanction of public opinion is being applied to hypocrisy of which millions disapprove. Many Britons resent celebrities who treat publicity as a tap they can turn on and off. They accept these people as role models and brand ambassadors. They demand in return the right to scrutinise their lives.
Twitter is new. Invasion of privacy, moral censure and populist simplicity were established in the British press while Queen Victoria was on the throne. She might be amused that elements of her own moral code have proved so enduring.