IS there now one law for Huw Edwards and another law for Joe Public?
One for celebrities and another one for “civilians”, as the luvvies like to call us “little people”?
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How far things have gone became clear recently when The Sun on Sunday discovered that a celebrity was under investigation for attempted rape.
The paper contacted the police to confirm the story.
Outrageously, after responding to this normal Press inquiry, police passed it on to the celebrity’s high-powered lawyers.
The Sun on Sunday quickly received a legal letter, warning the Editor to bury the news.
Now, in the Huw Edwards case, it seems we have reached the point where a famous suspect is not necessarily named even AFTER they have been charged.
What next? Might some like to keep quiet about celebrity crimes even after they’ve been convicted, maybe reassuring us they are in rehab?
We should stand up for the freedom of the Press to report the truth without fear or favour, regardless of who doesn’t like it.
As an old saying about journalism has it, “News is what somebody doesn’t want published. All else is advertising”.
We belatedly learned this week that Edwards was charged with having child sex abuse images over a month ago.
Yet police and prosecutors kept those charges secret until the veteran BBC news presenter appeared in court on Wednesday to plead guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children.
Why the silence? There was an obvious public interest in reporting that the pillar of BBC News, who led national TV coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and the Coronation of King Charles, had been charged over child sex abuse images on June 26.
But the public were kept in the dark.
Do we now live in a state where the police get to edit the news?
Official police guidelines state that those charged with an offence should always be named “unless there is an exceptional and legitimate policing purpose for not doing so”, as agreed with the Crown Prosecution Service.
The rules even say that police should “proactively release” the name of anybody charged with a crime “of a serious nature”.
What “exceptional” reason did the police have for not telling us Edwards had been charged? Apart, that is, from his celebrity status.
Perhaps they just don’t consider child sex abuse image offences to be crimes of a sufficiently “serious nature”?
This looks less like the universal presumption of innocence, to which everybody is entitled, than a tailor-made conspiracy of silence.
Edwards received 41 child sex abuse images, sent via WhatsApp by a paedophile.
He kept seven Category A images of the worst kind on his phone.
The prosecution said they were sent “clearly with Mr Edwards’ approval” and that the two perverts had “chatted” about a number of the images sent.
He now faces up to ten years in prison.
Why the silence?
Can you imagine any ordinary Brit charged with such offences being left to swan about for weeks before the authorities told the world about it?
They would be publicly exposed and shamed. Then they would creep into court, probably under cover of a blanket.
They would certainly not be left to carry on living as if nothing had happened for more than a month, before brazenly strolling through massed paparazzi sporting a designer suit and shades, as Hollywood Huw did outside Westminster Magistrates court this week.
Police and prosecutors now insist there was “no conspiracy” to hide the truth about Edwards from the public. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
As for “our” publicly-funded broadcaster, BBC bosses now admit that they knew that Edwards was first arrested in November over “serious offences” — yet they said nothing and continued to pay his full £469,000 salary until he resigned “on health grounds” in April.
As recently as July 23 — almost a month after Edwards was charged — BBC chief Tim Davie publicly defended paying the presenter’s fat salary, and even giving him a £40,000 rise at the expense of licence fee-payers.
That was despite Edwards being suspended for most of the year over allegations he paid £35,000 to a young person who sent him explicit pictures.
Davie insisted that they had tried “to act proportionally, fairly and navigate this appropriately”.
The BBC’s fair and appropriate navigation meant, we now know, steering clear of any mention of Edwards’ arrest over child sex abuse images.
The BBC claims that it was not officially informed that he had been charged until a phone call from the Metropolitan Police hours before he appeared in court.
A source also said police told the BBC not to share details of his arrest in November 2023.
Edwards may have pleaded guilty, so avoiding a full trial.
Dirty secrets
But all of the institutions involved in the cover-up over his charges have plenty of questions to answer before the court of public opinion.
The Edwards affair raises important issues about equality before the law, open justice, Press freedom and even parliamentary democracy.
Edwards’s sordid private life first hit the news a year ago, when the Sun exclusively revealed that an unnamed “Top Beeb Star” had been “taken off air after “paying a teenager for sexual pictures’”.
Although everybody with a smartphone quickly knew who the star was, the media did not name Edwards until his wife confirmed it was him.
This media silence was due to Britain’s increasingly powerful privacy laws, now the favourite tool used by the rich and powerful to hide their dirty secrets.
No privacy law has ever been passed by our elected MPs.
Instead, unelected judges have used the power handed them by Tony Blair’s 1998 Human Rights Act to limit the freedom of the Press to report the truth.
These censorious privacy rules are exclusively available to anybody who can afford to hire a top celebrity law firm in the highest courts.
A clear case of money talks and free speech walks.
Worse, we are witnessing what one top media lawyer calls “privacy law-creep”.
Britain’s top judges now rule that those who are under police investigation but have not been charged should not be named.
A turning point came in 2018, when Sir Cliff Richard successfully sued the BBC for breach of privacy over its sensationalised helicopter-eye-view coverage of a 2014 police raid on his home.
Sir Cliff was never arrested or charged with any offence.
It’s not the job of the police or the BBC to act as PR agents for law-breaking luvvies.