The chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation was in full lamentation mode the other day. He didn’t like “the tone and the really nasty edge” to so much Brexit reporting. Heaven knows what Sir Alan Moses, a former high court judge, thinks now as his ex-colleagues on the bench are arraigned as “enemies of the people” on the front page of the Daily Mail, with the Telegraph playing little sir echo and the Express invoking “the dark days when Churchill vowed we would fight them on the beaches”.
But what can be done as the fulmination mounts? “I don’t think a regulator can address it,” Moses said. There’s a clear but often misunderstood press line between reporting and comment, not just in the Ipso code, but in Impress’s rival, charter-sanctified draft code (with its contextualised freedom to be “partisan”). And freedom of expression, down centuries in Britain, has upheld the legal right to vulgar abuse – for which, in this instance, read demented, paranoid, Brexit blather.
Down those centuries, the judges have often come under attack – from William Hone putting Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough in the stocks of ridicule in 1817 to Bernard Levin declaring Lord Chief Justice Goddard a vindictive, crudely emotional “calamity” in 1971. And the law survives. Levin may have been blackballed by the silk-heavy Garrick Club but, sniping away, he had the last laugh. And the only sensible thing, when the ranting gets too fevered, is to follow him and break into giggles over your morning Mail, or simply laugh out loud.