A few days ago, The Sun is published the naked Prince Harry party pictures.
The images were first published on the web three days earlier. But the Palace’s lawyers, via the Press Complaints Commission, warned the UK’s newspapers against printing them, claiming they would breach Harry’s privacy and the PCC Code.
Since then the entire UK media — print, online and TV — has reported on them and told readers and viewers how to find them on TMZ.com, the website that first published them, and on countless other sites that followed suit.
Millions found them on sites from Canada to New Zealand. The photographs were indisputably in the public domain everywhere in the world.
That generated a legitimate public debate about the behaviour of the man who is third in line to the throne and increasingly taking on official duties, as he did most recently at the Olympics’ closing ceremony.
Yet as that debate went on in homes, factories, offices and pubs, the Press were still effectively banned from using the pictures.
The many millions of people who get their news in print, or have no web access, could not take a full part in that national conversation because they could not see the images.
The Royal Family’s lawyers claim there is no public interest in The Sun running the photos. This is a favourite mantra of those who wish to muzzle the world’s most vibrant newspapers — stuffily declaring that a story has “no public interest”, as though it were an unassailable fact.
But there is a clear public interest in publishing the Harry pictures, in order for the debate around them to be fully informed. The photos have potential implications for the Prince’s image representing Britain around the world.
There are questions over his security during the Las Vegas holiday. Questions as to whether his position in the Army might be affected.
Harry has compromised his own privacy.
These are not pictures of him and a girlfriend at Balmoral. The Prince was in Vegas, the party capital of a country with strong freedom-of-speech laws, frolicking in the pool before inviting strangers to his hotel room for a game of strip billiards.
These are hardly the acts of a man jealously guarding his privacy. And, sadly for Harry, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.
Compare that with Prince William and Kate, whose desire for quiet privacy on their honeymoon was respected by the British Press in the kind of arrangement was readily agreed to with the Royal Family.
The Prince Harry pictures are a crucial test of Britain’s free Press.
