We are all happy to “toss aside” the notion of privacy when it protects our enemies, says Francis Ingham, PRCA chief executive

The final edition of News of the World was, of course, an exercise in pure self-justification. It imparted nothing of newsworthiness except the emotions of its own staff. Yet in a sense, what must surely count as one of the largest ever exercises in vanity publishing (it was, after all, double the normal print run), framed nicely the challenge of the concept of “privacy“.

Because the stories it chose to highlight were ones where the public would normally say “I’m glad I knew that” rather than “I wish that had remained private“, the paper did frequently serve the public good, just as it frequently fed the public prurience. And often the two collided.

As recent allegations appear to have shown however, in observing both those imperatives, the newspaper and its contacts appear to have had little interest in observing the law.

Matthew Parris put it well on Radio 4 when he asked an audience in full flow of venom against News International if they would feel the same way had Dominique Strauss Khan’s voicemails been intercepted?

And indeed, there is a certain irony in the Daily Telegraph (months of stories on the back of the purchase of stolen information regarding MPs’ expenses) attacking invasions of privacy; or indeed of The Guardian doing so, having proudly splashed the initial Wikileaks over its front pages.

And maybe here’s the truth. We all want privacy to protect us, no matter how high up we are (executive privilege, Mr Nixon?). And we all want it to protect the people and the causes with whom we feel empathy. But we are perfectly happy to toss it to one side when it defends people and causes for whom we have no sympathetic feelings. Maybe that’s human nature, but it’s no way to frame a privacy settlement.

Because a privacy settlement is probably what we now need, it’s inevitable, and a rebalancing has surely been coming for some years.

The greatest erosion of privacy ever delivered hasn’t come about through the decisions of government or the misdeeds of newspapers. It’s come about through the explosion of the internet. Private knowledge that once was firmly hidden from view – university overindulgences, or ill-conceived photographs, or jurors’ thoughts about their new temporary work – are now permanently in the pubic domain. Hidden if at all only through the sheer volume of material.

And the political and legal appetite for reigning in the media, in the wake of the expenses scandal and recent contempts of court should not be overestimated. As anyone who takes an interest in politics knows, it is huge.

The challenge of this new privacy settlement must be this though – to achieve something with a reasonable degree of consensus, that is realistic and long-lasting. That balances the historic Anglo-American model of freedom of expression trumping privacy, with people’s legitimate concerns, and, crucially, that is based around more than just the case of the News of the World.

Because constructing something so important as a settlement between privacy and freedom of expression on the back of one newspaper’s activity would be a major mistake that we would live to regret, some things are simply too important to be decided on the back of one week’s newspaper headlines.