Denis MacShane: A new band of Peeping Toms

Is it time for a new doctrine that allows some small space for closed windows on the private life of our nation's leaders?

There is now a fairly broad assault on the idea that anyone in public life is entitled to any privacy at all. If William Hague stretched civil service or parliamentary rules by offering a job, or taking on shadow cabinet trips, a young aide, then let him be held to account for that.

Top politicians, like top generals or top business leaders, do

have bright, clever, eager-beaver young aides (who cheer up

their boss with his heavy burden of responsibility).

Like his hero, William Pitt, William Hague has no children. So what? Gordon Brown waited until his sixth decade before becoming a father and had to endure the unpleasant insinuation on Desert Island Discs as its presenter asked about gay rumours. Brown had stunning girlfriends but, like many top politicians, his entire waking, resting, holiday and sleeping life was consumed

by politics.

Hague's judgment about releasing details of his wife's miscarriages has been called into question, mainly by women journalists. Over the weekend, a tabloid paper ran a story about a Tory MP whose wife worked as a prostitute in a brothel – sorry, massage parlour, in south London. Readers had to wait until the very end of the wretched two-page spread to learn that the MP had separated from his wife well before the election. One broken MP. One victory for Peeping Tom editors.

It is Hague's political judgment, not his private life, that should be open to the question.

In Saturday's Yorkshire Post, the Archbishop of York took to task the European policy of the

Con-Dem Government over its refusal to support a new EU Directive on Sex Slave Trafficking. Hague is in charge of that policy. If we had a press less obsessed with Peeping Tom journalism, last week's story about Hague should have been about his misjudgment in sending a comfort message to traffickers and pimps by opting out of common European work to combat this evil trade.

The sewer-rats of the Blogosphere have claimed

their scalp as Hague is now damaged goods and the Tories have a safe pair of hands in

Sir Malcolm Rifkind as a replacement Foreign Secretary.

But there is a wider issue that needs addressing. In the past, MPs and editors received this kind of nonsense anonymously and written in green ink. Now the net has elevated the green ink smearers to sources of information. But innuendos of the blogboys would remain in their holes were it not for mainstream journalists giving them space. It was the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Telegraph which published the pictures of Hague and his aide which launched the whole story. Both papers and other tabloids have decided that elected politicians should have no private life.

But how can the Foreign Secretary protest the invasion of his privacy when his own Prime Minister has taken Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World and one of the worst practitioners of Peeping Tom journalism, into the inner sanctums of Downing Street?

In the past, Winston Churchill, could be drunk or have a stroke or John F Kennedy use the White House to bed young women but we had a public and press that examined their record of courageous leadership rather than what happened behind closed office or bedroom doors.

Now tabloid papers pay out huge sums of money to anyone who will reveal boudoir secrets. There is growing concern that some newspapers have paid money to police officers, both in the Metropolitan Police and in the Palace of Westminster, in exchange for information. Andy Coulson now says he will go down to have a beer with his mates in the Met to talk about what his paper got up to when

it paid for senior public figures

to have their private phone

calls intercepted.

The public needs more than that. Only a full inquiry held by a judicial process able to

examine evidence from witnesses under oath will settle this matter. And the public has to decide whether its MPs and Ministers can have a private life or indeed any life or time that belong to them and is not under control by the growing, new Commons bureaucracy which is sucking independent life out of elected parliamentary democracy.

Harold Wilson put it well when he said he wished editors would extend to politicians the same privacy they extend to themselves and their proprietors. Bit by bit, the revelations over Andy Coulson and the furore over William Hague's private life are taking us closer to a privacy law. This would be bad for the Andy Coulsons of the world and other political Peeping Toms. But neither the souls, nor the bedrooms of politicians, need to have all their windows opened if we are to live in any kind of a decent society.