The recent revelations about the relations between Police, media, and politicians raise complex ethical questions. I don’t know what you feel about all this. Here are my views!

1. Imagine the following scenario. You are aware, as a politician, that the News of the World is hacking into people’s phones and gleaning messages. Not so difficult to work this out really. How else do they know “Sienna was mad with Jude” etc etc. I don’t think Sienna or Jude would have rung them up, do you?
2. You sit on the Media Select Committee. You are also aware of various skeletons in your cupboard. You smoked dope at Uni (who didn’t – but that’s another story!). You had an affair in 1995 with your best friend’s wife (well maybe this was pushing a bit) and, to cap it all, your daughter was diagnosed as Schizophrenic last year. Do you speak up or do you keep silent?
3. You suspect, but have no evidence, that there is complicity between the Police and these journalists. After all, how else do they know that Sienna is exiting Jude’s flat at three in the morning except that (this process of identification of a precise location by mobile signals is called “pinging”) someone has sold Sienna’s mobile location for three hundred pounds and lo! There is a journalist disguised as a hawthorn bush ready to click in the middle of the night.
4. You are also aware that everyone – I mean “everyone”, goes to Rupert Murdoch’s parties. “Oh Mr Murdoch, how wonderful you are, please support me in the next election!” Personally I’m more left than right, but I find David Milliband’s attacks on David Cameron quite sickening. Rebekah was apparentlyTony Blair’s best friend and David Milliband was guest at the recent NOTW party, toadying up to, guess who? Mr Murdoch (watch the Panorama programme broadcast last Monday July 17th for more on this).

I realise this ethical blog is getting a bit vitriolic so let’s try to place it in an ethical perspective.

In 1990 (yes, I am old and grey!) a student of mine said “I will do anything to get on!” I challenged him. Do you mean “anything”? Would you kill someone? Destroy your best friend’s reputation? Steal from an impoverished old lady? Drive a car at ridiculous speed through Somerset with a modified exhaust pipe? Is there no such thing as society? Care for one another? Dignity? Respect? Awareness of our common humanity?

People went on TV to mourn the death of the News of the World. Why don’t we just mourn the death of morality? For pragmatism and morality have nothing in common and all of us have a duty to decide what principles to live by.

The NOTW scandal vividly reveals something our guts may have been telling us for a long time: that the modern era fails and falls on the absence of two of the greatest virtues – the greatest “goods” – grace and courage.  Grace: mercy, generosity, compassion, forgiveness – the very antithesis of tabloidism.  And courage – the ability to say “destroy me if you will. I really don’t care!  I am concerned for the right and the good”.

So the conclusion is this. The media in the UK is riddled with immoralities. You don’t have to be an editor to notice this, but only the editor and proprietor have something they can do about it.

But they didn’t.