Comment
THE SUN SAYS
Free Press is vital to democracy – ICO seems incapable of getting the message
Grope-a-dope
THE Sun’s front-page scoop last June, showing Matt Hancock breaking Covid rules by having a secret fumble with an aide at work, stunned the nation.
Given the then Health Secretary had literally written the draconian rulebook himself, there was no more powerful example of public interest journalism.
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Mr Hancock duly resigned — with lawyers and politicians on all sides in agreement on the validity of our expose.
Yet, in a scandalous abuse of state power, the Information Commissioner’s Office decided it knew better.
Their priority was not Hancock’s staggering hypocrisy or the public’s right to know — but beginning a witch-hunt for the whistleblowers who passed on the CCTV images of the couple’s tryst.
So vexed were they by our scoop that they raided two homes and seized computers, in an operation more suited to tackling a terror ring than sparing the blushes of a Cabinet minister caught having a rule-breaking affair.
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The ICO was forced to admit defeat in its sinister bid to prosecute two people it suspected of being the leakers.
Yet ominously for future whistleblowers, it still tried to mount a feeble defence for its investigation, showing it has learnt no lesson from the sorry saga.
And taxpayers still have to foot the bill for its deranged vendetta, thought to run into tens of thousands of pounds.
A free Press is vital to the functioning of our democracy. It is to the great shame of the bureaucrats at the ICO that they seem incapable of getting the message.
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Rwanda vision
IT has been a while, but yesterday was a good day for Home Secretary Priti Patel.
Not only has she brought in tougher sentences for drink-spiking sex predators, but she also has a long-overdue strategy to beat smugglers who traffick migrants across the Channel in dinghies.
Flying these new arrivals — overwhelmingly economic migrants, rather than genuinely fleeing persecution — to Rwanda for processing of their asylum claims will trigger wails of protest from the Left-wing, open borders brigade.
But everything else tried until now has failed to short-circuit the traffickers’ callous trade in death and misery.
Will migrants really be as keen to hand over thousands of pounds to gangsters for a perilous crossing, once they know all they are buying is a ticket to Rwanda?
The devil, as ever, will be in the detail, and Ms Patel will need to swat aside the army of lawyers who will be rubbing their hands at the opportunity to cash in with bogus human rights appeals.
But at least she is tackling the small boats crisis — doubtless to the harrumphing of her feckless civil servants.
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As for concerns about the cost of the scheme, current measures are already blisteringly expensive, but don’t deliver.
If there’s a chance the Rwanda plan can save lives and bust the criminals’ business model, it’s got to be worth a try.
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