I must confess that I do not like, and do not read, exposés of the private lives of celebrities. However, I like even less the judiciary's notion that the celebrities can expose their private lives when it suits them and sue newspapers when it does not. 

In Night and Day, the idealistic journalist pours out his feelings on the limitations of newspapers. "You don't have to tell me," he cries. "I know it better than you — the celebration of inanity, the way real tragedy is paraphrased into an inflationary spiral of hackneyed melodramas — Beauty Queen in Tug-of-Love Baby Storm...Tug-of-Love Baby Mum in Pools Win...Pools Man in Beauty Queen Drug Quiz. I know. It's the price you pay for the part that matters."

Stoppard was writing in 1978, and "Beauty Queen in Tug-of-Love Baby Storm" stories seem quaint now. Compare the News of the World's coverage of the Moors' murders with its account of the murder of Baby P. The paper spoke to a 15-year-old witness who, it said, lived at the family's "filthy, flea-infested north London council house with human excrement smeared across the walls and a putrid stench of stale urine that choked your throat. Still racked with guilt that she felt too terrified to act at the time, the teenager told how the stepdad: 

• SLICED off the tot's fingertips with a Stanley knife and  wrenched off his little nails with pliers.
• SMACKED his private parts with a shoe."

And so it went on. Not just the tabloids but the old broadsheets and the broadcasters are giving ever more explicit accounts of sensational stories that won't land them in the courts, rather than investigating the Iraqi arms dealers, Saudi bankers, Icelandic financiers, African dictators and post-Soviet oligarchs who will sue on the smallest provocation.

We need to import the American system of protecting comment on public figures from legal action unless malice or a reckless disregard for the truth drives the writer, for practical as well as moral reasons. Our judiciary is giving us the worst of all possible worlds: censorship when openness is needed and openness when a decent reticence is required. The "price you pay for the part that matters" is growing steeper by the day.