A Curious Career by Lynn Barber Page A

spice of modern life. So, as a reader, I’m complicit in every press intrusion because I enjoy reading the fruits of it and would be very sorry if we had the sort of (much stricter) privacy laws they have in France. Incidentally, I’m always shocked that some of my respectable friends who say sniffily that they don’t want to know about Hugh Grant’s escapades will happily read page after page about gruesome murders and children held captive in cellars – stuff that I find far more troubling and, yes, obscene, than some film star paying for a blowjob.
    Because of my weird career trajectory, hopping straight from Oxford to Penthouse , and then, after a long career break, to Fleet Street, I never had a proper journalist’s training and sometimes wish I had. In particular, I could have done with some training in media law – I had to pick up an understanding of libel as I went along. And it became a very serious matter when I was on the Sunday Express in the 1980s because libel damages suddenly shot through the roof – Jeffrey Archer pocketed half a million in 1987 when the Daily Star said he’d slept with a prostitute. Consequently, the business of ‘legalling’ articles – getting them checked and passed by the in-house lawyers – which had been rather a formality before, suddenly became a vital part of my job.
    Luckily, we had some excellent in-house lawyers at the Sunday Express who took me under their wing and explained that even though I ‘felt’ that so and so was lying, it wasn’t actually advisable to say so in print unless I had some evidence to back it. Eventually we arrived at a good modus operandi whereby, instead of trying to censor myself, I would write whatever I wanted and then send it to the lawyers who would summon me for a sort of viva – a bit like an Oxford tutorial but a lot more fun. They would have my article in front of them with many words underlined and other words crossed out – this was in the days when we still had typewriters and paper, O best beloved, and lawyers had red pens. Then the interrogation would start: What is your evidence for saying this? Are you sure the quote is accurate? Are those his exact words? Do you have a shorthand record of it? (Bizarrely, in those days, judges would accept shorthand notes as evidence but not tape recordings – if I ever had been sued for libel I would have had to get someone who knew shorthand to make a shorthand transcript of the tape.) These sessions taught me the absolute necessity of keeping tapes, and making sure I transcribed them accurately, and the lesson was duly engraved on my heart.
    Then the negotiations would start. ‘Do you have to describe her hands as “withered”? Couldn’t they be weathered?’
    ‘No – they were rather pale.’
    ‘Wrinkled?’
    ‘Well they were wrinkled, but more withered, as if they had shrunk. What about “gnarled”?’ I would say, trying to be helpful.
    ‘No, “gnarled” is as bad as “withered”. Do you have to describe her hands at all?’
    ‘Yes, because that’s the giveaway [we were talking about Zsa Zsa Gabor]. Her face looks pretty good but her hands reveal her age.’
    ‘Oh all right, you can have “withered”,’ the lawyer would sigh and put a little tick by the word.
    Some of the lawyers rather fancied themselves as writers so these discussions could go on, enjoyably, for hours. ‘ “Poofy”, Miss Barber? The Sunday Express does not use the word “poofy”. Can you suggest an alternative?’
    ‘ “Effeminate”?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘ “Camp”?’
    ‘I don’t think our readers know what that means. “Dandified”?’
    ‘Mm – but that doesn’t mean the same as “poofy”.’
    ‘Quite.’
    Sir John Junor, who had been editing the Sunday Express for thirty years when I joined, maintained that you could not be sued for libel if you framed something as a question. It was a practice that seemed to work for him, so I followed it, though I’m not sure it ever