Why France Is So Vulnerable

The French government has reacted to the Nice attack by flooding the streets with armed men. This will have very little effect, says former Paris correspondent Patrick Marnham.

- Patrick Marnham

Some years ago, when working for the Independent, I was sitting in my office in Paris when the telephone rang and a complete stranger introduced himself as a former member of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. He said that he was passing through and would like to arrange a meeting. He also said that I could call him ‘Michael’ and that he had an interesting proposal for a joint enterprise to our mutual advantage. He would not tell me his name or where he was but he described the view from his hotel window. That was not much help.

Journalists have to spend quite a lot of time dealing with nutcases. At Private Eye we had a slightly higher incidence than average and we acquired a sort of instinct for sorting them out. The nutters sometimes came in with photographic portfolios. One young man turned up offering to sell an envelope full of pictures that apparently showed the prime minister of the day in a compromising situation. They were ‘too hot for the News of the World’. He was invited to leave the envelope and come back later. The envelope was duly returned to him with a message from the editor, Richard Ingrams, saying he was not interested at any price. Was the young visitor a nutcase? I have no idea, I never saw inside that envelope. Then a lady turned up with a brown A4 package, which was passed on to me. It contained photographs, offered for publication free of charge, of her husband, a prominent member of parliament, in a state of undress and considerable excitement. Since I had known both her and her husband for some time I could verify the contents as described (at least, up to a point). Once again, no deal.

There was no law of privacy in those days, and the super-injunction did not exist. What held us back? Was it lack of interest? Perhaps it was a sense of common decency. Is it possible that there was more of it around in the bad old days?