Privacy is a funny business.

THE word 'private' doesn't mean what most people think it does.

It gets confused with 'secret', more often than not, and is invoked to stop other people knowing things about you which you'd rather they didn't.

Hence its use by guilty parties to try to stop potential newspaper stories involving affairs, drug habits, sexual peccadilloes, finances, taxes, corrupt business deals and crimes the police haven't found out about yet.

Agents, publicists, lawyers and spokesmen of every sort and stripe will squawk "PRIVATE!" down the phone at journalists most days, when the word they should be using is 'personal'.

The trouble from their point of view is that 'personal' doesn't strike fear into any hack's heart in quite the same way as 'private', which carries with it the implied threat of punitive legal action and an almost-definite bollocking from someone.

The trouble with 'private' though is that it does not actually mean those things. The word means, instead, that something belongs to you or affects only you.

So your garden is private. Your masturbatory habits are private. But if you choose to combine the two your neighbours may feel that it affects them and then the police, and if it is newsworthy in some way journalists as well, will want to get involved.

We all feel our sex lives are private, but if our partners feel our conduct has not been up to par in some respect they have a right to speak about their own sex lives, and the bit which involves you.

Those who abuse drugs may feel it's their personal choice but families, friends, the police and criminal justice system think there's a lot of other people affected by it too and again they may want to express an opinion.

Such is life; we all like to keep things private unless we feel we might benefit from sharing. Hence the kiss-and-tell. When this Fleet Street staple makes a comeback please don't think less of people for taking a cheque to bare their hearts. Would you do it for free?

Before Leveson and phone-hacking there was a greater scandal gripping the Press and that was privacy injunctions. I've written before about who and what they were about so won't repeat myself here except to say some were reasonable but most were an appalling abuse of statute.

The vague law they were based on - 17 words in the Human Rights Act - was about protecting people's rights about things that belonged to them or affected only them. Instead it was used in many cases to get an injunction about things which might affect the money in rich people's pockets, and were therefore worth the £50,000 lawyers charged for saving their blushes.

Some injunctions were broken or lifted, and after Ryan Giggs, Jeremy Clarkson and Andrew Marr failed to lose any money as a result the celebrity taste for running to a costly law firm waned.

But one or two people were still silly enough to think bending the law to suit their purposes was a good use of time and cash. Which brings me to Caroline Spelman, the millionairess Secretary of State for the Environment.

Informed that her son Jonny, 17, a schoolboy rugby star who had played for England's youth team, was about to be exposed as a drugs cheat by the Daily Fnar Funday, she got a privacy injunction banning publication.

The judge, his hands burned by previous gags which were later found to be flawed, refused to make the order anonymous and therefore everyone knew the story was about Ms Spelman's son, that he was a rugby player, and a guessing game ensued about whether it was to do with sex or drugs.

A few weeks later we all knew which, because the paper won a subsequent hearing and published its story about this young man who had represented his country and was taking banned substances including anabolic steroids and a growth hormone following an injury.

That's not private. It's not even got a shot at being private. It's illegal to import such potions, which he did by buying them over the internet, it's against the rules of his sport to take them, and the people he paid for them were almost certainly criminals.

As a result of that story this lad has been punished by being banned from playing rugby for 21 months by the Rugby Football Union. As he should be, and I'm sure getting the police involved would be overkill.

Despite already spunking £61,000 on shirking responsibility, the Spelmans are funding an appeal which may reduce the length of the ban. But the fact remains - this was never private. It was instead about a Government minister attempting to force an illegal gag on the Press in order to protect a criminal family member.

That is utterly disgraceful behaviour from a public servant in a free country. It's what you'd expect in corrupt states run by despots, the sort of place with lottery scams and home-brewed petrol.

Ms Spelman will presumably cry motherhood as a defence and say she did it to prevent the attention that publication would have brought her son and the damage it would cause his career. That, had it been granted, it would also have spared her the same attention was merely a beneficial side-effect.

The fact is that most mothers in that situation would tell their son to face the consequences of his actions, whatever they may be, in the hope he would learn not to repeat his mistakes.

That basic process is the root of morality, the idea that if you go wrong you will be punished in some way is the main thing which keeps all of us on the straight and narrow.

But then, we're expected to be good, pay our taxes and keep our heads down, while the people in charge plough their own furrow which they can make as wonky and wiggly as they please without the barest hint of shame or disgrace.

Jonny Spelman's been punished enough.

His mother should be sacked.

But I expect she'd like to kill some badgers and sell off the forests first.

Dear Sarah Harding...

You don't know me, but I know a bit about you. You were in a reality show that created a pop group called Girls Aloud, whose songs I personally thought pretty awful but which were successful a few years ago. Since then you and your bandmates have DEFINITELY NOT SPLIT and there's constant talk of a reunion which never seems to happen, and you have mainly been pictured entering and leaving nightclubs.

You recently went into and then left rehab. During the past week or so those bits of the nation which care and quite a few which don't have been treated to a - if you'll pardon the bad-taste pun - blow-by-blow account of an argument in an Austrian hotel room with your boyfriend Theo De Vries. You have each said the other was violent, you have each reported the matter to the police, and you have each posed for pictures with your bruises. As human interest stories go it's grimy and depressing in the extreme.

I have had my fair share of arguments. I have gone tonto in the street and been arrested, I have smashed stuff up, the balance of my mind has gone off the scale a few times and I've been the victim of an addicted man who thought it was reasonable to bounce me off the walls of our home. It's none of my business what you get up to, but please take the following advice as coming from someone who knows their shizzle:

1) An affair with someone you meet in rehab is a fucking stupid idea.

2) Yesterday your PR was telling everyone you were sober and the victim of a terrible attack. Today you admit each of you was knocking back the booze, as though this doesn't matter. You are an alcoholic and so is he, so a fight like this was always on the cards. Don't blame your boyfriend for bringing you booze, because of 1).

3) You have the ability to say no. It's difficult and less fun than saying yes, but you can say no to a drink, no to stupid boyfriends, and while this may be a little off-piste I'd like you to say no to a reunion for the sake of my ears and your sanity. Spend some time on your own and get better.

4) You were a pop singer but now you are a 'troubled star'. Your career just jackknifed down the Sophie Anderton slope and that's not a nice place to be. You still have time to back-track but if you don't you're going to be a perma-tanned, scrawny, angry alchy with expensive tastes and no legitimate way of making money, and you're not going to make old bones.

5) You and Theo, as far as I can tell, are both telling the truth about each other and not about yourselves. You hit him and he hit you, and whoever did it first neither of you are in the right because that kind of violence is always wrong. When you fight back in a row all you do is up the ante, and the violence only ever gets worse. Look at yourself as hard as you are looking at him.

6) If your PR hasn't already resigned, get a new one. The decision to drag this nasty mess out publicly has kicked your career in the crotch.

7) See 1) again. And again, and again, and again.

None of this is to say that he's not in the wrong, or that you're not a victim. But when you are in a hole, the hole is all you can see; you don't get any perspective until you climb out of it. It strikes me that the main thing you're a victim of is your illness - you don't need to prove anything, you just need to make better decisions.

Get rid of the bastards, the blame complex, and the booze, otherwise this will keep on happening and it will happen harder and worse. If you choose to, you can rise above it. If you don't then it's going to swallow you.

And go back to rehab.

- Maya Angelou

Life is a losing game.

WHEN a celebrity junkie dies they are lionised, no matter how senseless or stupid their death.

That's why fans of Amy Winehouse have left bottles of vodka outside her home in the past few days, why Kurt Cobain's house was surrounded with candles after he blew his brains out, why Michael Jackson is believed by some to have faked his own death and to still be alive.

When every other addict dies, without the blessing of a talent to make them special, everyone sees them as 'just' a junkie. And aside from the wealth there is little to separate Jacko, Kurt and Amy from any other substance abuser.

I have lost count of the number of junkies I've dealt with. I don't need to tell you those stories, because you can imagine what they're like.

What you can't imagine until you've experienced it is what it's like to love someone with a problem. Which is why it took a while to realise that what my then-husband was doing to himself was also being done to me.

Only I didn't get the high: I got the waiting. The waiting, awake, for his heart to stop in his sleep. The waiting through the night for him to come home, wondering when calling round the hospitals didn't seem like a mad idea. The waiting for his anger which always flared exactly 72 hours after a bender and which made him flip out, scream and throw me into the walls if I did something wrong. The waiting for things to calm down, for me to have a quiet hour to search the flat and find his stash, the waiting for it to happen all over again.

It wasn't very nice, but it could have been worse and I had it only for a year or so. The affair which brought an end to our marriage was agony but pretty much the nicest thing he could have done because it meant I was happy to finally let go, and now his problems are no longer mine. Amy Winehouse's parents have had it for 10 years. I can't imagine how it feels to see your child - the most beautiful and fascinating thing a parent ever sees - kill themselves, and to do it so slowly, determinedly, and without caring how it feels to those who watch.

There are around 200,000 people in the UK with a recognised addiction. They've all got loved ones. And every single one of them is as selfish as hell.

They all know it's wrong, they've all got an excuse, and in the early stages they all think it affects only them.

There is of course a difference between a user and an abuser, but only in terms of quantity. Both have the selfish belief that it's their choice, their fun, or their pain.

But every addict has loved ones who are equally abused and damaged by the addiction as they. When I think back to that year all I can really remember is a constant sense of low-grade terror - that the next call would be from the hospital, or that I might end up in one myself - and I still feel its repercussions.

Every recreational user, even those who like my ex say it's just a bit of fun, is paying money to nasty people who murder, rape, beat and intimidate on a global scale in order to maintain their grasp on a criminal network that does zero good for anyone, anywhere.

It's impossible to make every pound you spend a clean one - for it not, in some part, to go to a country or company that does things which we don't like, even if you're buying only broccoli. But there are not many ways I can think of to make that pound as dirty as you do by giving it to drug lords.

And all to feel like slightly less of a prat for a few minutes. For the sense of imperfection, of ugliness or stupidity or pain or bad memories that we all have to recede for a while and to get the ability to pretend they were never there at all.

I don't want this to read like I hate addicts or users, not least because I know quite a few of both. All I really know is that those who stop it do so only when they put someone else first. When they decide that they do not want to hurt their parents or partners any more, when they realise that they can do without something which will kill everything in their life if they don't.

And, frankly, when they decide to toughen up.

Life is not fair. It is hard, and painful at times, and full of people who will not always be kind to you. We all wish we were prettier and wittier, that we farted only roses and had better teeth and no-one ever broke our hearts.

But I would rather have loved all the people I have than not, to have experienced each blow and boost that life has brought. Hurt is how we know we're alive: Amy used to sing about that, and it made a lot of other people feel better about themselves, but sadly she didn't hear the same thing.

Whatever the official verdict turns out to be the real cause of her death is that she didn't see any reason not to die. That's the tragedy - that with a loving family, wealth, millions of fans and people who loved her, she still felt that they weren't worth more than the worst she could do to herself.

There are millions of people without Amy's luck who've fought an addiction and won, because in the end it comes down to stopping the excuses and asking a very simple question: do you want to take life on the chin, or in the arm?

Amy Winehouse in 2002, aged 18

* You can ring UK Narcotics Anonymous on 0300 999 1212.