Hacked off.

WHEN a man in a car factory has a bad day at work, the car may get put together wrong and end up killing or injuring someone.

The same is true of doctors and nurses, engineers, architects and a host of other trades; those who are teachers and lawyers, shelf-stackers, till assistants, cleaners, carpet fitters and so on are less likely to maim with a mistake but still make them nevertheless, with unseen and sometimes serious consequences.

When a journalist has a bad day at work, there's usually a massive rollocking from The Editor, a series of difficult questions from The Lawyer and The Reader gets upset.

They are upset; it may be very, awfully, badly, terribly upset, but it is just upset. No-one's ever died or been injured from the occasional mistakes I've made in print. I had someone phone up threatening suicide once when I was on a local paper and aged only 18, which was pretty hairy at the time, but I got her friend and the police round to her house as quick as I could and it turned out she was distressed we hadn't reported her gripe against the local council's wobbly pavement. It wasn't that wobbly, you see.

Despite our low murder rate it seems journalists are considered a more destructive, unpleasant and socially detrimental force at the moment than any other profession. The Leveson inquiry - which I have forsworn to pass comment on until after it reaches its conclusions - is the first time I can recall that an inquiry into a public scandal has been held before the court case. It is yet to examine the other players in the phone-hacking debacle: the police and Prime Minister Dishface, to name but two.

Yesterday staff of a political lobbying firm run by a pal of Maggie Thatcher was exposed on camera saying pretty much anything to a prospective client in order to get their business, including promises of direct access to the PM, which has been met with a total lack of surprise among most of us because it's what most industries would do to gain a competitive advantage. Last year a similar sting was carried out on tabloid journalists, who in the same way agreed to meet someone who said they had a story, tried to persuade them not to take it elsewhere, said they'd talk to the boss and be in touch. The film-makers didn't wait to hear the answer, perhaps because had they done so the hacks would have either turned them over or told them the story was impossible to use for legal reasons. But the docu on the journos is the one being heard about by that inquiry today, without any of the hacks involved being invited to explain why it's only half the story.

Meanwhile the four swordsmen trying to bring about a newspocalypse - Zac Goldsmith, Steve Coogan, Max Mosley and Hugh Grant - have paraded their personal disdain for the trade that has repeatedly embarrassed them in front of a Parliamentary committee on privacy and injunctions.

What's under the table?

They have every right to an opinion and to be heard; but perhaps with a large dose of salt.

While I have immense sympathy for people thrown unwillingly onto the news agenda by life's misfortune or by being the recipient of any of these men's sexual attentions, I am not prepared to set my moral compass according to the whims of these boorish examples of humanity who have, variously: cheated on the mother of his three children with his sister-in-law while preparing to run for office, cheated on his wife with two lap-dancers while funding the international drugs trade and seeking tabloid publicity for his projects, engaged in appalling and violent rape scenarios far worse than 'ze spanking' we all joke about, and according to rumour indulged in behaviour which means that should we be introduced I will never, and I mean NEVER, shake his hand.

And no, I can't tell you. I don't know it's true, it's not in the public interest, and it would flout that man's right to a private life unless he or someone close to him decides to make it public.

And that's rather my point - there are lots of laws which say what I can and can't do, and I stick to them. Sometimes I screw up and when that happens I try to fix it as quickly as possible, and sometimes the toerags I annoy try to use those rules to score a point at my expense. There are rules for car mechanics too, for architects and policemen and nurses and carers. Sometimes bad people couldn't care less for the rules, and sometimes they have a bad day at the office. On the rare occasions members of a particular profession cause a public outrage - organ harvesting at hospitals, for example - we allow the legal system to run its course, hold an inquiry, punish those responsible and tighten the rules to make sure it can't happen again. But when have we ever decided to legislate a trade out of existence?

There are no judicial public inquiries investigating the Coalition's failure to fix the economy, while much of the rest of Europe is improving; why Milly Dowler's killer wasn't caught before he killed again; the ties between Government ministers and lobby firms; last summer's riots; the fact the trumpeted "lasting economic legacy" of next year's Olympics is going to be an even bigger debt than we already have; or the number of elderly and children struggling below the poverty line. And we still don't have a clue where Madeleine McCann is.

I am fine with the fact it's journalism's turn to be under scrutiny; I am fine with it being the fault of relatively few people, and that I've spent my entire career being treated as something less than human in return for seeing humanity at its best and worst. I am absolutely not fine with being likened to a guard at Auschwitz, which is what Zac Goldsmith said yesterday in a gross overegging of the pudding before he realised he was an idiot and backtracked.

But let's make one thing clear: a privacy law would not have saved Maddie's family from press attention, favourable or otherwise, especially when two police forces and their own spokesman were briefing newspapers. It would not have protected murdered Jo Yeates' landlord Chris Jefferies from police who arrested and held him for three days without good reason or journalists who temporarily forgot their law training, and nor would it have stopped Milly's voicemail being listened to by a private detective acting criminally while she was the missing subject of a nationwide search.

The rules as they stand protect everyone if obeyed and exercised correctly; a privacy law, were one introduced, would be used only by those with something to hide. This week I have already seen the Press Complaints Commission invoked to threaten one journalist over a perfectly anodyne story and another for proving a public servant wasn't doing their job properly. As a result I'm all for our rules being tightened, because if the idiots that abuse the system are stopped then the people with genuine complaints are going to get a fairer hearing.

No journalist worth the name wants to upset The Reader. But it is my job to upset everyone else and I am going to carry on doing that whether the likes of Hugh Grant approves of it or not.

Keep your hands where we can see them.

Licence to grill.

WHEN I heard Mr Justice Coleridge's comments that "divorce is easier than getting a driving licence" I had my normal spurt of righteous anger.

I am tired of hearing people who have never been through the process implying it's a doddle, and something done for a laugh or because you're bored. My marriage was pretty good to start with and then fairly grim, but even its worst moments paled by comparison with the 16 months it took to end the union.

It was not a decision I made lightly, it was no fun, and it took me a good couple of years before I felt like I was back on my feet. To have that dismissed as 'easy' or the cause of social breakdown - when I regard it as a great social freedom - sends me into a fury, every time.

But then a driving test has a course of lessons and several exams. Getting divorced comes down in the end to filling in a bunch of forms which, in theory and if you're not married to a twat like I was, can end your marriage in six weeks.

What the good judge failed to mention is that getting married is simpler still. There are only two forms to fill in and the basic fees are a lot cheaper, if you don't insist on a three-day festival with marquees and foreign heads of state.

So why not make it harder to get married in the first place? All couples could have a course of lessons in the rules of the road they're about to start down. A relationship counsellor teaches them to recognise the hazards and how to navigate them, what is safe and what's ridiculously dangerous.

After that each party has to do a theory test on the basic standards of behaviour, the correct way to deal with problems and a computer simulation in which they are grilled on what might happen:

• Are you prepared to put up with the public humiliation of your partner sleeping with prostitutes? a) yes b) no c) maybe, so long as I get a £4,000 handbag once a week and some hair extensions
• You've been caught with two lapdancers and some cocaine in a hotel room 18 months after your marriage to the granddaughter of the leader of the Catholic Church in the UK. Do you a) blame the newspapers b) shout 'AHA!' c) get a second series?
• If you take a holiday with your partner to India will you a) visit the Taj Mahal together b) visit the Taj Mahal alone?
• Has every first-born male in your partner's family since 1066 had a mistress? a) yes b) no c) shit
• Your partner likes cats and hates dogs, and you like dogs and hate cats. What are the chances of your marriage lasting more than two years, nine months, and three weeks? a) 100% b) 50% c) 20% d) 0%
• Your mother sends your partner an email outlining their faults. Do you a) hide b) emigrate c) talk to both parties in an effort at reconciliation d) post it on the internet

There are no right answers and you pass the test only if your responses are the same as your partner's more than 50 per cent of the time. Then you can go on to the practical exam, which lasts a month, and at the end of it if you still have a 51 per cent agreement rate and haven't totally lost the will to live you can get married.

If I'd been asked some of those questions before I wed, I might have realised before the ring went on that not only were we ill-matched the man was a dog-hating idiot capable of making Steve Coogan look committed and mature.

As for who should be the instructors - that's obvious. The divorced.

Fancy a ride?

All aboard.

ON the one hand, we have responsibility, (noun): the state or fact of being answerable or accountable for something within your power, control, or management.

And on the other, we have a bandwagon, (noun): a transport, usually large and ornately decorated, for carrying a musical band, as in a circus parade or to a political rally; a party, cause, movement, that by its mass appeal or strength attracts many followers.

Amazingly, in the teeth of an international scandal people happily dodge one and jump on the other. Who'da thunk it?

So Dishface won't turn up to the hacking debate in the House of Commons, even though he employed a man now up to his neck in trouble. The chief executive of a company that's had £4bn wiped off its shares and sacked 500 people sees no reason for concern. And the police officers who plainly did not investigate the whole mess properly blame the criminals for not co-operating.

Meanwhile a former Prime Minister throws around accusations of stealing medical files of his sick son in what later turns out to be some kind of vengeful fantasy, the House of Commons which has perhaps the greatest concentration of fraudsters in Britain loudly accuses others of misbehaving, and Anne Diamond has suddenly claimed, 20 years after the fact, that condolence bouquets from journalists given after the tragic cot death of her son may have contained listening devices.

FYI, Anne, in 1991 any such devices would have needed a battery pack the size of a housebrick. Added to which, no-one needs to bug you when you're so keen to talk. And for Keith Vaz, one of the oiliest politicians ever to crawl into Parliament, to start asking other people about abuse of power is mind-shatteringly ironic.

While, quite plainly, there needs to be a clean-out of the Met, new rules that politicians might actually stick to and stronger, better powers for the Press Complaints Commission, we're now being confronted with a celebrity campaign whose ultimate aim is that we get a media which meets with the approval of Hugh Grant, Max Mosley and Steve Coogan.

Presumably they'll demand every newspaper runs consumer campaigns on the hookers that give real value for money.

As appalling as some aspects of the scandal are, there's not a lot of firm evidence yet and plenty of people throwing mud. The story's changing several times a day, everyone involved is going to need to take a long cold bath, and by the end of it things are going to look very different.

I just hope someone, at some point, puts their hand up and admits responsibility for their own actions, like a real, proper grown-up. And that we don't all end up printing a version of Celebrity Razzle.

Toot toot!