ROYAL PRIVACY

It's hard not to feel sorry for the Duchess of Cambridge, wife of the heir-but-one to the British throne. One minute you are on holiday in the sunshine at a private residence in the South of France; the next, pictures of you without your clothes on, and taken from roughly a kilometre away, are splashed all over a French magazine. That's illegal in France, which is why a French court has told the magazine Closer to hand over all of the photos and pay damages. But in this internet age, even an efficient court can't move as quickly as an IBM server. Within minutes, the pictures were all over the internet.

Against that background, the decision by Denmark's leading gossip magazine Se og Hør ("See and Hear") to  earmark 16 pages of this week's edition to publishing the very same pictures strikes me as bizarre. Because although the legal position of pictures taken on private property is unclear in some countries, in Denmark - as in France - it is illegal if the person in question has not given their permission. Se og Hør's editor is saying that because the pictures were taken in France and because they had purchased them before the French court's decision, then that is somehow OK. I am not the only one who thinks that a Danish court would view that as hogwash.

But in order to get that far, the Duchess would have to take the magazine to court. Presumably Se og Hør is betting that she won't. Because it's one thing to go after the source of the photos, it's quite another to try and block every outlet on the internet, when the pictures have already been seen by millions (including, I have to say, me).

Some would say that if you're going to be a royal, then you have to put up with this sort of thing. I disagree. We can agree to differ about the precise dividing line between public and private life, but everybody has the right to some sort of private life, however small. Personally, I hope that the Duchess does sue Se og Hør and takes them to the cleaners. It's a tacky magazine that has been losing readers, and I wouldn't miss it.

Walter Blotscher