Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail editor-in-chief, has launched a scathing attack on a High Court judge whom he accused of bringing in a privacy law by the back door.

Mr Dacre said the “arrogant and amoral” judgments of Mr Justice Eady were “inexorably and insidiously” imposing a privacy law on the British press.

Mr Justice Eady had used the privacy clause of the Human Rights Act against newspapers and their age-old freedom to expose the moral shortcomings of those in high places, Mr Dacre told the Society of Editors' annual conference in Bristol.

“If Gordon Brown wanted to force a privacy law, he would have to set out a bill, arguing his case in both Houses of Parliament, withstand public scrutiny and win a series of votes,” Mr Dacre said.

“Now, thanks to the wretched Human Rights Act, one judge with a subjective and highly relativist moral sense can do the same with a stroke of his pen.”

Two years ago, Mr Justice Eady had ruled that a cuckolded husband could not sell his story to the press about another married man - a wealthy sporting celebrity - who had seduced his wife.

Mr Dacre said: “The judge was worried about the effect of the revelations on the celebrity’s wife. Now I agree that any distress caused to innocent parties is regrettable but exactly the same worries could be expressed about the relatives of any individual who transgressed which, if followed to its logical conclusion, would mean that nobody could be condemned for wrongdoing.

“But the judge - in an unashamed reversal of centuries of moral and social thinking - placed the rights of the adulterer above society’s age-old belief that adultery should be condemned.”

In the case brought by Formula One boss Max Mosley against the News of the World, Mr Justice Eady “effectively ruled that it was perfectly acceptable for the multi-millionaire head of a multi-billion sport that is followed by countless young people to pay five women £2,500 to take part in acts of unimaginable sexual depravity with him”.

Mr Dacre said: “The judge found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a ’sick Nazi orgy’ as the News of the World contested, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform.

“Mosley was issuing commands in German while one prostitute pretended to pick lice from his hair...

“Now most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Justice Eady. To him such behaviour was merely ’unconventional’.

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