Thank you.

Thank you.

I don't think so.

No. I've never been instructed that way myself. I'm certainly aware that it goes on.

Of? Of being targeted?

Well, one of the reasons I'm here today -- I don't think I would have dared stick my head up above the parapet again had it not been for the Channel 4 documentary where they interviewed Rupert Murdoch's former butler and it seemed to suggest that I was ...

Yes, I do, and I still come back to what I originally said, which is: I've never seen any real exercising of that code. What I've seen is the exercising of an editor's personal judgment, or maybe a proprietor's personal judgment, I don't know.

I don't -- I have never seen any real evidence of it being used. I don't know. I've never been an editor, so I don't really know.

It has relaxed significantly over the years, so I think you could probably argue that it does evolve. I remember in the early days in ITV, the IBA was very, very strict and we would often moan about how strict it felt but a lot of those rules have been ...

No, never. It's always the subject of very heated debate in newsrooms between producers and directors and journalists up and down the land. Heated debate, sometimes a little frustration. I've been party myself to instances where, making a documentary, we felt we wanted to uncover certain things that ...

20 years ago I remember the same debate. It was about 25, 20 years ago when we stopped having a Press Council and it became the Press Complaints Commission and the presses were desperate then that they didn't want a form of official regulation and they said, "Let us ...

On its own, it has failed.

I think I'd most like to say that it doesn't have to be like this. It's so sad that a handful of bad journalists have besmirched the profession in this way. We need a free press, and I understand why some proprietors are very worried about any ...

Yes, absolutely.

And I still feel very proud of and I feel --

But there are very -- there are two sides to the popular press. I think if I had a secret boyfriend right now, which by the way I don't, but I think if I did now and I was just off to see him for a cup of coffee after ...

Yes.

That's a very complex question to answer. As I've said before, the Sun talked us into doing a campaign with them to raise money particularly so that we could put funds into cot death research, and when we did agree to do that, we did a fantastic job ...

Absolutely, of no public interest whatsoever, but still massively hurtful. Again, it's as Charlotte Church said, it's -- there are arguments about balance when you are the person in the public eye yourself, but your family, they don't deserve to be under the same scrutiny at all.

No, because then it comes down to taste and ethics and decency. I mean, my child's funeral happened in a public church and we did walk out and we could be seen but from the road, and the photographer was very careful to stay on the road, so there ...

Well, I think this is interesting. This illustrates my point that in the press it comes down to the judgment call made by the writer, then particularly the editor and maybe the proprietor as well; it comes down to their values. But not the collective values of a body that ...

Yes.

Yes, they had asked me to write the article and they'd discussed what they thought they would quite like me to say and I said what I was prepared to say, which fell a little short. I wouldn't want to go into any more detail about that because ...

I had already checked with them because they discussed --

No.

I did indeed. I was rung up -- as I said, I still work a lot in print journalism too. I write a lot of articles, and I was rung up by the Daily Mail in this situation and they said, "Everybody's talking about Dawn French's weight loss. Would ...

No, because they're still a human being. They are still a human being, and no matter what they do for a living, I think every human being deserves some time in their life to be private. And that's why I say I can understand that it's arguable ...

Obviously, certain things are symbiotic in that, as Hugh Grant said earlier and Sienna Miller and Charlotte Church said, you are often -- in my case, if I'm contracted to present a television programme, I am also contractually obliged to do a certain amount of publicity about it.

Again, the press worry that -- or they always allege there is this symbiotic relationship, that I need them as much as they need me, but they always forget to mention that the only reason they put Charlotte Church's picture on the front page or my picture on the front ...

Absolutely. The newspapers always argue that it is a totally black or white situation, that if they have to answer to a regulatory body, that will put an end to investigative journalism, and it isn't that black and white an argument at all. Broadcast journalists have to abide by ...

I think not necessarily. I do agree that the balance is a difficult one to achieve. We all live very different lives. I mean, the McCanns, for instance, have found themselves the subject of a great deal of press intrusion. You could argue: well, as soon as they gave their ...

No, I don't.

I must say, I would never have done so in the early days. I tended to do that more and more over the years as a means of redressing the balance. Very often, you would feel that there have been several negative stories about you, or a continuous succession of ...

Yes.

Yes, that was a regular occurrence, and it wasn't just our rubbish bins. I learned from very early days to invest in an industrial-sized shredder, which I still do, and I shred everything before I throw it away, but your family and friends don't do that and they ...

It was a wider press.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Immediately after that front page had appeared -- and as I said, the bottom line sort of almost giving the impression that I'd given some sort of a tacit endorsement for that front page, the other newspapers ran spoiler stories, as it were, saying, "Anne Diamond did do a deal ...

We talked about it long and hard and -- I mean, that's the trouble. I am a print journalist by training. I know the power of the press and I know that it can be such a force for good as well as some of the negative bad things we ...

Emotionally blackmailed by the people who I felt had just trampled all over our dignity, all over our child's grave.

He wanted -- he rang to say that they had had an incredible reaction from that front page. They had been inundated with millions of people wanting to raise funds into cot death, wanting to do something about cot death. It had motivated the nation. That was what he said. "And ...

In fact, my now ex-husband reminded me this morning when I spoke to him that we were aware that there was a photographer at the funeral on the public highway. Within a few hours of the funeral, the editor of the Sun rang my husband and said, "We have a ...

No, nothing at all.

But I felt that the Sun newspaper was seeking to justify the use of the picture with those words.

Perhaps I don't need to.

Would you like me to read it out?

As though I'd given some sort of agreement to that photograph being used and I'd actually given them a plea. I hadn't, of course.

That was a long lens photograph of -- I mean, I don't even need to say that that's the most private moment you could possibly go through. At the bottom -- it almost purports to be an interview with me -- it says "Anne's plea".

That's the photograph. And if you pull out, you'll be able to see that it took out the entire front page. Now, we had written to every editor begging them to stay away, and this was the front page of the Sun.

We had already been through several days of what you've just seen, being followed and being intruded upon even at this desperate, desperate time, and very strong in our memory was a story that had happened just a few months, I think, maybe a year before, of when Eric ...