We have ways of making Mr Schröder seem silly

The interesting case of the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, and the Mail on Sunday is partly a legal question and partly a cultural one. Mr Schröder has shown himself rather more enthusiastic about employing legal resources than his English counterparts would be; you will recall that in May last year, he brought and won a case against a press agency that had suggested – falsely suggested, I am obliged to point out – that he dyed his hair.

Political life in Germany is such that it does not seem to occur to politicians that it might be worse to let the electorate come to the conclusion that their Chancellor is a pompous pillock than that he might be vain about his personal appearance; I don't remember any kind of rebuttal emerging when the papers here made merry with the idea that Mr Blair might have taken to using make-up in public, and you can imagine the fun they would have had if he had resorted to a legal challenge.

The dust had hardly settled on that one when Mr Schröder issued a further legal challenge. This time, spectacularly, it was in the German courts, but against a British paper that had made certain unrepeatable allegations about the state of his marriage and about certain personal activities of the Chancellor that if true, would not display him in a very admirable light as far as his private morality was concerned.

The privacy laws in Germany are much stricter than in Britain; Mr Schröder launched a case based not on the fact that these allegations were untrue and libellous, but on the invasion of his privacy. The German court, whose jurisdiction over the Mail on Sunday is far from clear to me, declared that if the newspaper repeated these allegations, it would be subject to a fine of 250,000 euros. A curious thing – I may be wrong, but I don't think British courts customarily tell their clients in advance what an uncommitted offence will cost them.

Not being a legal expert, I can't say whether this legal challenge has any kind of authority. Certainly the Mail on Sunday is hotly contesting the idea that some German court can go beyond placing an injunction on the paper's distribution in its own national territory and apply German law outside Germany. If this judgment does hold, I wonder whether it is now open to any citizen of the European Union to pick and choose among the various legal regimes until they discover one that suits them. Could a British citizen who feels his privacy invaded by a British newspaper bring a case in the German, Greek or Portuguese courts?

But the principal interest raised by the case is in demonstrating the profound difference between British and German political culture. It is fair to say that British politicians accept that their private lives are open to scrutiny by newspapers, and the behaviour of their families is of interest. Of course, some of this comment is frivolous and deplorable, but some is not.

To take a particular example, I doubt that any paper in this country, and very few readers, however responsible, would maintain that if a minister were having an adulterous affair, it would be a purely private matter. The Profumo case, and several such cases since, have shown that apparently private matters can have serious public implications. Even if this is not true, as with David Mellor's resignation, the public status of a figure may make public disclosure easily defensible. No one, as far as I know, suggested that John Major's affair with Edwina Currie was none of our business, although it certainly was; the truth is that the story possessed an interest that was not entirely prurient.

If, unimaginably, Mr Blair were suddenly discovered to be having an affair with Ulrika Jonsson, we would surely want to know about it. The alternative, it seems to me, is a political culture like Germany's, where the ruling classes exist in a state of complacent arrogance, constantly confident that whatever their conduct, they may resort to the courts, which will help them hide behind a spurious cloak of "privacy".

Of course, the welter of gossip that is printed daily about politicians in this country does not have any very appealing aspect. But it is very difficult to draw the line between that and legitimate comment on their behaviour after office hours. In my view, the allegations printed in the Mail on Sunday were very much more than tittle-tattle, and if they should prove to be true, the German electorate may well feel that they ought to know the substance of them.

In any case, there is no justification imaginable for falling down before a spurious attempt to use one country's laws to silence the media in another. That is sheer opportunism, and in the long run it will do Mr Schröder a great deal more damage than any amount of giggling in print about his private habits, his associates or whether his hair is quite what, at his age, it might be expected to look like.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk