Observations on privacy

"Mo Mowlam's widower is comforted by Clare Short." This headline greeted readers of the Daily Mail on 22 April, atop the first big story to follow many pages devoted to the Queen's 80th birthday. It was obviously a quiet news day.

I am Mo Mowlam's widower, so I had more interest than most in the picture of Clare and me reading newspapers at a bus stop on Wandsworth Road, London. The article was essentially true, in that Clare and I are seeing each other and have made no secret of it.

There were the usual journalistic inaccuracies: I supposedly have two daughters - wrong: only one - and Clare also has a daughter - wrong again: a son. And there were interesting facts about who does the food shopping and where, what time we leave the house in the morning, and how I once told the press that I paint pictures in the nude. (Old hat, surely, and not even true this winter; it has been too cold.)

It is disconcerting to have your private life written about like this. I have lived in the world of celebrity and politics, but on the margins. All I am is an ex-banker who was made redundant in his forties and took up painting pictures, not a person who has sought public attention or deserves it. Yet my shopping habits and what time I get up in the morning are of interest to the tabloids.

The story was not even new. The News of the World had it weeks before, though despite staking out Clare's house for a week the paper only managed to get photos of us leaving separately. Shock! Horror! This time we are together at a bus stop, albeit apparently more interested in our papers than each other.

I am not a person who gets angry about the standards of the tabloids; I know they will push the public-interest argument beyond the reasonable to get a story they want. I remember once, when I was married to the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, asking Rebekah Wade, now editor of the Sun, whether she would run a story about me at a gay club (if such a story existed). Of course, she replied.

I argued that I was a private individual, and that who I was married to was irrelevant. Not so, it seems.

I can see that if you use the media to advance your career you should run the risk of press intrusion into your private life. But if you are just a normal person trying to live a normal life after coming through a rather testing period I'm not sure they have the right to investigate your shopping habits.

Is it worth going to the Press Complaints Commission? It's all so trivial. I feel intruded upon, knowing I have been photographed going about my ordinary life. But the most upsetting thing is that the photograph made me look much balder than I thought I was.

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