Of interest to the public

AMY WINEHOUSE was a phenomenon. I admire her music — its eclecticism, drawing as it does on soul, jazz and the blues.

She had a lot more to give and yet her originality was tragically twinned with an age-old and fatal stereotype. That of the addicted and doomed Rock Star, in her case, destined to die young, at just 27.

At Amy's funeral there were more photographers and fans outside the Golders Green Crematorium than there were mourners within it.

The press were just as fulsome in chronicling her self-destruction (those photographs of her battered and bruised) as they were in getting the snaps at the finish. Something that leaves me feeling profoundly uncomfortable.

There are, of course, those whose lives are built upon celebrity — people who crave a particular kind of press — and for them I guess some level of intrusion is not unreasonable.

But for someone who was so clearly damaged and vulnerable (the evidence for Amy included her hospitalisation with an alcohol and drug induced seizure) was it right that she should have been subjected to those constant Red Top splashes on her chaotic life?

There has been a great deal of debate recently about the press as law-breakers. The courts will judge, some will go to jail — new press regulation will result. It is likely that the Press Complaints Commission (a self-regulating body that sees papers sit in judgement upon each other) will be reformed.

My hope is that as well as ensuring that the press remains essentially free these changes will provide greater protections of individual and family privacy — not for those personal matters that are genuinely in the 'Public Interest' but perhaps for those that are, in reality, little more than of casual 'Interest to the Public'.