Press freedom is once again under attack from cop-thumper Max Mosley’s state-backed sham regulator Impress. Readers will remember MediaGudio’s Impress File, which exposed anti-press bias at the heart of the group hell-bent on financially ruining Britain’s most popular papers. Now a group of peers are promoting Impress’s vendetta in the Lords…

The Data Protection Bill provides an important public interest protection for journalists, shielding them should they have to use limited private information when they are exposing wrongdoing. The protection is especially important for investigative journalism, much-valued by the public. The Bill grants this vital shield to journalists subscribed to the accepted industry standards: the Ofcom code, the BBC Editorial Guidelines, and IPSO Editors’ Code.

But two Lib Dem peers, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord McNally, have tabled an amendment to remove IPSO from that list, thereby threatening to undermine the crucial legal protections enjoyed by the vast majority of Britain’s mainstream newspaper journalists. Clement-Jones, 68, a veteran lobbyist, namechecked Impress in an oral question last year…

Memorably, McNally took the most Government Car Service journeys of any minister under the Coalition government: 818 limo trips, often from parliament to his £1 million home just 30 miles away in St Albans, landing the taxpayer with a bill for £80,000. The free press dubbed his lordship the “limo king”…

Meanwhile, crossbencher Lord Skidelsky wants to add Impress to the list, which would give legal credence to Mosley’s operation, to which only handful of mostly crank outlets have signed-up. Guess who Skidelsky, 78, was best mates with at Oxford? Yep, Max Mosley. During the Mosley scandal, longtime press-critic Skidelsky even wrote a piece asking if there is “too much press freedom”. You couldn’t make it up…

These denizens of the ermined elite – who wouldn’t be recognised in the street by a single member of the reading public – are threatening to use their inordinate influence to hijack the Data Protection Bill and turn it into a media-bashing exercise. Three faceless peers threaten to blunt the free, fair and fearless press consumed by millions of Brits. Just who do they think they are?