THERE’S more than a degree of irony in the gushing tributes to Graham Taylor from the country’s red-top newspapers.

While the staff and the editors may be different, the title pieces are the same and the headline type just as large and just as bold.

It was a credit to the man Graham Taylor was that far from allowing the ‘Turnip’ headlines and brutal criticism to affect him, he, in public at least, brushed it all off. He even sent a warm note to the Sun production journalist who wrote the infamous ‘SWEDES 2 TURNIPS 1’ headline when he retired.

Taylor’s father was a journalist, so perhaps his son had more understanding of the behaviour of the Fleet Street media in those days.

It makes you wonder how someone like the former Formula 1 boss Max Mosley, so hell bent on “reforming” the press via his Impress regulator, mainly because his own misdemeanour was exposed in the red-tops, would have got on in 1993 when acronyms like IPSO didn’t exist.

Anyone who has read a newspaper post-Leveson couldn’t fail to see the difference between the tabloids of the mid-nineties, early noughties and those of today.

I should make it clear that it was the reckless behaviour of some publishers that led to Leveson and, rightly so, the treatment of such subjects as the McCann and Dowler families was condemned as ‘outrageous’.

But even a monster like the Press is capable of learning its lesson.

Yet we are awaiting a decision from Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Karen Bradley on Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act that threatens the very existence of our free Press. We all know how it came to this, but, still, the position we find ourselves in is rather hard to comprehend, particularly in the regions where, if Section 40 is implemented, we stand to lose more than most.

I write this as someone who believes in authority being held to account and as someone who believes such atrocities as the Rotherham child abuse scandal should be exposed.

With Section 40 in place, this may not happen. There is an old saying that I was taught when studying journalism... ‘Publish and be damned’, which, despite its bluntness, actually means making a judgement call.

Editors ask: “If we do this, could we defend it in court?” Under Section 40, ‘Publish and be damned’ will take on a literal meaning because, unless we sign up to Mosley’s Impress regulator, newspapers would pay both sides’ costs in a libel action - even if they win.

We’d go bust and for what? Exposing the truth?

How can that ever be considered wrong?