The Mail on Sunday inspires such hatred among some on the liberal-left that Meghan’s victory over the newspaper in the Court of Appeal was bound to interpreted as great triumph.

Whether the same people will be cheering when the new privacy law effectively written by the earlier High Court judgment is deployed to protect tax-dodgers, rogue capitalists and Tory MPs with lucrative second jobs is another matter. Much investigative journalism – and this applies as much to liberal newspapers as it does to conservative ones – relies on being able to pore over, and publish, private communications between individuals, which were written by people who might have a reasonable expectation of them remaining private.

Are we now not allowed to see Sir Geoffrey Cox’s emails, or MPs’ expense claims? You can argue a public interest defence, but who now knows how a judge might interpret that? It is theoretically possible that even Meghan could find herself on the wrong end of privacy law – if, say, Prince Charles were minded to sue his own daughter in law over her disclosure that a senior member of the royal family (allegedly Charles) made a private remark speculating on the likely complexion of his grandchildren.

Thursday’s verdict is no victory for truth, honesty or anything else. It simply marks another step on Britain’s long descent into kritarchy – rule by judges. It is exactly the situation which critics of the Human Rights Act warned about when it passed into law 22 years ago: given a set of vague principles to steer their decisions, judges would find themselves able to invent their own laws at whim.

If we are going to have a privacy law, fine – but let’s debate it first. Let’s argue in what circumstance it should apply, whom it should protect and whom it should not, what ought to constitute a public interest defence. Let a political party put it in its manifesto and let Parliament vote on it.

Instead, privacy laws are being established through the back door, by the judicial party, for whom no-one voted and which never even produced a manifesto. You don’t have to share the sentiment about judges expressed in the infamous Daily Mail headline ‘Enemies of the People’ to find this objectionable.

It is fascinating, by the way, to see the Guardian cheering the result of the Meghan case while simultaneously expressing outrage at the possibility that US Supreme Court judges might change the law on abortion without the matter being referred to democratic mandate. If you don’t like judges making up the law, then don’t praise the cases where you happen to agree with the outcome – it will come back to bite you.

The High Court judgment in the Meghan case was doubly offensive in that the matter was never allowed to go to a full trial – indeed, that was what the Court of Appeal ruling was all about. Summary justice is something I have always associated with dictatorships; but it seems it is alive and well in Britain, too. We can have one judge, sitting on his own, without a jury and without hearing full evidence, making a ruling based on a law which he has effectively just made up himself. How ironic that we have ended up in this position as a result of an act which was supposed to respect our human rights.

The Meghan case is not entirely over. The Mail on Sunday could up the stakes further and go to the Supreme Court or even the European Court of Human Rights – which remains even more supreme. But even if it were overturned and Meghan were forced to put her case before a full court the essential problem would remain.

We will drift towards kritarchy for as long as the Human Rights Act allows judges to seize the legislative powers which the MPs of 2000 too freely voted to hand over. Let’s have a proper privacy law which enjoys democratic consent, respects the balance between privacy and public interest – and properly defines them too, so that everyone knows where they are.