Daily Mail reminded to think of the children

You'll recall the Daily Mail doesn't run paparazzi photos any more. Not since the death of Diana, when their team decided that it was beneath the title to pay people to poke long lens into people's affairs.

Mail leads the way in banning paparazzi pictures

That was the headline.

Oddly, though, one or two such pictures do sometimes slip in. Like recent photos of Take That's kids.

Not only was this a breach of the Mail's pledge to the memory of the late Diana, but also contravened the rules of the Press Complaints Commission. Oh, and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Two breaches, strictly speaking, as they ran photos of Gary Barlow's kids and Mark Owen's as well.

The result has been a stiff legal letter emailed to Paul Dacre and his Sunday equivalent Peter Wright, asking the paper to perhaps think about obeying the law and not running photos of kids without any reason.

In a lovely bit of attention to detail, the Take That solicitors point out that for some reason the paper had elected to pixelate out the faces of Mark Owen's kids, but not those of Gary Barlow's.

Happily, the solicitor's intervention seems to have reminded the Daily Mail of its obligations under the law and as a member of the Press Complaints Commission, and the offending pages have been replaced with a 404 error.

All's well that ends well, eh? And certainly it's unlikely the Mail will make the mistake of publising pictures of kids just because their parents are well known, that's for sure.

Oh... hang on... what's this?:

Melanie Brown's daughter, 2, shows off some zig-a-zig-hair with new Mohican crop

By Chris Johnson
Last updated at 4:19 PM on 23rd July 2009

She may be only a tender two years old.

But that certainly does not bar Melanie Brown's younger daughter Angel Iris from making a style statement.

Quite what mothers of similar aged toddlers will make of the eye-catching Mohican - which clearly involved an early introduction to the razor - is another matter.

Well, I guess the photos from the Splash agency only show the back of the two year old child's head. And, presumably, the Mail believes that the question of how a child's hair cut is a matter of serious public debate. Because how dare someone who was in the Spice Girls decide on her kid's hairstyle? Doesn't she think how it will look when the Mail puts a long lens photo onto its website?