Editorial: Money can buy Mike's love

The usually private Mike Hosking made a very public proposal to Kate Hawkesby on a Melbourne bridge. Photo / Norrie Montgomery

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles, said Oliver Wendell Holmes, the distinguished Bostonian writer and physician. In an age when celebrity was defined by actual achievement rather than individuals' self-regard and the blandishments of publicists, Holmes' wedding would doubtless have made the Boston Post - but money would not have changed hands.

It may be unfair to suggest that radio host Mike Hosking is not in Oliver Wendell Holmes' league; after all, he has many years ahead of him in which to achieve something of significance.

But he upped the pressure on himself this week when episode one appeared of the wedding saga he and his intended have sold to a women's magazine. If he is not careful, he may go down in history as a perfect exemplar of Holmes' dictum about having one's principles for sale to the highest bidder.

Hosking, it will be remembered, joined forces with his estranged wife Maree and went as far as the Court of Appeal to stop another magazine from using photographs, taken in public, of their twin daughters.

His attitude to stories about himself has been more ambivalent: knowing that publicity is at least as important as talent to his success, he has not been averse to smiling and strutting for the cameras.

Now he and long-time love Kate Hawkesby have decided to tie the knot and the wedding has made a magazine scoop.

What's more, in the first episode, which included the details of his bended-knee proposal in front of dozens of people on a Melbourne bridge, readers have been told that the wedding will be "all about the children".

Assuming that the delicate wee mites will not be shielded, like Michael Jackson's masked brood, from the cameras, one wonders how this rhymes with Hosking's professed distaste for exposing them to prying publicity.

Perhaps it's a new commitment to press freedom. But payments have been mentioned, equivalent to the value of one of the BMWs that he is so fond of. Surely the idea that his principles are for sale is too monstrous to contemplate.