The following is the text of the Headmaster’s address to the Senior School in Assembly on Monday 23 January 2012.

Amidst the run-up to Christmas, a sad event happened which does not seem to have received the level of sporting recognition which I think it warranted, namely the death of the individual who achieved surely the most remarkable single performance ever seen in the world of sport.

Yes – I bet you are racking your brains, wondering to whom I am referring. Not Muhammad Ali – he’s still going – not Sir Steven Redgrave, five-time Olympic gold medallist, who picked up a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year competition.

I’ll put you out of your misery: I am talking about the death of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il. Now you may not have realised that he was a superlative sportsman, but he was, at least according to the tightly controlled North Korean media. If you believe what they wrote in state-run North Korean newspapers, Kim Jong Il (or the ‘Dear Leader’, as he was called by his adoring subjects) had golfing skills that would make greats like Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods weep with envy.

Back in 1994, when he was already in his fifties, long after most of us have passed the peak of our athletic prowess, Kim Jong Il set a record that is likely to stand forever. Playing his first and only round of golf, he scored 11 holes-in-one and carded a stunning 38 under par – shattering the record for the lowest ever score in the history of golf by at least twenty shots. Regarding the 11 holes-in-one on a single round, this is particularly extraordinary when one considers that six or seven of these must have been holes-in-one on par fours – holes on which experienced, highly competent golfers cannot even reach the green in one blow.

Now you might be thinking that this score sounds a bit unlikely – but don’t worry, this unprecedented achievement was witnessed, so the North Korean press stated, by seventeen people – all of them bodyguards employed by Kim Jong Il. So it must be true.

You’ll gather (at least I hope you will have gathered by now) that I am more than a little sceptical about this feat as reported in the North Korean media. The probability of a golfer making 11 holes-in-one in their debut round of golf would be, according to one calculation, 183 gazillion to 1. Indeed, I recount it simply to make the point that the media in North Korea are about as far from an ideal of media freedom as it is possible to get. As General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of North Korea and head of the military in what is laughably called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Jong Il was one of the most widely condemned national leaders of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, and he left his country diplomatically isolated, economically broken and divided from South Korea. There is little dispute about his responsibility for a system that saw widespread human rights abuses and perhaps the worst record for press freedom and government transparency in the world. Theoretically, the North Korean constitution safeguards press freedom. The media are free to say and write whatever they like – provided it is entirely supportive of the repressive regime, of course. In case you in any doubt, there is an official North Korean publication, “Guidance for Journalists”, which advises that “newspapers carry articles in which they unfailingly hold the president in high esteem, adore him and praise him as the great revolutionary leader”. That is pretty unequivocal. Its author – you’ve guessed it – the multi-talented Kim Jung Il.

Forgetting the Dear Leader’s ridiculously unfeasible sporting accomplishments for a moment, one recent (indeed on-going) event of which you really should be aware is the Leveson Inquiry, which is a public inquiry currently being conducted into the practices and ethics of the British press.

Under Lord Justice Leveson from whom the inquiry takes its name, its objective is two-fold: firstly, to look into the specific claims about phone hacking at the News of the World, and secondly, a wider remit to examine the general culture and ethics of the British media.

And it has to be said, unequivocally, that the behaviour of some of the British media has been shameful in recent times. Employees of the ‘News of the World’ are accused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories, particularly targeting celebrities, politicians and members of the British Royal Family.

However, in July 2011, it was revealed that the phones of relatives of deceased British soldiers, victims of the 7/7London bombings and even of murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, were also accessed. Meanwhile, police involved in high-profile cases have been bribed for inside information. These, truly, are shameful acts – and it strikes me as wildly improbable that such behaviour was limited purely to one paper.

But such acts, shameful as they undoubtedly are, do not, in my view, justify widespread government control of the media. The British media are far from perfect, but a press and media which are free from government control help to expose corruption and injustice on the part of those in public office. Nor should we have to tolerate such despicable press offences as “a price worth paying” for a free press.

As Ian Hislop, long-standing Editor of the satirical magazine, ‘Private Eye’, recently said in front of the Leveson Inquiry, a plethora of laws already exists which could be enforced to stop malpractice in Fleet Street. As Hislop pointed out: “Contempt of court is illegal, phone tapping is illegal, bribing policemen is illegal.” The legal framework for dealing with such outrageous acts already exists. What we need is not new laws, but the political will to enforce existing ones. But in the meantime, whilst we can condemn some of the behaviour of some of the British media, let’s give thanks, at least, that we live in a country in which the right to freedom of expression and opinion are – more or less – intact. The example I gave you about the nonsensical propaganda published about Kim Jong Il may be so ridiculous as to be laughable, but the principle behind it is deadly serious. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression …. the right to …. hold opinions without interference, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers”.

In North Korea, those words are meaningless. The fact that we here in the UK can argue, publicly, about the behaviour of the gutter press is a sign of the existence of a precious freedom which we should fight to protect.