IT is known in the trade as a spoiler. When you are scooped by your rivals, or if your bid to buy the story falls short of the competition's, then you do your best to rubbish or ruin the exclusive.

So it is probably fair to say that many of those newspaper executives who leapt on to a herd of high horses and denounced chequebook journalism surrounding Lucille McLauchlan and Deborah Parry were exhibiting not high-minded principles but pique. They lost. The condemnation may

be correct even if the motives behind

it are not.

We have been here before. Lots of times. In a trade renowned for humbug it's easy to deplore the excesses of the tabloids and vow that in future there will be no more offensive intrusion or paparazzi pictures or attempts to buy up witnesses. As far back as 1981, after the conviction of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, there was a sudden outcry against the practice of chequebook journalism. The mother of one of Sutcliffe's victims protested to the Queen. It was made known that the Queen disapproved of such practices. There followed an orgy of self-

righteousness in which everyone

was against chequebook journalism, including - as it later turned out - the newspaper group which paid out big dollops of cash to Mrs Sonia Sutcliffe. By then, though, the public had lost interest. The row died down. Until the next time.

The latest case involved the book deal struck between author Gitta Sereny and her subject, Mary Bell, convicted as a child of killing two small boys. The pantomime that followed disclosure that Sereny had paid Bell a nominal sum that was far less than her newspaper critics had been offering for her story led to scenes reminiscent of a sixteenth-century mob. The Home Secretary strutted his stuff by promising to examine the law allowing criminals to profit from their crimes.

The Prime Minister, in response to outraged demands for a reaction from newspaper editors, said nearly everyone would feel revulsion at the idea of making money from heinous murder. A few weeks later, though, it transpires that those same newspapers condemning Mary Bell were lining up bids for the ''exclusive'' stories of the two released nurses. Confused? You shouldn't be. Fine words and weasel words nuzzle up together cosily. All's fair, it seems, in love of a scoop and the circulation war.

In February, Lord Irvine of Lairg outlawed chequebook journalism payments to trial witnesses. The Government has accepted a call from the all-party National Heritage Committee for payments to witnesses in criminal trials to be controlled by law. Concern came to a head during the trial of Rosemary West when a number of newspapers bought up witnesses. Something like 19 people were paid or signed contracts to sell their stories. Quite right, you might huff.

But, hang on - wasn't it a Government employee in the form of the Official Solicitor who was touting the tale of the Wests around publishers? The justification was that the profits should go to the Wests' children.

The current brouhaha was predictable from the day the British

nurses were arrested. Public flogging, beheading, nurses, strange country, gruesome prison - all the ingredients were there from the first.

It is not clear that they are heroines in the traditional tabloid sense: nor is it clear that they are victims. They may even be guilty of murder. They say they were intimidated into making confessions. Both the Express and the Mirror insist they believe the women were victims of a gross miscarriage of justice under the Saudi system. So uncertainty swirls around the case like the black robes that shrouded their bodies as they made a hasty exit from Saudi Arabia and climbed aboard the plane to freedom.

Glasgow Labour MP George Galloway has complained to the Press Complaints Commission about the newspapers buying up the stories of two women convicted of murder. The complaint is being investigated. Ironically, because it is, Lord Wakeham, the PCC chairman, cannot comment on it. But sources hint that there is a get-out clause to the prohibition on payments to those convicted of crime - it is the public interest defence, it's whispered.

There is some justification for the charge of double standards and hypocrisy levelled against those who berate the judicial systems of other countries when the Birmingham Six and other major miscarriages of justice spring so readily to mind. Amnesty International has drawn up damning reports on crime and punishment in Saudi Arabia. It has been just as harsh in criticising American states which still exercise the death penalty and where condemned human beings linger for years on death row. That same organisation has criticised primitive conditions in some British prisons. Not forgetting that the same news-papers which caricature the Saudi regime as punitive and autocratic have often spoken in glowing terms of countries such as Singapore where the flogging of juvenile delinquents is common.

Finally, let's not forget those who sneer at the brother of the dead nurse and his demands for ''compensation'' may well be sitting alongside those who are paying out blood money in a different form.

There's still some serious bingeing going on in the Last Chance Saloon.