Columnists
Paper thin excuses
Paul Vallely
One moment summed up for me the long and
labyrinthine saga that was Leveson. Maria Miller, the Culture
Secretary, appeared on the Today programme the morning after the
mammoth inquiry issued its report into the ethics of the press -
and its dubious relationships with both police and politicians.
Only minutes before she appeared, the programme had interviewed
one of most grievous victims of the intrusion, mendacity and casual
malice of the press, Gerry McCann, whose daughter Madeleine
vanished in Portugal in 2007. McCann, with his wife Kate, have had
to put up with five years of innuendo insinuating that the parents
killed the little girl. The McCanns, who have conducted themselves
with a tortured dignity as they coped with the open-ended horror of
their daughter having disappeared, had given evidence to Lord
Justice Leveson's inquiry into the press. At the end they had felt
that the judge's report did not go far enough - they wanted 'a
properly independent [statutory] regulation of the press' - but,
Gerry McCann told Radio 4 listeners, they were prepared to welcome
the Leveson recommendations so long as they were implemented in
full
Immediately afterwards the Tory Culture Secretary came onto the
same programme and twisted the words of Madeleine's father within
minutes of him delivering them. Ms Miller claimed that
self-regulation by the press was what the McCanns wanted to see -
despite the fact that Gerry McCann had just said the exact
opposite.
There is nothing so deceitful as the human heart, said
Jeremiah, though since I am a journalist you had better go check
the exact quote yourself (17:9). Deception, duplicity and
self-delusion have been threads woven continuously through the
Leveson fabric. They have characterised the testimony of press
barons, tabloid hacks and politicians right up to the Prime
Minister.
David Cameron ducked and weaved throughout the entire process. He
originally set up the inquiry to divert attention from the row over
his decision to employ as his chief spin doctor a former News
International executive implicated in the phone-hacking scandal.
When it became clear, as the inquiry proceeded, that Leveson had
statutory measures in mind the PM loosed his vocrabulous attack
dog, Michael Gove, to undermine the process.
When that failed to win public sympathy Mr Cameron told the
inquiry it should be about protecting 'the people who've
been... thrown to the wolves by this process'. It would only
be adjudged a success if it passed what he called 'the victim
test'. There could be no more 'last chance saloons' for the press.
Provided Leveson's recommendations were not 'bonkers' he would
implement them, he pledged. Yet within hours of the 2,000-page
report being released he took to the dispatch box to oppose its
main recommendation: that the press should be regulated by law to
prevent further wrongdoing. The victims said he had betrayed
them.
Of course the press almost universally said the opposite, which
no doubt confirmed Mr Cameron in his judgement that it was better
to disillusion the victims than the editors who will set the tone
for how the Conservative's next election campaign is viewed. It
was, the received wisdom has it, 'The Sun wot won it' in previous
elections. Editors and ministers went into a huddle to come up with
a new system of self-regulation, which amounted to Mr Cameron
setting up yet another tab behind the bar in the notorious Last
Chance. Word was that the PM had instructed lawyers to draw up a
draft bill to implement Leveson which is so daunting, complex and
cumbersome that it will frighten off anyone worried about the
freedom of the press. Newspapers have leaned into this with huge
hoo-haa, hype and hyperbole about Rubicons and Soviet-style press
censors sitting in every newspaper office.
Such talk is over-inflated as well as self-serving. We need laws
because people cannot be trusted to stick to their good resolutions
and fine intents. Maria Miller showed that. So did David 'so long
as it's not bonkers' Cameron. So have countless journalists, and
not only in the catalogue of shame paraded before Sir Brian
Leveson. There is nothing so deceitful as the human heart.
One of the greatest pieces of cynicism is the repeated assertion
that a statutory underpinning to press regulation will somehow lead
inevitably to a curtailing of press freedom. Statutory is used as
bogey word as if there could be no variation in what a statute
actually says. There are, as the media lawyer David Allen Green has
pointed out, 85 statutes which already regulate the work of
journalists - from the Contempt of Court Act and the Magistrates'
Court Act to the Data Protection Act and the Computer Misuse
Act.
Judges, doctors and lawyers are all regulated by statute and yet
have freedom of conscience and action. The BBC is regulated by
statute and charter yet it does not produce state-licensed
journalism. Its reporting is untrammelled by nothing more than a
requirement for political impartiality, particularly during
elections. Indeed, despite a few recent high-profile exceptions,
BBC journalism sets the gold-standard by which the rest of us are
judged. It is far more a guarantor of democracy than the
manipulative distortions of newspapers doing the bidding of their
megalamillionaire owners.
Press and politicians may continue to believe that it is The
Sun wot wins it. But opinion polls show that the public is not
fooled. People understand that it can only be the law - and cheap
and easy access to it - which holds political and corporate power
to account. What the press and politicians will now do is try to
drag the issue out until the steam has gone from public outrage. It
will be interesting to see if campaigners can sustain that
indignation until the next election.
Paul Vallely