Everyone except the industry and 86 MPs and peers knows something must be done to curb the press's abuses of its power
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Christopher Jefferies is still awaiting apologies for being called a murderer. Photograph: Antonio Olmos
Listening to the familiar, self-justifying nonsense being peddled by the booze industry as the government finally squares up to imposing a minimum unit price on alcohol left me with a sense of deja vu. Where else had I recently heard such special pleading from an industry which is often recklessly indifferent to the destructive consequences of its own behaviour?
Bankers? Tobacco barons? Supermarkets? Ah yes, that was it: my own industry, the Fleet St in and around which I have worked since becoming the Evening Standard's summer relief reporter in 1970. I arrived just in time to be outside No 10 when a woman threw red paint over the new PM, Ted Heath. Alas, I missed the incident, being in the phone box talking to the office ("all quiet here") at the crucial moment.
But my error was no bigger than the street's collective miss as it tries to browbeat the political class into rejecting the independent regulator, underpinned by statute to prevent the usual jury-rigging of the old "self-regulation" regime as Lord Justice Leveson checks the spelling on tomorrow's big report. The special pleading has been awful, and has served simply to remind everyone that the newspapers want everyone to be independently regulated except itself.
Today's opinion poll, commissioned by the high-minded Media Standards Trust (MST) and scrupulously reported by Patrick Wintour, shows 79% of voters in favour of an independent regulator established by law, including readers of the Daily Mail (81%), whose editor leads the charge to resist this totalitarian (etc etc) imposition.
We can all take such polls (and the MST) with a pinch of salt: voters like to have their cake and eat it. But I suspect it reads the public mood better than the cheerfully cynical "free press" letter from 86 MPs and peers, which both the Guardian and Telegraph publish today. What fun that must have been to draft. Trebles all round!
Then read this column, written by Charles Moore – Lord Snooty, to Private Eye readers – Margaret Thatcher's biographer and a clever, fastidious Etonian who makes David Cameron sound like a character from EastEnders. Moore was the last gentleman (no irony intended) editor of the Torygraph before the tax-efficient Barclay Brothers, Fred and Dave, bought the paper and let the barbarians (a lot of rough, Daily Mail types) over the wall.
Unlike most of the Street of Shame, Lord Snooty gets it. He knows how bad the papers' behaviour has often been – intrusion, bullying and illegality, with no public interest to justify it – for so long, how many chances to reform themselves have been pissed away in the last chance saloon, and how they are currently sounding as bad as (well, he is a Tory) trade union barons. Get real, says Moore.
Good. That sort of talk comes better from him than from the Guardian, though Moore, too, will be mocked as someone who has never chased a fire, doorstepped a starlet's flat at midnight or bought a copper lower than deputy commissioner a drink – and only then in the Savoy Grill. A fair point, but it cuts both ways. What was most humiliating at some of Leveson's hearings, as Dan Sabbagh points out in a very comic precis, was the way so many witnesses confused the public interest with anything that may interest their little corner of the public and shift a few copies.
That was why dead Millie Dowler's phone was hacked (oh yes, it was), why Sienna Miller was chased down a dark road by snappers, why the love lives of not-so-talented actors and useless footballers were stalked, snouts and tarts paid off, and the private lives of ordinary people – humbug phrase – noisily ruined for a bit of fun.
They still don't get it. That's why the papers have been pouring buckets of manure on to the BBC for its failure to expose Jimmy Savile. Ditto Cyril Smith, in recent days. Yet, inasmuch as "everyone" knew there was something dodgy afoot, the failure was everyone's, not least that of the tabloids, which pride themselves on sex and smut.
That's why the MPs' letter can solemnly claim that a legally imposed regime of regulation – the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) was really a front job for the industry, not a regulator – would be a return to the kind of press licensing abolished in 1695, though the punitive stamp duty on newspapers ( a "tax on knowledge": ho, ho) was actually only lifted in 1855. In an era when human rights are a major UK industry, the comparison is preposterous.
It's also why the letter from 86 MPs and peers can claim that the abuses Leveson examined (at excessive length, says me) "were not a sole failure of regulation but rather of law enforcement". Well, of course they were. But why was that? Because the media barons – notably the tax-efficient Murdoch empire – had squared or squashed the coppers as well as large chunks of the political elite.
That's why the Guardian's phone-hacking allegations were brushed under a carpet at Scotland Yard for so long. Isn't it? Let's not forget, though I realise memories are short. Here's a list of failed reforms over many decades, provided by George Eustice, the Eurosceptic ex-Ukip MP who used be David Cameron's press flack. I can find it only on the website of the self-styled libertarian Guido Fawkes, but let's be broadminded.
The scandal was also about poor corporate governance at newspapers all too happy to throw the book at hospitals, politicians, Rotherham social services and others who fall short of their duty. They are warier of people with expensive lawyers (such as banks) until it is quite safe to pick up a brick. Pretty careless internally, too, some of them. There's not much about that in the letter either.
Instead they have floated, elsewhere in this week's press, the preposterous notion that African dictators will eagerly copy the draconian press laws that mild-mannered Leveson may – may – have in mind if Cameron and Nick Clegg embrace a statutory framework. What cynicism. Alas, dictators in Africa or nearer home need no encouragement. Good to see the lads taking a belated interest in Africa's wellbeing, all the same.
Nothing illustrates the disorienting effect of a seductive press campaign than the presence of David Blunkett's name on today's list, in a classic case of Stockholm syndrome, sympathy for one's captor. We can understand why Norman Tebbit's name is there: at least it is consistent with his wider worldview.
But what can the former Labour home secretary be thinking? He was twice forced to resign on what were essentially spurious grounds cooked up by the press: a nanny's fast-tracked passport (case not proven) and some allegedly undeclared share dealings (ditto). Both cases were wrapped up in sex headlines about one genuine affair (he was a single man over 16 at the time) and one a bogus honeytrap job.
So Blunkett's career was wrecked by newspapers he thought were his friends. Yet he went to a Sun party at Wapping on the night of one sacking, wrote a lucrative column for the News of the World ( later killed off by Murdoch in a bid to rescue his BSkyB deal), and quietly took a sizeable (£300,000?) settlement when it was confirmed his phone had been hacked. The Observer's reporting of the deal he described as harassment, in the Mail. Money can have that effect.
Unlike Lord Snooty, I suspect he may have had a bit of help drafting it, though both vaguely hope that a sensible and workable arrangement can be found that protects both a robust inquiring press and victims of its abuses. Nor everyone is as tough or rich as Max Mosley, who took the bullies on.
It isn't easy. Liberty rarely is. Powerful forces are slugging it out. The Guardian, FT and Independent have held out against endorsing the Fleet Street pack's expensive campaign, while also resisting a form of independent regulation that requires statutory underpinning. Everyone agrees that a parliamentary bill would be fraught with risks of foolish or vindictive amendment in either direction.
But something has to be done. Even the industry admits that, while murmuring "as little as possible" under its breath. Twitter and other social media must be made more accountable for excesses, too. But Leveson deserves a respectful hearing for his proposals, however wise or not they turn out to be, not an hysterical hail of denunciatory abuse of the kind we have seen in recent weeks.
If you doubt that, just remember Milly Dowler, Christopher Jefferies (still awaiting any apologies for being called a murderer) or the grieving Dr Kate McCann, who put up with such accusations for weeks on end. Some of the lads in the pub still think she did it.
But Fleet Street takes a dimmer view of human nature than it should because it's usually on the lookout for the downside. That's corrosive, too.