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Leveson inquiry: Yes, he got some things right, but it's a tragic blow to liberty and the public's right to know

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Yesterday was a bad day for the British Press, but a worse one for freedom. Lord Justice Leveson’s report catalogues misdeeds by some journalists that embarrass everyone who works in the newspaper industry.

Some people in our trade have behaved like wild beasts, and if they end up behind bars, that will be entirely just.

But Leveson’s remedy is to terminate  centuries of bold, brassy, often vulgar and disreputable — but also brave and important — British journalism and dress the Press in a tight, clumsy straitjacket of his own manufacture.

He describes his proposals as ‘self-regulation’ backed by law, yet the newspaper industry’s only active role in such an arrangement will be to pay the bills for it.

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Lord Justice Leveson has launched a wholly unguided missile. He is seen here with an executive summary of his report following an inquiry into media practices

Thoughtful: Mr Cameron considers the speech of Ed Miliband who pressed for all of Leveson's suggestions to be put in place, but the PM said alternatives must be explored

Leveson concedes that he is ‘firmly of the opinion that the British Press — all of it — serves the country very well for the vast majority of the time’. But under his new  system, ‘independent’ arbiters will have power to force it to behave ‘responsibly’ — though heaven knows how anyone short of Solomon on a good day will define this.

He demands what amounts to a new right to privacy, upholding the claims of such  people as Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan, J. K. Rowling and Max Mosley to decide when they wish to have the tap of personal publicity turned on and off.

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The new regulators, says the report, ‘should . . . warn the Press . . . when an individual has made it clear that they do not welcome Press intrusion’ — which in the case of public figures would presumably mean whenever they are not promoting a book or movie.

Of course, it would be wrong to dismiss Sir Brian Leveson’s entire report as a waste of time. He is obviously right when he says that there have been far too many occasions when the Press has failed to observe its self-proclaimed ethical responsibilities.

Though he accepts the Mail’s campaign to expose the murderers of black teenager Stephen Lawrence as a great achievement, he is oblivious of the fact that the information that made it possible came from an off-the-record police tip-off, of the kind he deplores.

Grudge: Actor Hugh Grant, who has changed his Twitter name to 'Hacked off Hugh'

Self-interest: Max Mosley, the former President of the FIA

Mr Cameron said he did not think powerful state body Ofcom could oversee press regulation when its chief is appointed by ministers

He goes on to accuse newspapers of ‘betraying an unethical cultural indifference to the consequences of exposing private lives, and a failure to treat individuals with appropriate dignity and respect’ and says that a section of the Press ‘practises journalism which on occasion is deliberately, recklessly or negligently inaccurate’.

He catalogues some malpractices that are cringe-making even to people like me, who have worked all our lives in the industry — albeit a rather different side of it.

The tale of corporate misgovernance at News International makes particularly shocking reading and must deal a crippling blow to the credibility of Rupert Murdoch  and his family on both sides of  the Atlantic.

But the over-riding initial impression made by the conclusions of Leveson’s report is of their naivety.

They make it seem as if the judge has spent his career not in law courts, but in a monastery.

Centuries of brave and important journalism will be terminated and privacy laws will be misused by every crook in the land

A wise man would have sought to set the undoubted misdeeds of newspapers in a broader historical and social context.

He would have recognised that, whatever the sins and corrupt practices of sections of the modern Press, they are much less grave than those of the past, for instance the era of early 20th-century news-paper barons.

He would have seen that journalists’ shortcomings should properly be viewed against the background of the failures of politicians, lawyers, policemen — even judges, who sometimes commit shocking blunders, some of which have cost innocent people their freedom.

Yet Leveson throws the whole weight of his sympathy squarely and almost without reservation behind complainants about Press behaviour. In truth, he has launched a wholly unguided missile.

Indeed, the virulently anti-popular Press lobby group Hacked Off might have written his report themselves.

He castigates newspapers, but lays a blanket of innocence across all the other players in his story.

Though he catalogues shocking errors and failures by the police in investigating phone-hacking, he concludes: ‘I am satisfied that I have seen no basis for challenging at any stage the integrity of the police or that of the senior police officers involved.’ Instead, police merely made a series of ‘poor decisions, poorly executed’.

Reforms: Lord Justice Leveson (pictured delivering his verdict) called for sweeping changes in the law to regulate the 'outrageous' behaviour of the press

Bob and Sally Dowler, the parents of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, attended the release of the Leveson report in central London today

This seems a remarkably charitable verdict on the behaviour of the  Met’s top brass, especially in investigating criminal behaviour at  News International.

I scarcely know anyone with first-hand knowledge of Britain’s police, including successive Home Secretaries, who have not, over the years, been deeply disturbed by the conduct and occasionally grave misconduct of certain senior officers with regard to some case or other.

Somewhere, Leveson lost his way in the course of his inquiry, which he allowed to roam untethered across the landscape for many months in a fashion quite unworthy of a competent judge.

Above all, he fails to understand that the central issue, that illegal phone-hacking and thus gross breaches of privacy reflected not a lapse of Press ethics, but large-scale criminality.

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The only organisation that ever was, or ever will be, capable of investigating such behaviour is the police.

It was Scotland Yard’s failure  to probe misconduct at News International properly in its review of the investigation in 2009 that allowed wrongdoing to continue for so long.

Some of us cannot agree with the learned judge that the police should be excused their investigatory failures merely because News International was unco-operative. The police handling of the case was scandalously negligent.

Now that a proper inquiry is being carried out belatedly, and arrests made, it is absolutely right and, indeed, essential that journalists and executives who committed criminal acts should face conviction and imprisonment.

But to introduce a new Press law to impose decent behaviour on the entire industry is far less useful than it would be to create the same sort of body to impose standards on policemen or lawyers, whose misdeeds have far more serious consequences for society.

It is precisely because politicians forged such close relations with News International and its senior executives that the company felt able to act as if it was above the law.

Of course, David Cameron called for Leveson because he found himself in a political hole — mortally embarrassed by his own wildly ill-judged relationships with senior Murdoch executives.

Against strong advice from those who knew their history, the Prime Minister had made one former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, his media chief, and another, Rebekah Brooks, his close friend.

When these relationships eventually ended in a firestorm generated by the malpractices at News International, the Prime Minister felt compelled to launch Leveson.

But from beginning to end, to some of us it has seemed wholly irrational to address a huge failure to enforce existing criminal law by an inquiry into media ethics followed by legislation to abolish Press freedom.

The only credible response to criminality is to fine or imprison the guilty. No regulatory body, including the one proposed by Leveson, can possibly do the job of the police.

Alastair Campbell had his evidence treated with great respect by Leveson and gleefully responded to the published report by saying the report had made sense of the 'mess the Press got themselves into'

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg made a separate statement from the PM in parliament today- suggesting they are not in agreement on the Leveson reports findings

And the price of creating such a body through legislation is to sacrifice the centuries-old tradition of a free Press on the altar of past police incompetence and politicians’ folly.

Leveson also highlights concerns that politicians and the Press ‘have traded power and influence in ways which are contrary to the public interest and out of public sight’.

Yet he then acquits senior politicians of blame in conducting  admittedly reckless relation- ships with senior figures at News International.

Lord Justice Leveson: Lack of wisdom

For example, Leveson finds that the special adviser of the then  Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, had a long and improper dalliance with News International lobbyists about the firm’s planned BSkyB takeover. But he rejects criticism of the minister himself, whom many people at Westminster believed should have been sacked for his behaviour.

While castigating the Sun for publishing photographs of Prince Harry naked in Las Vegas, Leveson offers no answer whatever to the intractable reality that the internet daily perpetrates vastly worse excesses of taste and privacy, which are accessed by millions.

‘It is clear that the enforcement of law and regulation online is problematic,’ he says limply.

His attitude appears to be that since newspapers are the only parties within reach of his lash, they must take their flogging alone.

He attacks some titles, including the Daily Mail, for supposedly unjust criticism of his fellow judge Mr Justice Eady, for alleged bias towards plaintiffs in several big libel cases.

To my personal knowledge, Eady’s behaviour on the bench has dismayed even other senior judges.

But Leveson will have none of this. Newspapers, and newspapers alone, receive his censure.Leveson’s brand of crudely moralistic, statutorily backed arbitration would also enforce standards of political correctness, for instance intervening in ‘cases of allegedly discriminatory reporting, and in doing so reflect the spirit of equalities legislation’.

The proposal that the new regulatory body should admit complaints by ‘representative groups’, which consider themselves maltreated by the Press would mean newspapers could end up buried under a mountain of complaints from countless wailing bodies that think coverage of themselves unfair.

The public should recognise that the alacrity with which some politicians have welcomed Leveson’s proposals is influenced by a spirit of vengeance. They remain bitter about Press exposure of MPs’ fraudulent expenses claims.

As more than a few in Westminster will admit over a drink, this is payback time.

Leveson found that the special adviser of the then Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, had a long and improper dalliance with News International lobbyists about the firm's planned BSkyB takeover

Criticised: Lord Leveson said that John Yates was too friendly with News of the World reporters and should have stepped back from the hacking investigation

Newspapers put politicians on the grill over crooked expenses. Now, they think they see an opportunity to get their own back.

Yet such exposés of our rulers’ wrongdoings are the perfect example of the vital power the Press has to call governments to account, in a way that modern parliamentary oppositions often fail to do.

It will be a rotten day for democracy when newspapers lose that power.

It is inevitable, however, that new privacy rules will be exploited by every crook and charlatan in the land to shield their misdoings,  just as some already abuse our  Draconian libel laws.

Rancour: Comic Steve Coogan, pictured here arriving to give evidence to the inquiry about his personal experience with the Press

To create a new regulatory body by parliamentary statute would be to breach the freedoms and rights — even the right sometimes to be irresponsible — created and sustained for more than 300 years.

Above all, it is the lack of wisdom in the Leveson report that makes it such depressing reading.

There is a silliness and illogicality about its conclusions that are dismaying.

Some of Britain’s judges are men and women who daily display the highest intellectual rigour, but there is precious little of such a virtue in evidence here.

Leveson, for instance, treats with apparent respect the evidence of Tony Blair’s former Press secretary Alastair Campbell, who in the eyes of most of us is a moral bankrupt notorious for his role in preparing the false evidence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

No wonder Campbell gleefully responded yesterday by saying the report had made sense of the ‘mess the Press got themselves into’.

A vital part of mature and sensible government is to adopt proportionate responses to perceived ills. Britain has some of the best, as well as some of the worst, newspapers in the world. This seems to many of us not a bad recommendation.

Indeed, Leveson himself acknowledges that most of the British Press serves the nation well most of the time. Why, then, if this is so, impose upon us shackles such as may delight Hugh Grant and Max Mosley, but would represent a tragic blow to freedom, our heritage and the real public interest?

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