A vintage week at Leveson…

Raymond Snoddy says despite the grandeur and scale of the evidence – and the abuses revealed in cruel detail – Leveson has little choice but to wend his way towards a better form of independent self-regulation..

It has been a vintage week at the Leveson Inquiry  with no less than one serving Prime Minister and two former PMs on parade.

Can David Cameron have ever imagined he was exposing himself to a five-hour judicial grilling when he set up his little inquiry into media standards a long time ago? Inquiries don’t get much better than that.

As a result we have learned a great about Lord Justice Leveson’s plans, the current state of the media and politics and once again about the law of  unintended consequences.

David Cameron survived his command performance – just  – but not without the toe-curling embarrassment of toadying emails from Rebekah Brooks and the ill-judged decision to put culture secretary Jeremy Hunt in charge of the BSkyB “quasi-judicial” decision.

It was also surprising to see how amnesia – perhaps of the selective variety – can strike in one so young.

We did at least learn what is now a familiar refrain from senior politicians and one that Lord Justice Leveson should pay attention to – that it would be “much better” if reformed regulation of the press could be achieved “without statute”.

Overall the former PMs were more interesting – and of the two, Sir John Major, whose stature continues to grow the longer he has been away from office, was the more compelling.

Murdoch claimed he had never asked Prime Ministers for anything, ever. Sir John, with total clarity, remembers a private dinner when Murdoch, as an American citizen, had the bare-faced effrontery to ask a British Prime Minister to change his European policy or “We” cannot support you.

There might be a slight bit of wriggle room in that a change of policy is semantically not a “thing” or a commercial advantage but it would still be great to hear Murdoch explain any misunderstanding.

It has long been a mystery why Murdoch, who has little knowledge or interest in Europe, should be so obsessed with the UK’s position in Europe. But anyone who heard Sir John give evidence cannot but note the sense of astonishment and maybe even quiet fury in his voice.

Gordon Brown is a less straight-forward character than Sir John. But Brown could not have been more emphatic that he never made a call to Murdoch threatening to declare war on his empire because The Sun did a flip-flop on its political allegiance. No such call happened he insisted repeatedly.

Can Murdoch have totally made such a thing up? Or if as seems likely Brown the Presbyterian is telling the truth then did a hoaxer get through to Murdoch pretending to be Brown?

Lord Justice Leveson was asked to examine the relationship between the media and politics and we know how much he likes to stick to his terms of reference. But a further attempt should be made to try to get to the bottom of such differences in evidence rather than merely relating the disparities in a neutral and balanced way.

Lord Justice Leveson might also like to consider some very slippery political comments from Gordon Brown that Cameron in office had implemented all of Murdoch’s media shopping list as set out in James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.

Not true. The Murdochs wanted an end to the impartiality rules governing television news. Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt backed the rules explicitly. Murdoch wanted a much smaller BBC and instead got a larger Corporation, which will now also be responsible for the World Service, The Welsh Fourth Channel and the Caversham Monitoring Service.

The licence fee was frozen despite the new responsibilities but both the BBC Trust plus out-going director-general Mark Thompson accepted the deal as fair in recessionary times.

James Murdoch was furious at the turn of events and Rupert Murdoch sniped during his Leveson evidence that all British governments end up giving the BBC what it wants.

In the sort of loose talk that politicians come out with in opposition, or in the early days of office, David Cameron did threaten to cut the legs off Ofcom – but no such thing happened.

There was also some good advice this week for Lord Justice Leveson from George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer. Osborne advised against going down the route of trying to do something about the merging of fact and opinion in the press.

With a few exceptions news and comment have been converging for years and in the age of 24-hour television news and the internet printed newspapers’ role in the provision of urgent facts is much diminished. Comment and opinion will account for more and more of the offering in future. Clearer labelling? Possibly, but it’s hardly a matter for regulation.

The political tone of an individual newspaper’s coverage inevitably reflects its world view.
The coverage and selection of stories in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail are biased in a conservative way while The Guardian’s bias lies in its liberal outlook.

Readers know this and the only question worth considering is whether the press provides a variety of opinion.

Osborne’s evidence can also be seen as a warning to Lord Justice Leveson that press regulation should err on the side of freedom of speech.

It will be the present Government that will be responsible for implementing Leveson’s recommendations. The advice is to err on the side of freedom of expression.

All of which made Labour leader Ed Miliband’s evidence rather strange. In a piece of political opportunism Miliband said he believes News Corporation controls too much of the national press and should in effect be broken up.

Has be thought what that means in the internet age? Has he considered for a second how such a plan should threaten the existence of The Times, which is in effect cross-subsidised by profitable titles such as The Sun? Has any other publisher in in the UK been prepared to spend more than £700 million on new presses in recent years?

Luckily Lord Justice Leveson noted that such matters were outside his terms of reference.

Where does all of this leave Lord Leveson now and what are the political realities of his position? Despite the grandeur and scale of the evidence and the abuses revealed in cruel detail he has little choice but to wend his way towards a better form of independent self-regulation with a modest tooth or two for appearances sake.