08 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
After 21 years, the Press Complaints Commission today confirmed it will close and be replaced by transitional body until a replacement is set up after the Leveson Inquiry.
The Guardian reported this morning that “closing the existing self-regulatory body will offer the press a clean break from the past and an opportunity to regain the confidence of the public.”
In his testimony to the Leveson Inquiry last month, the PCC’s current chair Lord Hunt said there was an urgent need for a new body and that there was “wide consensus for radical reform”. He suggested a new regulator having two arms — one for handling complaints and mediation, and another for auditing and enforcing standards.
If there is one thing the first module of the Inquiry told us, it was that the PCC had failed. Today’s news is the long-awaited admission of that.
Guardian journalist Nick Davies opined that the journalism industry was not “interested in or capable of” self-regulation, citing the PCC’s failure to properly investigate the extent of phone hacking in 2009 and arguing that the body did not take into account getting remedy for victims of the press. Sheryl Gascoigne called the body a “waste of time”, JK Rowling deemed it a “wrist-slapping exercise at best”, and Daily Express editor Hugh Whittow went so far as to suggest that one of the reasons for the tabloid withdrawing from the the body was because it failed to stop the paper publishing defamatory articles about the parents of missing toddler Madeleine McCann.
But defence of the organisation was equally staunch, with former chairs arguing it had been criticised for failing to exercise powers it never had. Baroness Peta Buscombe claimed that the body did not have investigatory powers to summon editors to give evidence under oath and that the rest of the world “would kill” for the British press’s system of self-regulation.
Buscombe’s predecessor, Sir Christopher Meyer, also grew exasperated with Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC’s criticism. “Don’t drag me down that path,” he told Jay, rejecting the counsel’s suggestion that, had the PCC taken a more proactive stance with the McCanns, the libellous coverage of Bristol landlord Chris Jefferies would not have been able to go so far.
We are now, it would seem, in self-regulation limbo. A longer-term replacement for the PCC is not expected to be up and running until after Leveson reports on his findings this autumn. While Leveson has hinted at a new regulator having statutory backing of some kind, he has reminded his followers not to take his thinking as proof of proposals.
In the meantime, a rebranding of the PCC needs to be avoided so as not to repeat past mistakes of failing to investigate effectively. As Index argued in its submission to the Leveson Inquiry in January, we need a more robust and trustworthy press, monitored by an enhanced regulator pushing improved standards and corporate governance. If we want further wrongdoing to be prevented, its investigatory powers must be strengthened. More must be done to make the media more accountable and transparent in the way ethics are applied and ensuring high professional standards are maintained.
But improved regulation should not occur at the expense of press freedom — the country’s “greatest asset”, in the words of Lord Hunt. The current atmosphere, in which the police seem to be acting in a overzealous manner, perhaps as a response to previous accusations of not having done so, is worrying. Concerns have also been raised that the internal investigation at the Sun has compromised reporters’ sources. While the press should indeed co-operate with the police where there may be evidence of illegality, journalists’ sources must be protected. Whatever powers the transitional body, and its eventual replacement, have, today’s tense atmosphere should not become the norm.
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07 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
A former assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police has told the Leveson Inquiry he felt critical coverage of him in the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday was a reaction to his arrest of a Tory MP in a leaks probe.
Bob Quick told the Inquiry that both papers had been critical of his investigation, in which former shadow immigration spokesman Damian Green was arrested, having received leaks from a civil servant. Neither Green nor the civil servant were charged, with the Crown Prosecution Service saying there was “insufficient evidence” to bring a case against them.
Quick said that some of the subsequent media coverage was “a surprise”. He noted that the then acting commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson asked him to drop the investigation, and former assistant commissioner John Yates had also told him the inquiry was “doomed”.
“I didn’t feel I had huge support from my colleagues,” Quick admitted, noting that coverage from the Mail on Sunday had affected his family’s safety and that he moved his children out as a result.
Describing events leading to the December 2008 story, Quick said the Mail on Sunday had asked him about his wife’s wedding chauffeur service, questioning if he or other police officers in uniform drove the cars. Scotland Yard’s press office later told Quick that the Sunday paper would run the piece as a front-page story. The paper never did, conceding there was no truth to the article, but instead published a piece titled “Security scare over wedding car hire firm run from top terror police chief’s home”.
Earlier in his lengthy testimony, Quick added that in 2000, while he was working with Scotland Yard’s anti-corruption command, he became suspicious about the relationship between journalists and officers suspected of corruption, following a covert operation that revealed corrupt payments to police officers for information. He told the Inquiry that when he recommended an investigation in a report to his then boss Andy Hayman, Hayman said it was “too risky”.
Quick also noted that, on two occasions when he was invited to drinks at a wine bar near Scotland Yard, he saw Yates, Stephenson and the Met’s ex-public affairs chief Dick Fedorcio having drinks with former News of the World crime reporter Lucy Panton and the Sun’s Mike Sullivan. He noted his surprise at seeing the Daily Mail’s Stephen Wright in social engagements with Yates, despite having been critical of the Met.
Such socialising, Quick said, had the “perception of looking inappropriate”, adding that he felt there was a “risky interface between the police and journalists who are in a fiercely commercial environment seeking scoops, exclusives and stories”.
Also in the witness box today was the Met’s ex-deputy commissioner, Tim Godwin, who also expressed concerns that socialising with journalists would create a “perception” issue.
Godwin revealed there was “one style” of conduct with the press favoured by the management board, and there was his own, in which he felt uncomfortable socialising with the press. Lord Justice Leveson pressed him on the matter, questioning him on the possibility of his senior colleagues having a separate “set of values”, to which Godwin responded that it was more a difference of style than a difference of values.
The Inquiry continues on Monday.
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07 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Former commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Lord Blair, told the Leveson Inquiry this morning that he felt staff at the force spent too much time worrying about the press and that policing had become politicised.
“My determination was to spend less time on press matters than we were spending under my predecessor [Lord Stevens],” Blair told the Inquiry, citing processes of dealing with the media as being “exhausting” at times, and adding later that newspapers were “very difficult animals” to grapple with.
In his witness statement, Lord Blair, who was commissioner of the force from 2005 to 2008, wrote that there was a “significant problem” of a “very small number of relatively senior officers” being “too close to journalists”.
Rather than financial gain, Blair said he believed this was “for the enhancement of their reputation and for the sheer enjoyment of being in a position to share and divulge confidences”.
“It is a siren song,” he continued. “I also believe that they based their behaviour on how they saw politicians behave, and that they lost sight of their professional obligations.”
“I don’t know how the political genie can be put back in the bottle,” he said of press coverage of the police becoming too politicised, noting that political correspondents, rather than crime reporters, had covered both his and his successor Sir Paul Stephenson’s resignations.
He endorsed recommendations made by Elizabeth Filkin in her report on relations between the press and police, arguing that her comment that “contact is permissible but not unconditional should be nailed to the front door of the police station”. Yet he took issue with “a whole series of injunctions and sub-clauses” about dealing with the press.
Blair wrote in his evidence to the Inquiry that his relationship with journalists had “always been perfectly proper”. He told the Inquiry he had not had dinner with editors, with the exception of one who had been a friend before his commisionership.
His written evidence also revealed that he was told “certainly after 2006” that his official and personal telephone numbers appeared in files belonging to private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, and that they had been obtained in the spring of the same year. Yet Blair stressed, “I had no evidence that I had ever been hacked.”
He also echoed former Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke’s “perfectly reasonable” view that countering terrorism was a greater priority than investigating phone hacking. “We had closed Heathrow airport in the middle of the holiday season, there was enormous pressure,” Blair said.
“It really was the only show in town. Any conversation about this would have been way back on the agenda and relatively short.”
Yet he added that the 2009 decision of former Assistant Commissioner John Yates not to re-open the investigation in light of reports by the Guardian was “just too quick”.
“I don’t quite understand why John took that decision with the speed which he did,” he said, but stressed he did not believe Yates took the decision in order to placate News International.
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06 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Lord Stevens, former commissioner of the Metropolitan police, has told the Leveson Inquiry that he “had to get out” of a contract involving writing columns for the News of the World.
“The whole thing just didn’t seem right to me,” Stevens said. He noted that he decided to terminate his contract with the paper — which involved his writing several pieces over a two-year period following his autobiography being serialised in the tabloid — some months after the convictions of royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire of phone hacking.
He said he was paid £5,000 for the two articles he penned for the paper.
He told Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC he had also heard further information about “unethical behaviour” at the now-defunct tabloid, which he later clarified as “general behaviour”.
Elsewhere in his testimony, he said that as commissioner he would have been “quite ruthless” in pursuing issues related to phone hacking later raised by the Guardian. “I’d have gone on and done it,” he said. “That’s what police officers are paid to do, to enforce the law.”
Also appearing today was chief constable of Surrey police and former Met office Lynne Owens. Quizzed over whether her approach of only meeting journalists at New Scotland Yard rather than in a social setting was “austere”, Owens said she felt it was “entirely appropriate”.
She also told the Inquiry she found it “abhorrent” that a police officer could leak information about celebrities when they appear at police stations. “I don’t think people who behave like that should be in the police service,” she said.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with further evidence from former Metropolitan police staff, including former commissioner Lord Blair.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
