25 May 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Next week is set to be one of the most gripping yet in the Leveson Inquiry into press standards.
Monday has been reserved for former prime minister Tony Blair, who will likely be questioned about his close relationship with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose tabloid the Sun famously switched its long-standing Conservative allegiance to back the Labour party ahead of the 1997 general election.
Business secretary Vince Cable is scheduled to appear on Wednesday. It is likely he will be quizzed about News Corp’s £8bn bid for the takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB, particularly his admission that he had “declared war” on the Murdoch-owned company, which led to his being stripped of responsibility for the bid.
But the highlight will surely come from Thursday’s sole witness, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, who is fighting for his political life after the revelation of a November 2010 memo he sent to David Cameron in support of News Corp’s £8bn bid for control of the satellite broadcaster one month before he was handed the task of adjudicating the bid.
In the memo Hunt emphasised to Cameron that it would be “totally wrong to cave in” to the bid’s opponents, and that Cable’s decision to refer the bid to regulator Ofcom could leave the government “on the wrong side of media policy”.
The memo has further weakened Hunt’s grip on power, already in doubt after last month’s revelations that his department gave News Corp advance feedback of the government’s scrutiny of the BSkyB bid. Evidence shown to the Inquiry yesterday during News Corp lobbyist Frédéric Michel‘s appearance showed over than 1000 text messages had been sent between the corporation and Hunt’s department, along with 191 phone calls and 158 emails.
The Labour party has since upped the volume on its calls for Hunt to resign, arguing he was not the “impartial arbiter” he was required to be.
Hunt has maintained he acted properly and within the ministerial code, while David Cameron said today he does not regret handing the bid to Hunt, stressing he acted “impartially”.
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23 May 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman has claimed former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan once showed him how to hack a phone.
Speaking at the Leveson Inquiry this afternoon, Paxman recalled a September 2002 lunch at Mirror headquarters during which Morgan was “teasing” Ulrika Jonsson, former partner of ex-England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, telling her “he knew what had happened in the conversations between her and Sven-Göran Eriksson”.
He added that Morgan asked him if he had a mobile phone, explaining: “the way to get access to people’s messages was go to the factory default setting and press either 0000 or 1234, and that if you didn’t put on your own code — his words — ‘you’re a fool’.”
“It was clearly something that he was familiar with and I wasn’t”, Paxman said, adding he “didn’t know that this went on.”
He said he did not know if Morgan was “repeating a conversation he had heard or he was imagining this conversation”, but suggested accepting both possibilities because Morgan “probably was imagining it.”
The Newsnight anchor added that he felt the atmosphere of the lunch was “bullying”.
“I didn’t like it,” he said.
Morgan has said several times that he has “no reason to believe” that any phone hacking occurred at the Daily Mirror under his editorship from 1995-2004.
Also appearing this afternoon was former Home Secretary John Reid, who said he was not briefed on Operation Caryatid — the original phone-hacking investigation — until 8 August 2006, around the time of the arrests of the News of the World’s royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.
“When I say that throughout this I wasn’t receiving briefings, it’s not a complaint,” Reid said, stressing that he knew “what the counter-terrorist unit had on its plate.”
Reid said the country was facing up to 70 terrorist plots when he took office in May 2006, and the timing of the Mulcaire-Goodman arrests coincided almost exactly with the arrest of the ringleader in a plot to bring down 10 trans-Atlantic airliners.
He added that it was “completely untrue” that he knew other reporters at the now-defunct tabloid might have been involved in phone hacking in 2006.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow.
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23 May 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Broadcaster Andrew Marr today told the Leveson Inquiry it needs to address the “gap” between “state control of press on the one hand and a free-for-all on the other”.
“It’s a difficult gap,” Marr said, adding it was a “new place to build something.”
Marr, who for years maintained a superinjunction barring the press from reporting allegations he had fathered a child during an extra-marital affair also brought the judge back to the unclear terrain of regulating the online world, noting that many of the most influential political commentators today were bloggers.
“The old distinction between a political player and a would-be professional journalist is breaking down,” Marr said.
“At one point does andrewmarr.com become big enough to become part of a regulatory system?” he asked.
Marr also cautioned against recording all contact between members of the press and politicians, noting there was an “absolute distinction” between proprietors and editors meeting politicians and the “day-to-day job of story-getting political journalists” having contact with them.
Earlier in the day, a former secretary for national heritage has challenged Lord Justice Leveson’s suggestion of press regulation with a statutory backstop this morning, arguing that existing legislation needed to be better enforced.
“If we already have a set of legal standards that aren’t being met, we should ask ourselves why that is,” Conservative MP Stephen Dorrell, who oversaw the Major government’s response to the second Calcutt report in 1993, told the Inquiry this morning.
“The reason we’re sat here is that the existing laws that nobody disputes haven’t been observed and enforced,” Dorrell said.
Dorrell, who was secretary of state for national heritage during the Major government from 1994-5 — a position that subsequently became the culture secretary post — also stressed there was an issue of management culture that had largely been lost in the ongoing debate into press standards.
“The breaking of the law is the symptom of what’s wrong in the culture of an organisation that tolerates criminality,” he added. “No regulation will deliver an outcome if the core problem remains [of tolerating criminality].”
He stressed a need to “address the cause of the problem rather than the symptoms”.
Dorrell also emphasised his view that the responsibilities of a reformed Press Complaints Commission should not be decided by an external force. “The PCC is an organisation with the responsibility to promote and define standards within the press,” he said, adding later: “The issues around standards need to be internalised within the press, not taken away from them.”
Yet he said he was not appearing at the Inquiry to “defend the record” of the PCC, stressing the need for the press to hold itself to account. “The PCC cannot be a champion of every individual organ of the press,” he said. “It can be a champion of press freedom but it has to be willing to be critical of its own when the standards it espouses aren’t met.”
He added later: “The question is what happens in circumstances like [Chris] Jefferies where a judgment is made and a major injustice is done. In those circumstances, you either give people a right to remedy or recovery in civil law or you throw it back to the editor and proprietor and require them to think about what the consequences are that should flow in those circumstances.”
“It’s a completely fair question to put to the press industry: What should have happened?”
Leveson took the opportunity to flirt further with his notion of press regulation with statutory backing of some kind. “There is something systemic here. I struggle to see how it could be done by getting editors and proprietors together,” he said.
“The trick is to get a mechanism that works for everyone, that represents a free press and free expression but does cope not merely with the very rich who can indulge in proceedings but everyone.”
“I struggle to see how that’s possible on a model that doesn’t have something, somewhere.”
He was quick to add, however, that he was “simply talking about structures”.
“I am not suggesting the state should have any view at all about content,” Leveson said.
The Inquiry continues this afternoon.
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22 May 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Lord Justice Leveson has repeated his wish for his Inquiry into press ethics not to be a “footnote in history”.
“I can live with something short of perfect,” Leveson said while discussing press regulation with former culture secretary Lord Smith this afternoon. “But I would find it difficult to live with improving things for two years,” he added, noting that public money and effort would have been put into “not very much”.
“Two years for me would represent a real failure,” he said.
Smith and Leveson spent most of the afternoon debating how to improve press standards. Smith, who was culture secretary from 1997-2001, described the Advertising Standards Authority’s regulatory system, but stressed it would be difficult to translate it to the press.
“The most obvious one [sanction] would be a requirement for equal prominence,” Smith said. “A system of fines of some kind has been mooted many times,” he added, noting it would be “hard to put in place but should be considered as a way of toughening the ability” of the Press Complaints Commission’s successor to make a newspaper recognise any mistakes it had made.
He added that there had been “palpable” improvements in press standards — notably in techniques used by paparazzi — following the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Smith said he received 1,200 letters of complaint deploring press intrusion.
However, Leveson suggested the changes were not enduring, referring to the “calamity of press behaviour” in the princess’s death followed by the use of private investigators revealed by Operation Motorman and the phone hacking scandal that has engulfed News International.
“How many more times can we do this?” he asked.
The judge said he did not accept that “there would be any curtailment on freedom of press to hold all those in office to account (…) or to indulge in investigative journalism is imperiled by a system that prevents type of behaviour I’ve heard so much about in last few months.”
Smith, meanwhile, warned strongly against state involvement in regulating the British press. “Decisions about applying public interest, plurality tests shouldn’t rest with a secretary of state,” he said.
“These decisions shouldn’t rest with a political figure, however honourable they may be.”
Smith said he recognised the scope for a “statutory backstop” to assist with enforcing decisions, but emphasised that the decisions themselves made by a body that is voluntarily put together by the press, rather than imposed upon them.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow.
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