Leveson Inquiry

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the wise words we have just heard from someone with experience of this industry and from others with the same kind of experience who have spoken. Unfortunately, my noble friend Lord Watson of Richmond has had to pull out of today’s debate. He has asked me to convey his apologies and to emphasise, rather along the same lines of the speech just made by the noble Baroness, that if the press does not understand the human rights of individuals on whom it reports, it can lead to some of the worst examples of bad behaviour. I am not an expert on the industry because I am a politician and a consumer of the press, but I have concluded that we do need a free press in this country and that it would have been relatively a very free press indeed if it had not been dominated by the controversial visitor from Australia many years ago who acquired the Times and the Sunday Times in dubious circumstances. That has already been explained in the debate by at least one speaker. I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, said.

The dismay I felt as an onlooker at this complicated field before Christmas at the time when this debate was postponed concerned the award to Rebekah Brooks of, I believe, £11 million in severance pay as a result of her departure as editor of the News of the World. It did not seem to produce the indignation and anger that I thought would have been relevant. Does that not say it all about the attitude of the boss man and his cronies who run the world’s most unappetising newspaper network? It is the ultimate two fingers of defiance from Rupert Murdoch after the pretend grovelling during the Select Committee hearings and all the rest of it. In a fascinating book written by Tom Watson MP and Martin Hickman, Dial M for Murdoch, published by Penguin Books, the section from page 268 onwards is revealing about his character and background. Incidentally, I am reminded of Murdoch’s sneering comment to Lord Justice Leveson that apparently he is one of the few people in the world who still reads Le Monde. Rather than actually answering any of the relevant questions, Murdoch chose to make other sneers which I shall quote briefly to illustrate. He used the occasion to settle old scores, criticising former editors who had later questioned his methods. He said that editor David Yelland was drunk all the time at the Sun. Andrew Neil found it,

“very profitable to get up and spread lies about me”.

The last is the preposterous remark that Colin Myler,

“would not have been my choice as editor of the News of the World”.

A previous speaker said that the owners would be suffering from illegal behaviour by journalists, but I think that it is probably the other way around. How reminiscent of the famous old Mafia trials in the US. All these appearances from this person remind us too of the cozy relations, unfortunately, between politicians of all parties and the unimpressive world leader of the newspaper industry. Now we have to contend with the reality of the mass destruction of e-mails, which would have been even more embarrassing had that reached the authorities now investigating through the Metropolitan Police.

Returning to the compensation for loss of office for Mrs Brooks, the rest of the News of the World staff fired on the spot must be rigid with anger and resentment. We remind ourselves that the insult—relative as well as absolute—to the long-suffering Dowler family is monumental. That is the ethos and nature of an international press operation which considers the word “ruthless” to be compulsory. How the Murdoch brigade must be laughing at the pulling-the-punches response of naive people in the law and politics as to what now needs to be done. The arrival of this man in the UK years ago completely wrecked the reputation of British newspapers, which were relatively decent—noble even—in the days of quite ruthless press barons like Beaverbrook, Rothermere and Thomson. Certain standards were maintained.

We must now have a system of press supervision, and regulation, in the proper sense of that word, which is underscored by the legal support system. It is not only the reckless Mr Murdoch—whose now sadly missed and highly respected mother should have told him to behave properly years before he came to Britain— but the other unattractive denizens. The owners of the Daily Star, the Daily Express, the extremist Daily Mail and the tax haven dwellers who own the Daily Telegraph all now need a proper system of supervision that prevents them from ruining the lives of ordinary people with falsehoods, brutal doorstepping and misquoting, and from engaging in the ruthless harassment of the Royal Family, abuse by long-lens cameras and all the rest of the sordid paraphernalia.

I believe I am correct in assuming that all these owners avoid, or even evade, UK personal taxes while pontificating about this country in boring editorials and mendacious articles. If I have been unfair to any of them individually, I will be delighted to set the record straight at once, but I believe that is the sad and tragic case when it comes to those who happen to own the British newspapers, unlike in many other countries.

The Prime Minister’s response was, I believe, overpartisan to the overmighty press excess that we have already witnessed. Producing a giant Bill would be a mistake but so is saying there will be no statutory back-up. Like others in this debate, I am glad to see some psychological coming-together now of all the parties about the urgent need to get this right and between the Liberal Democrat leadership in the Commons and Labour on some of Harriet Harman’s proposals in the other place. The deputy leader of the Opposition in the other place did, I think, get the balance as right as you can get it with the proposed six-clause draft Bill. It needs to be a brief piece of legislation, which would aim to create a regulator apparatus with a legal guarantee of effectiveness and independence. The Lord Chief Justice and his fellow judges would, under those proposals, consult expert assessors to ensure compliance with the new press law. It is possible to maybe take some parts of that and create a package between all the parties. I hope that that will be so.

Freedom of the press is an equally vital element of the new structure and would also be enshrined in statute. This reassurance is vital for the vast number of decent, well behaved journalists who do not admire the Murdoch method. Whatever package is painfully constructed after vast consultation and debate, it will be quite a complex piece of legislation. The shorter it is, the better, but it can and must be done. At last Britain has the chance to get away from the sinister grip of Murdochian sensationalism and false assertions and to get close again to the usually higher standards we still see, mercifully, in the press on the continent or in Scandinavia. We can get back to the great newspapers in Britain that people enjoyed. As the noble Baroness said in her speech just now, they were not comics, they were newspapers. Now, they are just masquerading as newspapers and are comics. That can be done.