Leveson Inquiry

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fowler]

My Lords, may I first congratulate the noble Lord on his maiden speech, which was quite excellent? No one has had to wait longer to make it, given that he was sitting patiently in his place just before Christmas and, if I may say so, it was very much worth the wait. I agree with what he said about statutory underpinning safeguarding the public. I think we will all want to study the words that he uttered; it was an important speech.

The noble Lord is a very distinguished scientist. He spent most of the past 20 years at Liverpool University. His achievements take up a significant chunk in Who’s Who, but what also interested me were his recreations. Recreation one is mountaineering, recreation two is “living life while I’m alive”. As a non-mountaineer, I would judge the two recreations are very closely connected. The whole House will wish to congratulate the noble Lord and I hope that “living life while I’m alive” will include making many more speeches in this House.

Perhaps I may say to my noble friend the Whip on the Front Bench, as is customary, my seven minutes start now. When I originally raised the issue of phone hacking, I remember being assured by a senior Cabinet member that it was just an issue for the media village. I think we can say that with more than 50 speakers in this debate it has gone way beyond that and has been revealed as the worst press scandal since the Second World War.

I started life as a journalist for almost 10 years in the swinging 1960s. I worked just off Fleet Street with the Times under the editorship of William Haley, and then of William Rees-Mogg, who we all remember with great affection. Indeed, if Lord Rees-Mogg’s high journalistic standards had been generally followed, we would not be having this debate today.

As a result of my journalistic past I was always regarded in government as something of an apologist and a defender of the press and the media. My noble friend Lady Thatcher never forgot my journalistic past. I remember at a reception for the Prime Minister of Finland she spied me, “Ah, Norman”, she said, “come and have a word. You know all about paper”. She added, “The Manchester Guardian”. This lady knew how to wound. As for her successor, John Major, he also simply regarded me as a hopeless case when it came to putting into action his not very temperate views on the British press.

Let me be quite clear: the journalists and editors I have worked with over the years in the national and regional press were and are predominantly men of honesty and integrity and sometimes of substantial courage, such as the war correspondents now at work in Syria.

Frankly, I am much more accustomed to defending the press and much more comfortable in that role, so why is it that in the past two years I have campaigned for change? Basically it is because I have seen the values that I and most journalists hold high trampled into the dirt; it is because I have seen so-called journalists attacking the public rather than carrying out their essential duty of standing up for their rights; and it is because I have seen a newspaper industry unable and unwilling to take action against palpable wrong-doing. One may say that actions such as phone hacking are criminal offences, and so they are, but what they also pointed to was a deeply rotten culture which had grown up in some parts of the press. It was so rotten that one mass-circulation newspaper had to be closed; so rotten that 1,000 people, and probably more, have been the likely victims of phone hacking; and so rotten that the Press Complaints Commission, which is there to protect the public, has been deemed by Leveson and virtually everybody else to be unfit for purpose.

What has confirmed me in my view is the dishonest campaign that over the past few months has been mounted against change by some of the most powerful figures in the industry. Rather than admit that there has been abuse of power, they seem to feel that they have been unfairly put upon. The result is that, even before the Leveson report appeared, there were adverts such as the one that appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 26 November saying:

“These people believe in state control of the press. Do you?”.

This was followed by pictures of Mugabe, Assad, Castro and Putin, and the injunction:

“Say no to state regulation of the press”.

There cannot be any serious figure in this country who believes that a comparison between Lord Justice Leveson and Mugabe and Assad is anything other than the crudest and most dishonest form of abuse.

Furthermore, anyone who believes that because of the revelations of the past two years and the Leveson inquiry everything has already changed needs only to look at Andrew Mitchell’s account of his experiences with the press. They laid siege outside his home for more than a month, they followed his children and his wife in cars and on foot, and they even tried to find his 92 year-old mother-in-law but fortunately managed to get the wrong address. It is not exactly the strongest case for allowing the industry alone to protect the public interest in this country.

My view is that Lord Justice Leveson has done this country a great service. He has demolished once and for all the excuse that phone hacking was the work of one rogue reporter, and he has revealed the almost total inactivity of many proprietors and editors when undoubted evidence of wrong-doing was produced. Most of all, I support Leveson because he has put forward a system that would protect the public from abuse of power but would not be state regulation. In effect, he would allow the industry to come together and set up a complaints and investigation body that would be given certain rights provided it exercised its powers responsibly and independently. I accept that one does not have to follow every one of his proposals—for example, in relation to Ofcom—but the decision that cannot be avoided is whether we have a modest degree of statutory underpinning. It is statutory underpinning that Lord Justice Leveson proposes. We should be clear about how modest that is, for what we are talking about is basically a body that will periodically validate the independent arrangements that have been decided.

Personally, I think it is utterly ludicrous to describe that as state regulation, but it is important because it gives the public the assurance that their complaints will be investigated properly and independently and, above all, will continue to be so. That, it seems to me, is an assurance that they are entitled to have after decades of false starts and failures. Nor do I accept that the legislation need be long or complex. No less than four draft Bills have now been prepared, each one shorter than any of the Bills that I introduced as the Minister in charge of transport, health, social security and employment. It is a nonsensical argument.

As for the Government’s apparently favoured solution of setting up a new body under a royal charter, I cannot decide whether that is intended as a reward for the press for past conduct or as a punishment for what they have done. I say punishment because a royal charter hands over control to the Privy Council and, as the Privy Council’s own guidance says:

“This effectively means a significant degree of Government regulation of the affairs of the body”.

Why the press should want that is entirely beyond me. I repeat:

“a significant degree of Government regulation”,

resulting from a charter which, in its workings, will certainly require legislation—legislation otherwise known by some as statutory intervention.

The truth of the matter is this. If this were any other industry, it would be the press themselves clamouring for reform, and it would be the press themselves telling Parliament to ignore the claims of special interest groups. I believe that our concern should above all be the public interest. What we need is a short Bill which underlines and safeguards the freedom of the press while at the same time recognising that with that freedom comes the duty to respect the truth, to obey the law and, above all, to uphold the rights and liberties of individuals. That is what the Leveson report proposes. We will never have a better opportunity to act.